Human progress, to a large degree, has depended on the continual expansion of social networks, which enable faster
sharing and shaping of ideas. And humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city. As our cities grow larger, the synapses that connect them—people with exceptional social skills—are becoming ever more essential to economic growth.
Richard Florida his colleague Charlotta Mellander have taken a closer look at the metropolitan well-being numbers and found moderate correlations between happiness and other factors, like wages, unemployment and output per capita. The variable they looked at that showed the strongest relationship with happiness was “human capital,” measured as the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
