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A comment on The Happiest Regions in the U.S.. Parent comment

Re:The Happiest Regions in the U.S. by existencebox on Saturday August 16, 2014 @08:47PM (#8188169)
At the risk of falling into the "All heatmaps end up generally being a reflection of population density heatmap" pitfall, I'd cite the fashionable argument that education is inversely correlated with happiness, coupled with reasonably recent census data http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer to point out that, with some exceptions, there does seem to be similarities. If anyone has information that would support or refute this, I'd be curious, a brief searching didn't turn up anything solid.
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Re:The Happiest Regions in the U.S. by learc83 on Saturday August 16, 2014 @09:40PM (#8188277)
>I'd cite the fashionable argument that education is inversely correlated with happiness

That argument doesn't seem to be supported.

The article points out that high school graduates are more satisfied than dropouts. Also up to a point higher income (correlated with higher education) leads to higher satisfaction. A quick google search seems to confirm that education is correlated with life satisfaction [1,2,3].

Furthermore the study mentioned in the article is specifically looking at location differences. They acknowledge that other factors like "income, education level, age, and marital status" matter more, but that there even controlling for those factors there are still differences based on location.

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/does-education-...

[2] http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2012...

[3] http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/main/does-educat...

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Re:The Happiest Regions in the U.S. by autokad on Sunday August 17, 2014 @12:06AM (#8188511)
It looks like the happiness map is at county level or higher, where as any useful map/data trying to break education and income apart would use census block group or tract at the largest.

imagine philadelphia county which has some of very highly educated areas such as around the University of Pennsylvania. But the overall education of Philadelphia is quite poor.

im just saying that any attempt to link education with happiness data at the county level is somewhat useless for most of the country.

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Re:The Happiest Regions in the U.S. by enjo on Saturday August 16, 2014 @10:21PM (#8188349)
Colorado has a very high rate of college graduates (third in the county I believe). It's all blue.
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