The OECD — a club of various rich, developed countries — recently unveiled a new dataset on well-being across the world, which they measure holistically, taking into account everything from the murder rates to unemployment levels to broadband access. Conveniently, they broke the numbers down not just by nation but by region. Adam Carstens conveniently graphed the US state data:
The case for moving to New Hampshire, in one chart
Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
New Hampshire comes out on top, followed by Minnesota and Vermont. Interestingly, the education rankings for each state are fairly uniform; safety and health appear to have the most variation (as Dartmouth Atlas researchers would be glad to confirm).
There’s obviously stuff this leaves out; the housing measure is “average rooms per person” which rewards places where housing is cheap rather than dense cities where housing is expensive but life has immeasurable advantages. If you want to delve deeper into the raw data, you can download the full dataset (warning: Excel doc), which also lets you check regional breakdowns for other countries. Even wondered whether Sweden’s Central Norrland region has a higher life expectancy than neighboring Upper Norrland? Wonder no more.
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