Richard Florida can maybe tell us!

Via All About Cities

Maybe meeting expectations makes “cities” happy

Richard Florida has a new thought provoking piece on what makes cities happy.  Since cities are inanimate and cannot really be happy or sad, he seems to be referring to the aggregate mood of the people.

He and his colleagues look at the positive correlations between happiness and such things as income and having higher education levels.  And they note the negative correlation to lower education levels.

This made me think about political revolution theory.  More specifically the theory that societies are most prone to revolution when rising expectations fail to meet reality.  (This is the J-Curve model.)  The reverse also generally holds: revolutions are least likely when reality is matching rising expectations — because people are happy if their expectations for life are being met, or exceeded.

So, therefore, if a city is able to meet the rising expectations of people who live there, the citizens will appear to be happy by most measures.  I think this partially fits with Florida’s observations.

For example, he found that cities with high numbers of citizens with advanced education levels tend to be happier.  We could assume that these individuals have higher expectations for themselves, and also tend to meet them.  But we should probably watch out for situations in which those with higher education are not succeeding.

Florida also notes the lower levels of happiness among metro areas associated with the working class — their expectations for life have likely been dashed.
For political leaders a key issue may be to manage expectations.  For those of us just trying to understand cities, we may need to look beyond comparing such things as housing prices, average wages, and even education levels across cities.  For example, it may not matter to happiness if one city’s citizens have a lower living standard because of high costs; it matters more whether they expect something different.

Richard Florida – Makes Cities Happy - you can click on the link for all the graphs.

“Earlier this week, I discussed the new Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index of happy cities. Today, with the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I look at some of the social, demographic, and economic factors that might be associated with the happiness and well-being of cities.

There has been considerable debate on the factors that are associated with happiness and well-being at the national level. The well-known Easterlin Paradox suggested that happiness tends to level off after a certain income threshold. Psychologists, notably Edward Diener, have argued that factors such as health, challenging work, and close social relationships, among others, play a considerable role in happiness. Some have even made the case for instituting a new measure ofgross national happiness to supplement conventional metrics like gross national product.”

We look at the associations between the Gallup-Healthways Metro happiness index and key social, demographic, and economic factors–like income, unemployment, high-technology industry, and socioeconomic structure. Data-matching reduces the size of our sample to 170 metros–roughly half of all U.S. regions. As usual, we point out that our analysis points only to associations between variables. It does not specify causation or the causal direction of those associations which are questions for future research. Still, the results are interesting across several dimensions.

Income, Wages, and Output: So what is the relationship between metro-level happiness and income, wages, and output?  We find moderate correlations between city happiness and  wages (.45), income (.4), and economic output per capita (.37). The scatter-graphs below show the relationships are reasonably linear, though there is a better fit for wages and income than for output per capita….”

“Unemployment: Conventional wisdom and academic studies suggest that a rising unemployment rate would take a big toll on happiness. We find a moderate correlation between unemployment and happiness across U.S. metros. The correlation between happiness and the unemployment rate is -.34 and between it and the year-over-year (December 2008 to December 2009) change in unemployment is -.3.”

“Post-Industrial Economic Structures: In our ongoing research, we have been testing the notion that happiness and well-being may be more associated with key features of so-called post-industrial economic structures–namely the shift from physically oriented work to knowledge, professional, and creative occupations and industries–and from lower-skilled to more highly skilled and educated workforces. A large body of research has found a close association between human capital (measured as share of the population with a B.A. and above) and economic development across nations as well as regions; other research has found thathuman capital levels are becoming more divergent across regions over time. To get at this, we looked at the associations between happiness and human capital, as well as between it and creative-knowledge-professional occupations and blue-collar working class occupations.

Human Capital: Happiness at the city or metro-level is more closely associated with human capital with a correlation of .68 - the strongest correlation of any of the variables we looked at. The scatter-graph below shows a fairly linear relationship. ..”

High-Tech: Happiness is also associated with locations that have higher concentrations of high-tech industries. We find a correlation of .41 between it and the Milken Institute’s Tech-Pole measure.

Working Class: On the other hand, metro-level happiness is negatively associated with the working class, -.34, a finding which is similar to that for states.”

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I’ve been back in this city for twenty years. The first four or five years back I really wanted to move away - basically back to Ottawa were I had worked for three years after graduating from graduate school. I was born here but moved away in 1958 and came back in 1971 and then left again in 1985.

Am I happy living in this city, somewhat but that is never a concrete question with a definitive answer.There is always expectations and let downs - life. I am working and according to Florida those with post secondary degrees are happier than those without. I am a member of the creative class, work in a high tech profession, therefore I should be happy with Windsor and in Windsor. Which I generally am. Can things be better sure, can they get worse with our economy - yes.

But then I’ve never asked or really sat down and addressed the question is Windsor a Happy City

Tags: All About Cities, Creative Class, Human Capital, Income, Martin Prosperity Institute, Post Industrial Economic Structures, Richard Florida, Unemployment, Wages