by Dish Staff
Ben Schiller runs down the research of Stephan Goetz, who tracked “the number of days people said they were in a negative mood” on a county-by-county basis:
Goetz says suburban counties tend to be happier than urban or rural ones, and that non-white counties tend to be happier than whiter ones. People were also happier when they commuted less, moved homes less often, and lived in places deemed to have more closely-knit communities (higher levels of “social capital”).
For example, a 1% increase in the share of non-whites in a county reduced the average number of poor mental health days by 0.08%—which is actually a larger number than it might seem, when you consider the whole country. “After controlling for other factors including income, educational attainment, place of residence, commuting time, social capital, there is still a residual, unexplained factor that leaves whites a little bit less happy than non-whites,” Goetz says via email. “One possible factor that may explain this difference could be religious adherence, to the extent that it varies between whites and non-whites.”
(Image: the results of Goetz’s study plotted on a map of the United States, with the highest number of “poor mental health days” in red and the lowest in green.)
The Dish 