Can California Legislate Its Way to Happiness?

Are you happy?

That’s the question at the center of a new committee in the California Legislature. The first-in-the-nation group aims to gather data on what makes people truly happy to reframe how state policymakers craft and champion legislation.

It may sound silly or pie in the sky, but Assemblyman Anthony Rendon, who started the committee, thinks lawmakers should be seriously pursuing how to increase happiness for Californians.

“The fact that we’re not focused on that very fundamental question is something that I think ought to be very disconcerting to a lot of us,” Rendon said this month at the first public hearing for the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes. “If we have everybody clothed, everybody housed, everybody has a job and they’re miserable, then we’ve failed at what we’re trying to do.”

The committee heard from experts who shared wide-ranging ideas for making Californians happier — from improving access to green space, to encouraging meditation and charity work, to improving the quality of schooling and available jobs — and reviewed the myriad benefits of happiness. Happy people have more productive careers, are more likely to volunteer, are less likely to fall ill and tend to live longer.

Happiness is an area where California and the United States are “very, very far behind the rest of the world in looking at this issue — I think that’s a shame,” said Rendon, who added that the committee would put out a report on its findings by the end of the year. “But from a California perspective, I think it says a lot about us that we’re at least starting this discussion.”

In California, about 58 percent of adults say they are “pretty happy,” 16 percent are “very happy” and 26 percent “not too happy,” according to a September 2023 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. Those numbers line up roughly with nationwide happiness levels, though that’s not necessarily inspiring given that the U.S. just received its lowest ever ranking in the United Nations’ annual World Happiness Report.