Happiness research follow-up

In response to my post titled, "Do we want to be this 'Happy," a reader questions my focus on density and my bias toward suburbs (which I freely admit).  As this blog is about issues affecting land use, I selected certain information to make a point.  I am citing my research sources for all readers to check out.  To get the full picture on the geography of happiness, read the full reports, links given below.

The first research paper, "The Geography of Happiness," looks at how happiness can be measured through the use of geotagging certain words on Twitter that were found to correlate to scales of happiness.  The second is the Gallup-Healthways, "The State of Well-Being," called the "Well-Being Index." The annual report is done using surveys in each state within selected congressional districts. A third research study, "Urban Scaling and its Deviations," looks at economic and social well-being rather than the happiness of cities. And lastly, a Huffington Post article, "The Happiest States In America In One Map."

The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter Sentiment and Expression, Demographics, and Objective Characteristics of Place. 

On wealth:
Happiness within the US was found to correlate strongly with wealth, showing large positive correlation with increasing household income and strong negative correlation with increasing poverty. 

On obesity:
We also observed that happiness anticorrelates significantly with obesity. A similar link between obesity and happiness has previously been reported [33], particularly for individuals who report low self control [34]. However, as some authors point out, the presence of chronic illnesses accompanying obesity can confound the link between obesity and psychological well-being[35], and indeed an inverse relationship between weight and depression has been found in some studies [36].

On population density:
For example, economic productivity [12], [13], [15], [20]–[22] (value-added in manufacturing, GDP, wages, personal income, etc.) increases systematically on a per capita basis by 15% with every doubling of a city's population, regardless of a city's initial size (whether from, say, 50,000 to 100,000 or, from 5,000,000 to 10,000,000). Remarkably, these general increasing returns to population size manifest, on average, the same statistical relationship (the 15% rule) across an extraordinarily broad range of metrics, regardless of nation or time. Similar increases apply to almost every socioeconomic quantity, from innovation rates [10], [14] and rhythms of human behavior [15] to incidence of crime [15], [16] and infectious diseases [15], [18]. They express a continuous and systematic acceleration of socioeconomic processes with increasing numbers of people [15], so that larger cities produce and spend wealth faster, create new ideas more frequently and suffer from greater incidence of crime all approximately to the same degree.

On socio-economic status:
Only two groups show a large number of attributes which significantly correlate (below ) with happiness; these are shown in blue (with red crosses specifying the median attribute). These two groups might be broadly characterized as representing high socioeconomic and low socioeconomic status respectively, with many of the attributes in the high socioeconomic status group positively correlating with happiness, and anti-correlating for the low socioeconomic status group.  (Image below)