In the 1960 documentary Chronicle of a Summer, two French anthropologists ambled through the streets of Paris asking a simple question: Are you happy? The answers, they found, were not quite as simple, or as succinct.

This was still at the height of French existentialist thought, when Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre could be seen in dingy cafes on the Left Bank, hashing out the meaning of life without God over Galois cigarettes and cheap red wine. It was soon enough after World War II for many Europeans to still be putting their lives back together, including one of the film's main subjects, a pretty woman in her mid-30s who survived a concentration camp.

Add to this the dreary Parisian weather, the economic turmoil of that period, and the sudden influx of immigrants looking for a better life, overwhelming the city and saturating the job market more people than there were jobs.

Sound familiar? If you live in New York City in 2009, I'll bet it does. Which is perhaps why New York -- the whole state! -- finished dead last in a recent study by two economists on the United States' most content populations. Since Washington D.C. was treated as its own entity, that puts New York at 51 out of 51. Connecticut and New Jersey came in at 50 and 49, respectively.

What gives? People around the world are clamoring to be in New York. Its population is estimated at 8.4 million, and that doesn't even include the whole tri-state area. It has the Finger Lakes, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and the Berkshires. But, the study's authors found, New York also has a lot of complainers.

To determine their list, the researchers conducted a survey of 1.3 million people and asked them subjective questions about their lives, very much like the "Are you happy?" question posed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin back in 1960. Then they combined those responses with non-variable criteria, such as cost of living, climate, and commute times, and found that, objectively speaking, New Yorkers should be miserable.

But climate isn't everything. California also fared badly, landing at number 46, while Louisiana, whose climate will likely forever be associated with a pretty name that starts with "K," received top billing at number 10. It must be the traffic, the economy, or the sense of nihilism that Thomas Pynchon captured in his modern classic about postmodern malaise around Los Angeles, The Crying of Lot 49.

Clyde Halberman, in his article about the study for the New York Times, invokes the 1949 film The Third Man to make a point about so-called "miserable" places: the protagonist (Orson Welles) says, "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

"In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Or, as my dad used to say of my parents' decision, before I was born, to move away from San Diego to western Illinois: "I wanted my kids to know that if they stood still for too long they'd freeze to death."

In other words, happiness ain't everything.

[Image: Walker Evans, 1938, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art]