{"ID":2842394,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10542","arxiv_id":"2511.10542","title":"Two Americas of Well-Being: Divergent Rural-Urban Patterns of Life Satisfaction and Happiness from 2.6 B Social Media Posts","abstract":"Using 2.6 billion geolocated social-media posts (2014-2022) and a fine-tuned generative language model, we construct county-level indicators of life satisfaction and happiness for the United States. We document an apparent rural-urban paradox: rural counties express higher life satisfaction while urban counties exhibit greater happiness. We reconcile this by treating the two as distinct layers of subjective well-being, evaluative vs. hedonic, showing that each maps differently onto place, politics, and time. Republican-leaning areas appear more satisfied in evaluative terms, but partisan gaps in happiness largely flatten outside major metros, indicating context-dependent political effects. Temporal shocks dominate the hedonic layer: happiness falls sharply during 2020-2022, whereas life satisfaction moves more modestly. These patterns are robust across logistic and OLS specifications and align with well-being theory. Interpreted as associations for the population of social-media posts, the results show that large-scale, language-based indicators can resolve conflicting findings about the rural-urban divide by distinguishing the type of well-being expressed, offering a transparent, reproducible complement to traditional surveys.","short_abstract":"Using 2.6 billion geolocated social-media posts (2014-2022) and a fine-tuned generative language model, we construct county-level indicators of life satisfaction and happiness for the United States. We document an apparent rural-urban paradox: rural counties express higher life satisfaction while urban counties exhibit...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10542","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10542v1","authors":"[\"Stefano Maria Iacus\",\"Giuseppe Porro\"]","published":"2025-11-13T17:41:11Z","proceeding":"cs.SI","tasks":"[\"cs.SI\",\"cs.LG\",\"stat.AP\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}