By Andrew Sheeler
How happy are you, really?
A committee of California lawmakers looked into the issue and released a report showing more Californians are unhappy, while happy Californians are more likely to be better off financially and live near the coast.
The report, released this week by the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes, is online at shorturl.at/HDwnY.
The select committee was the passion project of former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who leaves office at the end of this year. The committee held three hearings on the topic of happiness, in March, May and August.
It heard from a variety of experts on the subject, from Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California to Phuntsho Norbu, consul general of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United States. They heard from politicians, filmmakers, clergy, professors, researchers, state officials and more, all on the subject of happiness.
The findings? Fewer Californians are “very happy” and more are “not too happy,” according to PPIC surveys conducted in 1998 and 2023. In 1998, 28% of Californians said they were “very happy.” That number dropped in 2023 to 16%. Likewise, the number of “not too happy” Californians doubled, from 13% in 1998 to 26% in 2023.
“We find that happiness is aligned with specific quality of life ratings. In particular, jobs, leisure, and housing,” Baldassare said, according to the report. “In our polling, we also looked at personal finance. But the biggest change we’ve seen over time has been satisfaction with jobs, which went from 52% saying they were very satisfied in our first polling to 31% today.”
Other polling, by Gallup, asked Californians to rate their satisfaction of life from 1 to 10. A research team from the University of Oxford then compiled all 215,801 responses into a map of the state, broken down by county.
The conclusion: Coastal Californians were more likely to be happy than their inland counterparts. Of the top 10 counties with the highest recorded scores, seven were coastal, with higher-than-average median incomes.
READ THE FULL STORY FROM THE SACRAMENTO BEE HERE.
Distributed by Tribune News Service.