Study: Unhappiness fueled region’s decline
A new study suggests the decline of rust belt cities such as Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton didn’t make their residents unhappy, but that residents’ unhappiness helped along their community’s decline.
And the authors of that study ranked the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton metro area No. 1 in unhappiness in the United States.
Economists with Harvard University and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, looked at telephone polls from 2005 to 2009 organized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among a slew of health and lifestyle questions was, “How satisfied are you with your life?”
At least 300,000 people in the United States answered that question each year. The study’s authors picked 177 metro areas that garnered at least 200 respondents each year. Even controlling for age, race, gender and other demographic factors, Northeastern Pennsylvanians were most likely in the country to tell pollsters their lives are unsatisfying.
Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Erie also made the least happy list. Most-unhappy metro areas are Midwestern and Northeastern industrial cities now in decline.
The authors dug into various surveys going back to the 1940s. They looked at other urban data, including population and income levels. They put forth evidence that these cities were even bummed out during boom times.
“Indeed, cities that have declined also seem to have been unhappy in the past, which suggests that a better interpretation might be that these areas were always unhappy — and that was one reason why they declined,” the study states.
Authors Joshua Gottlieb, Ph.D., and Edward Glaeser, Ph.D., could not be reached for comment.
The findings match with what 27-year-old Lackawanna College student and St. Joseph’s Center employee Charlotte Lewis observed growing up in West Scranton. Like many residents, she’s used to the city getting bad marks.
“I think it’s because of the history of political corruption that even goes back to the height of the coal era,” said Lewis, who is working as an environmental activist in Susquehanna County this summer. “That legacy just has this greater