Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, there is actually an annual happiness survey done each year here in the U.S. And there are several interesting results from the survey. First of all, if you look over the last 30 years, there's actually been very little change in the overall rate of happiness, if you will, among households here in the U.S. But we do find variation among particular households. What we find is that happiness has actually been increasing for college graduates, but it's been going down for households with less education. Now, one big question would be why? Well, one thing that economists can speculate on is this may be correlated with changes in income, and indeed, this decade what we have found is that only college graduates have enjoyed income gains that have exceeded inflation. All other households with different educational levels have seen their wages and their incomes go down, and hence, perhaps their happiness go down. One piece of good news out of all this is that differences in happiness among different racial groups have actually narrowed in recent surveys."