A quiz question: Which state does best at ensuring the well-being of its citizens, giving them health, education and hope?
It’s not one of the richest places per capita to live, which — depending on how or what you count — include Connecticut, New York and Washington, D. C. It’s not the world’s tech capital, California, nor is it proud and flamboyant Texas. Florida may attract retirees, but it’s not Florida either.
Rather, a major new study finds that the No. 1 state in terms of its residents’ quality of life is Minnesota. Yes, just-a-bit-boring Minnesota. Freezing Minnesota. Calm, pragmatic, not-very-ideological Minnesota.
The new study, released Saturday, comes from the State of the Nation Project, backed by a bipartisan group of experts. This year’s assessment is based on 31 measures and was created by scholars and by advisers to the last five presidents, including Donald Trump.
The bad news is that just about every part of the country — even Minnesota — is seeing a decline in self-reported personal well-being and mental health. Likewise, people throughout the country trust less in institutions and in their fellow Americans. Overall, we increasingly are unhappy.
“We have a national problem on our hands,” said Douglas N. Harris, a Tulane University economist who is leading the State of the Nation Project. Minnesota may be a model state compared with others, but even it is tracking the downward national trends in areas like mental health, children and families, he noted.
“It’s a very uniform, broad-based decline in well-being,” Harris said. “There really aren’t any states knocking it out of the park on how people feel about their lives, other people or key institutions.”
To me, this discontent seems a reason to mark the nation’s 250th birthday next month not only with celebrations but also with a serious, fact-based effort to diagnose what has gone wrong — and that’s something the State of the Nation Project may help with.
The top 10 states for well-being in the study, in order, are: Minnesota, New Hampshire, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Utah.
California and New York rank in the middle. Florida and Texas are a bit below average.
Louisiana is at the bottom, with New Mexico, West Virginia, Nevada, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arkansas and South Carolina not much better off.
In general, the states doing well tend to be in New England or the western part of the Midwest and are somewhat prosperous. The worst performers tend to be red states in the South, but the patterns aren’t clear-cut.
And let’s acknowledge that this is a single study relying on data that are sometimes subjective. This is not the last word in rankings. Still, I think it helps when Republican and Democratic experts agree on a snapshot of where we are. Three lessons seem paramount to me:
America does an excellent job generating wealth and a poor job translating that wealth into things we value. For example, the State of the Nation Project says, the United States performs better than 98 percent of countries worldwide in economic output, but better than only 57 percent of nations in child mortality, 33 percent in belief in democracy and 11 percent in measures of depression and anxiety. Domestically, rich states tend to outperform poor states, but the correlation is somewhat weak. What matters even more than economic growth is that benefits are shared, and richer states do not seem to produce more personal satisfaction.
Social spending, especially on education, improves citizen outcomes, but what matters in addition to the sums themselves is how the money is spent. Minnesota ranks 13th among states in the share of personal income going to state and local taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, but it seems to get a high return on its spending.
Southern red states do poorly, but some of the most progressive states also underperform, especially given how wealthy they are. Politicians in some liberal states seem better at reciting slogans (“Housing is a human right!”) than at actually building housing. Indeed, instead of spurring action, the slogans sometimes substitute for it. I’ve argued that the states doing the most to lift education outcomes are a trio of red states better known for their past failures in social policy: Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. These rankings are a reminder that what matters to residents is less the boldness of the vision than relentless empiricism and careful execution.
As I explored the data, I wondered if there’s something to be said for a healthy opposition party. The pattern is imperfect, but many of the worst performers are one-party Republican states, while the underperforming rich states are mostly dominated by Democrats. A few of the best performers, including Minnesota, have a blue cast but with enough Republicans to keep Democrats nervous.
Looking at these results, I also have a nagging fear: Decline can become self-fulfilling. The study underscores increasing economic frustration and distrust of government, and those realities may help explain the rise of Trump. And now he is giving people even more reason to distrust government.
Here’s my hope: We rigorously reflect on where we stand on our 250th birthday and aim, in a calm, understated Minnesota way, to tackle our challenges and, as Lincoln put it, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
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