America At 250: Minnesota Ranks First, Louisiana Last, And No State Is Getting Happier

As the United States turns 250 years old, a sweeping new report tracking the health of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. has delivered a verdict that cuts through political noise with uncomfortable clarity: American incomes are rising, yet Americans are becoming more miserable at the same time.

Released by the State of the Nation Project, a group of scholars from across the political spectrum, the “State of the States” report analyzed 31 measures of national well-being across 14 topic areas, from mental health and education to income, violence, and trust. A picture emerges of a country where economic growth has become untethered from actual human happiness, and where not a single state is improving on life satisfaction.

Scholars and advisors from seven leading think tanks, who between them have advised the past five U.S. presidents from Clinton through Trump, make up the group behind the report. That such a politically diverse group reached consensus on these findings is itself part of the story. Its members write that assembling such a wide-ranging group and agreeing on the findings “is itself a sign that we are more unified than we think,” even as the data they assembled tells a story of a nation fraying in ways that a booming stock market cannot fix.

Ranking All 50 States on Well-Being

Researchers pulled from data spanning 1990 to 2024, covering all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. They identified 31 reliable, state-level measures spanning mental health, physical health, education, the environment, inequality, civil liberties, and social trust, drawing on more than 4,000 individual indicators.

For each measure, every state was assessed three ways: how it ranks today compared to other states, whether it is improving or getting worse on its own terms, and whether it is gaining or losing ground relative to its neighbors. That last distinction matters. A state could be technically improving while falling further behind the rest of the country, or slowly declining while outpacing a national nosedive.

Rather than relying on any single survey or dataset, the researchers drew on multiple sources. Some measures come from publicly available federal data, while others (including trust measures) come from the General Social Survey, a long-running national poll administered by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.

Who’s Winning, Who’s Falling Behind

Minnesota landed at the top of the overall rankings, with an average rank of 13.9 across all 31 measures. Close behind were New Hampshire, Iowa, Vermont, and Massachusetts. At the other end, Louisiana posted the worst average rank of 40.7, preceded by New Mexico, West Virginia, Nevada, and Mississippi.

Regional patterns were stark. New England and the western Midwest consistently topped the charts, while the South posted the lowest average rankings across the board. Southern states‘ economic struggles stretch back centuries, the authors note, but most of the measures in this report are non-economic, meaning the South’s lower standing on trust, mental health, and other quality-of-life indicators stands as a separate finding in its own right.

Southern states actually scored in the middle of the pack on personal well-being, things like day-to-day life satisfaction and depression, but showed especially low levels of trust in institutions, including their own state and local governments. Mountain states such as Arizona, Colorado, and Montana flipped that pattern, showing relatively high trust but among the lowest levels of personal well-being in the country.

Well-Being Trends Moving in the Wrong Direction

Perhaps the most alarming section of the report is its finding that no state, anywhere in the country, is improving on eight specific measures: life satisfaction, adult depression, youth depression, fatal overdoses, trust in the federal government, income inequality, long-term unemployment rate, and hourly earnings growth.

Not one state, not Minnesota, not Vermont, not any of the top performers, is making progress on any of those measures.

On the flip side, two measures showed universal improvement: child mortality rates are falling in every state, and total state economic output is rising across the board. That last finding makes the well-being slide all the more confounding.

Out of 225 tracked cases where researchers could observe state trends in self-reported well-being, only 12 showed any improvement, and more than half were getting worse. When the researchers added fatal overdoses and suicides to the picture, 96% of all tracked cases showed a worsening trend. Washington, D.C., which showed improvement on suicides, was the lone bright spot.

Polarization added a counterintuitive twist. While national divisions feel sharper than ever, the data shows that states are actually becoming more similar to each other on 17 of the 31 measures: converging, not diverging. But the exceptions matter enormously. States are pulling apart on income, a reversal of a decades-long trend toward greater equality between states. And nearly half of the 13 measures where states are diverging involve personal and social well-being: life satisfaction, trust in science, adult depression, youth depression, suicide, and fatal overdoses. In most of these cases, the national average is already declining, meaning some states are falling off a cliff while others are merely slipping. In the authors’ view, this widening gap in well-being could help explain the political polarization that feels so dominant in public life.

Rich States, Happy People? Not Exactly.

One of the central questions the report set out to answer was whether states with stronger economies are doing better on well-being. Its answer is sobering.

When researchers examined the connection between income per person and three personal well-being measures (life satisfaction, adult depression, and youth depression), they found no meaningful relationship. Richer states are not happier states, at least not in any measurable way when it comes to how people feel about their own lives or mental health.

When the same analysis was applied to four measures of social well-being (trust in other people, trust in the federal government, trust in science, and social isolation), higher-income states did show stronger scores, though the link with trust in the federal government fell just short of statistical significance. In the researchers’ telling, this could mean that functioning economies support stronger institutions, or that people in more prosperous states are simply more inclined to view those institutions favorably. Either way, the pattern of higher-income states scoring better on social trust but not on personal happiness adds a new wrinkle to longstanding debates about what economic growth actually delivers for real people.

A public opinion poll of 1,000 Americans conducted in 2024 offered some validation of the project’s approach: the public largely agreed with the board’s choice of metrics, and the most common response was that the researchers had done a good job capturing what matters.

That consensus doesn’t make the findings any easier to absorb. At 250 years old, America is wealthier than it has ever been, child mortality is down, and states are converging on many measures of civic life. But the country’s inner life, how people feel, whom they trust, how they cope, is deteriorating in ways that wealth alone is not fixing. As the authors put it in their conclusion, invoking President Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address: “We have every right to dream heroic dreams.” Whether the country is dreaming or sleepwalking is a question this report leaves squarely in the hands of those who govern, and those who vote.

---