Marin ranks No. 2 in official California ‘happiness’ report

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.

The highest was Alpine County, with an average score of 7.92, but there were only 12 responses from that county. No. 2 was Marin County, which with its 7.40 rating would be the seventh happiest nation in the world, between the Netherlands and Canada, if it were its own country.

Meanwhile, nine out of the 10 lowest-scoring counties were inland, with Lake County (6.64) coming in No. 58, placing it between the Czech Republic and Malta as the 22nd happiest nation if it were its own country.

Placer County ranked No. 3, Yolo County came in at No. 4, while Sacramento County ranked No. 41.

“These two separate data sets show that while many Californians are happy, unhappiness is growing in California and that happiness is not distributed evenly across the state,” according to the report.

The report found that those who responded as “not too happy” were more likely to be 18 to 34 (30%), renters (32%), to have a high school diploma or less (33%), or with an annual household income of $40,000 or less (39%).

So what should be done?

First, the report calls for continuing the conversation around happiness. It also calls on lawmakers to keep happiness in mind when crafting future legislation.

“The Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes encourages current and future lawmakers to strongly focus on happiness when developing public policy in all sectors. The California State Legislature should be a champion for happiness,” the report said.

The report calls for adopting a creative and collaborative approach to improving happiness among Californians.

“The solution to promoting greater happiness levels may be in unexpected policy areas, and by creating unexpected partnerships. By continuing to consider happiness levels when developing all policies, we have the chance to develop creative and unexpected solutions,” the report said.

Finally, the report stressed the importance of creating more trust among Californians, and between residents and their state government. The report points to the fact that public trust in most government institutions is near a historic low.

“This state of collapse in both personal and institutional trust is deeply concerning and should be a top priority to the State of California’s Legislature and institutions. Efforts should be made, by current and future legislators, to identify potential causes of distrust, increase opportunities for positive socialization, and continue to find ways to ensure the people of California have trust in their government,” the report said.