The Human Flourishing Geographic Index: A County-Level Dataset for the United States, 2013--2023

2025-11-05

AI Summary

Existing prosperity metrics often lack spatiotemporal granularity and multidimensional coverage, limiting their utility for welfare research beyond GDP. Method: We construct the first nationwide, county-level, monthly-updated human flourishing dataset for the U.S. (2013–2023), derived from 2.6 billion geotagged tweets. Using a fine-tuned large language model, we perform fine-grained semantic annotation across 48 dimensions—including well-being, health, purpose, virtue, relationships, and financial stability—and extend the Harvard Global Flourishing Index with novel constructs such as immigration attitudes and perceived corruption. Validation employs spatiotemporal statistical modeling and alignment with diverse external benchmarks. Contribution/Results: The resulting annual and monthly flourishing indices capture subnational social dynamics with high fidelity, exhibit theoretically expected correlations with conventional socioeconomic indicators, and establish a high-resolution empirical baseline for welfare science.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success

Abstract

Quantifying human flourishing, a multidimensional construct including happiness, health, purpose, virtue, relationships, and financial stability, is critical for understanding societal well-being beyond economic indicators. Existing measures often lack fine spatial and temporal resolution. Here we introduce the Human Flourishing Geographic Index (HFGI), derived from analyzing approximately 2.6 billion geolocated U.S. tweets (2013-2023) using fine-tuned large language models to classify expressions across 48 indicators aligned with Harvard's Global Flourishing Study framework plus attitudes towards migration and perception of corruption. The dataset offers monthly and yearly county- and state-level indicators of flourishing-related discourse, validated to confirm that the measures accurately represent the underlying constructs and show expected correlations with established indicators. This resource enables multidisciplinary analyses of well-being, inequality, and social change at unprecedented resolution, offering insights into the dynamics of human flourishing as reflected in social media discourse across the United States over the past decade.

Problem

• Quantifying multidimensional human flourishing beyond economic indicators
• Addressing lack of fine spatial and temporal resolution in well-being measures
• Creating high-resolution geographic dataset for flourishing analysis using social media

Innovation

• Using fine-tuned large language models
• Analyzing geolocated tweets for indicators
• Providing monthly county-level flourishing measures