Here’s something that’s no news at all, really, but is worth passing on: According to practitioners of a new discipline called “happiness economics,” the happiest Canadians live in “poor” Atlantic Canada, while the unhappiest ones live in our wealthiest cities.

In fact, says John Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia, if the life satisfaction of Atlantic Canadians is the best in the country, “then maybe equalization payments of a different sort should be heading in the other direction.”

In other words, maybe we could give Ralph Klein his money’s worth after all: some advice about chilling out.

More seriously, there are implications here for policy-making. The great roar is always for more economic growth, more money, more jobs, with little thought for the other important things. Maybe we should take a moment sometime and reflect on what we’re wishing for.

A couple of weeks ago, The Globe and Mail had a big spread on this, with the usual litany of burned-out, money-grubbing, big-city workaholics admitting that their frenzied pursuit of wealth and status turned out to be a treadmill to nowhere, a trail of divorce, alienated kids and friends, bad health, pill popping, alcoholism and whatever.

It also had testimony from Andrew Oswald, a British pioneer in this field of study, who said he had always assumed, as economists generally do, that money bought happiness. “I have had to revise that opinion,” he said.

The real “news” here is that it took the emergence of a whole academic discipline to figure out the obvious: A neurotic quest for the tarnished baubles of wealth and fame doesn’t make you content. In Atlantic Canada, what gives us the edge is our ground-level networks of friends and family. Along with having more friends and acquaintances, our sense of social support is greater, our level of trust of other people is higher (the crime rate is also the lowest in the country), the gap between rich and poor is less, and people are more readily accepted as human beings rather than as piles of money decked out in fancy clothes. This goes against the modern grain, which is towards more and more isolation: bigger homes, bigger cars, bigger egos, the competitive quest for status, and so on.

There are, of, course, a few twists to the scenario. In Atlantic Canada, you’ll find the big-city attitudes creeping into the fancier suburbs of Halifax. I suspect that if the happiness economists applied their expertise more narrowly, they’d find rural Atlantic Canadians, on the whole, happier than urban ones.

I moved from Halifax to Yarmouth County a couple of years ago, where I built a house. The power corporation guy who hooked up my electricity told me he knew a couple of hundred families by name in the western counties just from hooking them up. “In Halifax, guys doing my job probably get to know maybe 15,” he said. And, I added, in Toronto, where you’re just a guy doing a job, probably none. I have conversations like this frequently.

Another kink is that the principle that money doesn’t buy happiness is relative. If you’re truly poor, or indebted, it does. If you already have enough, the researchers found, more money just makes you want more still in a never-ending quest to flaunt wealth and one-up the other guy. In response to one intriguing questionnaire, they found that most respondents would rather make $50,000 if others made half that, than make $100,000 if others made twice as much. Under yet another angle, they found that East Germans have become less happy after reunification, although their living standards have risen — because they’re now comparing themselves to West Germans.

And the final twist is that Atlantic Canada is not “poor.” That, too, is relative. The word only comes up because others are filthy rich. If we look at it in world terms, we are in fact mostly filthy rich ourselves. Figures from the World Bank indicate this: If you make $25,000 a year, you’re in the top 10 per cent of wage earners on the face of the Earth.

And so, our relative contentment is not because of our “poverty,” but because we’re still resisting a key element of the North American way: coveting the lifestyle of the rich and famous.