Happy Holidays? 

 This morning the  New York Times  alerted me to a  Science piece  written by two economists working on measuring happiness.  Their basic finding is that objective measures of quality of life (nice climate, etc) are pretty highly correlated with subjective, self-reported measures of how satisfied people are with their lives.  They provide a ranking of US states by happiness level, accessible  here , which shows Louisiana first and New York last, with Massachusetts falling to 43rd.  Go figure -- I like living in MA.   

 I really want to see some cross-national comparisons but I doubt anyone will be moving on to that unless the World Bank picks up Bhutan's  Gross National Happiness  measure as one of their development indicators. 

 Happy holidays to all!