What’s neat about this system is that in a sense, it is actually more logical than the old Norman Rockwell America that Republicans want to take us back to—you know, the republican Republic, in which elections are decided by philosophical debates among stalwart pillars of the community. As though we lived in ancient Rome, or 17th-century Massachusetts, or something. Do we? Come on, Republicans—do we? Is this really the reality-based community?

No, in the reality-based community, elections are decided by Middle Eastern Hispanics. Or more exactly, whoever can bus more Middle Eastern Hispanics to the booth. Or more exactly, elections are decided by who has power. Does it really matter whether all these Vietnamese Hondurans actually exist? They are not stalwart philosophers—they are numbers in a computer. If they exist, they exist to make the number bigger. If they don’t exist, their purpose and meaning is the same.

If the party with the most power wins the election, continuity is maintained and people can go about their daily lives. If the party with the least power, the party which has no way to organize legions of sock or meatpuppets, wins, what happens? Turbulence, disruption, stupidity, and probably in the end a return to normal conditions. Don’t be turbulent—vote for the winner.

Sometimes I wonder if the Republicans could man it up and propose a Great Compromise with the Moloch of progressive America. We’d call it a compromise—but I’m really thinking more of a surrender. The compromise (a consent decree, even?) would run as follows:

"We, the undersigned Republicans, admit that we are foul kulak racists and deserve only to lose. We shall therefore crawl back into our holes and cling bitterly to our guns, etc. We henceforth dissolve the Republican Party and all its organs, especially Fox News. All future elections will be won by the Democrats, who are winners and golden in the light of Allah. May they enjoy eternal diversity."

"We, the undersigned Democrats, accept with a heavy conscience the burden of world domination. We agree to admit that we are the ruling party in a one-party state which controls the entire freakin’ planet. We promise that we will never whine that we’re being oppressed when some stupid worthless kulak thinks he can fight back, which he can’t, for five minutes.

"And finally, since there are no more elections and no more Republicans to humiliate, we are out of the meatpuppet business. We will no longer import, bribe, invent, or otherwise create meatpuppet or sockpuppet voters. Frankly, we didn’t want these people in Takoma Park anyway. The landscaping might get a little scruffy, but come on—Maryland is full of redneck grits. What do they do all day, farm? They can drive their F150s down from Hagerstown, and come cut our damned lawns."

Their chief finding is a striking association between population density — the concentration of people in a given area — and happiness. When the researchers ranked all 1,215 communities by average happiness, they found that average population density in the 20 percent most miserable communities was more than eight times greater than in the happiest 20 percent of communities.

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So what makes the happiest communities different from all the rest? Aside from fewer people, the authors found that the happiest communities had shorter commute times and less expensive housing, and that a smaller share of the population was foreign-born. They also found that people in the happiest communities are less transient than in the least happy communities, that they are more likely to attend church and that they are significantly more likely to feel a “sense of belonging” in their communities.

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Perhaps even more surprising are the factors that don't appear to play a major role in community-level differences in happiness: average income levels and rates of unemployment and education. People may move to cities for good-paying jobs, but the Canadian study strongly suggests it's not making them any happier.