The Great Urban-Rural Happiness Debate

The subtitle of Ed Glaesar's recent book, Triumph of the City, states that urban areas make people richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier. A pair of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas aren't so sure about that last one. In a recent paper published in the journal Urban Geography, Brian Berry and Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn contend that statistical data show a clear urban-rural happiness gradient — in other words, as they move from small town to suburb to city, they find a gradual decrease in subjective well-being:

The researchers explore some of the theoretical underpinnings of urban unhappiness — referring often to Louis Wirth's 1938 paper, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," [PDF] which cites "the relative absence of intimate personal acquaintanceship," as one of many potential reasons city residents should be less happy — before moving on to recent data. Their primary resource is the General Social Survey, a broad sweep of social information collected regularly since 1972. By mapping responses to the G.S.S. question on happiness with data on place of residence, the researchers find that, between 1972 and 2008, "happiness has been lowest in the nation's largest cities and has consistently been at its highest levels in small towns and rural areas":