Does the Happy City Index Actually Measure Happiness?

I didn’t even know there was a ranking of the happiest cities. So I was pleased to see it the other day and even more pleased to see that New York is the top ranked American city. But, based on having worked in or around city governments across the U.S. since 1992, when I took a look at the indicators they use to determine happiness, I’m not sure it reflects my understanding of how cities work or what actually makes residents happy.

The survey uses government and third party data measuring the impact of different policies and statistics on citizenship, governance, environment, economy, health and mobility. To me, some of the specific criteria they use reflects what makes people happy or sad that they live in a particular city. Others feel like they matter to urban planners and people with policy degrees, but not at all to real people. But most important is what the index is missing — the criteria that, in my experience, matter most to residents are almost ignored completely. Issues like safety or cleanliness or taxes aren’t even in here. But some of the index is also very useful. Here’s what does and doesn’t make sense.

Logical Criteria That Just Make Sense:

• Quality of the schools? Absolutely. The point where lots of people leave cities for suburbs is when they have kids and the kids need to go to school. If the local urban public schools are bad, people leave. And if the schools are bad, the kids learning there are at a huge disadvantage for the rest of their lives.

• Innovation and creativity of residents? Again, absolutely. The best cities have an intangible quality where smart, interesting, creative people are there doing smart, interesting creative things. That creates energy, excitement, buzz. It makes other people want to be there. It brings in tourists, businesses, culture. It’s a big part of what makes a city great.

• Housing? Absolutely. From every survey I’ve seen recently, New Yorkers (just to use us as an example since we’re in a mayoral race so there’s lots of data floating around) want: (a) a city that is clean, safe and well run and; (b) a city they can afford to live in. Because of our zoning policies, our housing policies, our environmental policies, our community rules and our union rules, we make the construction of affordable housing virtually impossible both here and in many major American cities. Cities like Houston without those laws have far more affordable housing and far less homelessness.

• Access to culture? Similar to innovation and creativity above, although the former happens just by the government mainly doing its job well and getting out of the way and the latter requires a level of direct public support and interaction.

• Anti-pollution? Yes. I would not want to live in Lahore. So cities beset by smog and pollution clearly are worse places to live that make their residents less happy.

• Availability of green areas? Yes. People who live in small apartments need other places to go and people in general both need to spend time outside and time around others. Parks provide this.

• GDP per person and productivity? Yes. This is the question of how wealthy a city is. Wealthier cities have more resources to spend on public goods. They have more businesses, more jobs to fill, more cultural activities, more things that make living there worthwhile and fun.

• Mental health? As a subset of public safety and quality of life, absolutely. Right now, New Yorkers are very unhappy because it feels like mentally ill people are everywhere on the streets and subways and that’s scary and sometimes outright dangerous. My happiness living here is less than it used to be because of it. People in other major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco feel the same way.

• Accessibility and Efficiency of Public Transport? Yes. If a resident is either stuck in endless traffic or can’t use the mass transit system because it’s either way too limited in scope or way too ineffective, that materially makes life worse.

• Labor market flexibility and unemployment? Of course. People need jobs. It’s a lot harder to be happy when you’re unemployed.

• Involvement of residents in the decision making process? While I don’t think the average person has any interest weighing in on the budget for the sanitation department, cities with very low turnout in municipal elections end up with leaders whose views are often wildly out of sync with the general public. Take former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio. de Blasio self identifies as extremely progressive. New Yorkers as a whole, like pretty much everyone, everywhere, are moderate overall. de Blasio won his primary (which effectively was the general election) with around 280,000 votes. That’s a little over 3% of the city’s population. So of course his policies were then generally unpopular and not what New Yorkers wanted. When there’s incredibly low turnout, you get bad governance.

• Nutrition? Obesity, diabetes and food scarcity are the criteria here and clearly cities that can help people gain access to affordable, healthy food (and make sure that every kid is fed at school every day) and can offer people access to affordable, decent health care is going to have a happier population.

Criteria That Matter to Urban Planners and People With Policy Degrees But No One Else

• Transparency in operation and openness of data? No one is sitting around saying, “I’d really love living in Cleveland if only the fire response time data were more transparent.” Only planners care about this.

• Conscious strategies? They mean this as governing intelligently, but that’s really a function of electing competent people, which is a function of turnout (and higher turnout that limits extremism then attracts better candidates). This specifically should not be a category.

• Accessibility of public e-services? I am all for a fully digital society. Estonia has it right. When I get a parking ticket, I like being able to pay it online. And of course I believe mobile voting is the solution to the extremism gripping our nation. But overall, public e-service accessibility is not a major factor that impacts happiness. It is more a reflection of the quality of the city’s management.

• Waste, wastewater management and recycling? If a city has toxic water flowing through the pipes, then yes, this impacts happiness a lot. But this is a list of only the happiest cities worldwide, which are also typically wealthy cities. This is not a real issue in those places.

• Entrepreneurship? I am a venture capitalist so of course I love this. But in reality, this is not something that impacts most people and the measurements they use here (active companies and new companies) isn’t even what would or wouldn’t make an entrepreneur happy. What would matter in this case is ease of getting permits and licenses to open a business.

• Openness of transport data? See above. No one cares about this except people who write white papers for a living.

• Communication technologies in transport? This should not be its own category. All that matters is whether there’s enough mass transit and if it works. This is far too insular and navel gazing.

Criteria That Should Have Mattered a Lot More

• Safety. There’s just one category for this and the subcriteria are things like immunization and medical insurance. What world are they living in? How about murders? Rapes? Robberies? Felony assaults? Larceny? Car thefts? The single issue that determines whether the residents of any given city are happy is whether they feel safe. If they don’t, nothing else matters. The fact that none of this is included or prioritized in the report is either completely tone deaf or just reflects the authors’ fear of angering their progressive friends at the expense of their own credibility.

• Cleanliness. Are the streets clean? Is there trash everywhere? Are the subways clean? The parks and playgrounds? A dirty city with trash and graffiti everywhere leads to a host of other quality of life and public safety problems. How is this not one of the top measurements?

• Taxes. You can argue that a premium product requires premium prices and therefore taxes have to be high. But if that’s the case, you better deliver a premium product. In so many cities, taxes are high and yet the outputs are low. If affordability is one of the two main issues that determine happiness in a city, how much of your paycheck goes to the city’s coffers every week matters a lot. The omission of this again has to be a paean to progressives who don’t like anything that challenges their orthodoxy that high taxes are a good thing independent of what people get in return for them.

• Freedom from hate. When a particular ideology dominates local government and politics and culture, that meaningfully reduces the rights and freedoms of anyone who feels differently. We have seen this manifest on campuses over the past decade but it often is reflected more broadly in urban life. If someone can’t feel comfortable walking down the street wearing something that is part of their religious beliefs or they hear chants that they should die simply because of their ethnicity, they are not happy. Again, because much of this problem stems from the far left, I believe the authors just chose to ignore it.

• Basic order. Chaotic cities can be exciting but they’re also exhausting to live in. When people ride their bikes on the sidewalks or don’t pick up their dog’s poop or stores openly selling narcotics are allowed to operate or there’s scaffolding everywhere, cities feel broken. I know the far left hates the broken windows theory and the authors here likely avoided this issue to avoid offending their friends but they are missing a very basic, very fundamental criteria.

I love the concept of measuring the happiness of the people who live in a city. It’s a great idea. But to do it correctly, it has to actually reflect what makes people happy and not just what makes the authors look smart or sufficiently progressive. If we could strip out about 40% of the indicators here and then add in (and heavily weight) the things that truly determine happiness like safety, order, cleanliness and taxes, this could be a really useful tool in helping people decide where to live.