Two economics professors studied a mountain of data to determine a scale of American happiness, ranked by state.  New York State came in dead last, ranked 51 out of 51.  “Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn’t leave you busted, traffic wasn’t too fierce and so on,” says the New York Times.

Here’s the stupid bit in the article:

It falls to a New Yorker to ask how it is, if this is such an unhappy place, that more people are living in the city than ever before: an estimated 8.4 million. “That’s a very sensible point,” Professor Oswald said. Many people, he said, do indeed think of states like New York and California as “marvelous places to live in.”

New York State is not New York City.   The population of NYC makes up about half of the population of the state.  From my perspective, as someone born and raised in the city, if I lived in New York and lived in Buffalo or Syracuse or Rochester or points in between, I’d be pretty pissed off too!

But overall, I’d rather be in Hong Kong.

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