This site's own data recently traced an 11-times income gap between Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the country, and Las Marías, Puerto Rico, the poorest.^[1] Income was never going to be the whole story, and Puerto Rico turns out to be the clearest possible proof of why.

In 2016, the United Nations-backed World Happiness Report — built from Gallup World Poll interviews asking people to rate their own lives on a 0-to-10 ladder, weighted by income, social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and trust — ranked Puerto Rico 15th happiest out of 157 countries and territories measured. That year, Puerto Rico ranked ahead of the United States itself.^[2] The poorest place in the entire U.S. federal income count was, by the world's own most-cited self-reported wellbeing measure, one of the most content populations on Earth.

By the very next year's report, Puerto Rico was gone from the list. Not lower. Absent — dropped from the statistical appendix entirely, with no ranking published in its place.^[3] It has not reappeared in the ten years since.^[4]

This is the same shape this site already found in Puerto Rico's absence from the federal crime dataset, now showing up in a completely different, independently run measurement built by a completely different institution. Not a place doing badly on every count. A place doing well by at least one real count, then removed from being counted at all — income last, crime data zero, and now a happiness ranking that peaked ahead of the mainland it is legally, permanently part of, then simply stopped being asked. A third piece asks the question that actually matters: not why the count stopped, but what produced the result in the first place.