This site has traced Puerto Rico last on income, absent from the crime record, and once ranked ahead of the mainland US on self-reported happiness before being dropped from the count. If money wasn't what put it ahead in 2016, what was? The World Happiness Report's own methodology points to the same answer: family.

In 2016, the UN-backed World Happiness Report ranked Puerto Rico 15th happiest in the world -- ahead of the United States itself that year. By the very next report, Puerto Rico had vanished from the rankings entirely, and it has not reappeared since. Not a decline. A removal.

This site's own 2023 Census data shows a household in Loudoun County, Virginia -- the highest-income county in the country -- earning 11 times what a household earns in Las Marías, Puerto Rico, the lowest. Same federal government, same currency, same citizenship since 1917. Puerto Rico also has zero reporting agencies in the federal crime dataset this site draws from.

Loudoun County, Virginia and Las Marías, Puerto Rico are both counted by the same Census Bureau, governed by the same federal government, and paid in the same currency. Median household income in one is eleven times the other. Neither number is wrong. The gap is the actual finding.