(TNND) — Americans might not be as divided as they often believe, according to a wide-ranging group of scholars and thought leaders who crunched thousands of data points for a new “State of the States” report.

Unfortunately, the common ground is also rooted in troubling national trends for personal and social well-being, despite generally improving economic measures.

“There’s a lot in here to suggest that we shouldn’t be as divided as we are, because we face, for the most part, the same problems and the same challenges,” said Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University and the board chair for the State of the Nation Project, which released the report over the weekend.

Harris said they compared states across 31 measures that accounted for how children and families are doing, how citizenship and democracy are faring, how state economies are performing, how the environment is trending, and how our collective trust in each other and national institutions is holding up, among other topics.

They ranked the states on the numerous measures and assessed how states were trending against both themselves and other states.

Their work generated over 4,000 data points, but the researchers published an interactive map so that people can easily check out their state’s breakdown or look through national heat maps by various topics, such as test scores, voter participation, life expectancy or murder rates.

Minnesota topped the list for state average ranks across all measures, followed by New Hampshire, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Utah.

The four most populous states, California, Texas, Florida and New York, ranked 28th, 33rd, 35th and 26th, respectively.

But the researchers highlighted a handful of key patterns across the country.

Geography matters, but it’s not destiny, they said.

States in the western Midwest and New England outperform other regions across the 31 measures on average. But regional patterns aren’t uniform.

For example, Southern states performed better than their overall rankings would suggest on personal well-being measures, like life satisfaction.

No state, however, is improving on an “alarming” number of measures, including life satisfaction, depression, trust in the federal government and income inequality.

All states, however, are improving on two measures: child mortality and state total income.

Still, a stronger economy doesn’t seem to improve personal well-being, particularly trust in other people, trust in government and trust in science.

Economic growth is not enough, the researchers said.

“The fact that essentially no state is improving on almost any of the subjective well-being measures is really important and worrisome,” Harris said.

Harris said he hopes to dive deeper into the reasons why Americans feel so negatively about many things, despite a seemingly prosperous society. But he said many of the common ideas are probably right: more social isolation, more political polarization and more economic inequality.

States are becoming more alike in most ways, the researchers found. On 17 measures, states are converging. States are diverging on 13 others.

But the researchers said the divergence on lived experiences, where they’re occurring, may also help explain why Americans feel so divided, even as many national indicators improve.

The State of the Nation Project put out a report last year, its first, that compared the U.S. to other countries on many of the same measures.

The larger purpose of the project is to try to understand how we’re doing as a country and to motivate change, Harris said.

And change still occurs most often at the state and local level, he said.

“It seemed especially appropriate with the 250th anniversary that as we’re thinking about where we’ve been and where we’re headed as a country … to do something that was focused more on the states,” Harris said.