Taking Happiness Seriously: Can We? Should We? Would It Matter If We Did? A Debate

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Dr Michael Plant

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For £1,000 you could:

Double the annual income of 1 household

Provide 250 bednets

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Treat 10 women �for depression

We want to do ‘the most good’. But how do we assess what works?

Deworm 1,300 children

Two paths to measuring impact

• ‘Objective indicators’ approach: using objectively-measurable indicators of wellbeing, e.g. health and wealth, combined with intuitions, to make trade-offs
• ‘Subjective wellbeing’ approach: use self-reported measures of wellbeing, eg surveys of happiness and life satisfaction
• Proposal: take happiness seriously: set priorities using the evidence on subjective wellbeing.
• A new, radical idea?

A new, radical idea?

“the care of human life and happiness [...] is the first & only legitimate object of good government” - Jefferson, 1809

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“the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation” - Bentham, 1776

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“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” - Aristotle

What’s new? Data

• 1946 - Gallup is founded
• 1972 - General Social Survey (GSS) begins in the US; Bhutan starts its Gross National Happiness (GNH) index
• 2002 - Australia deve
• 2005 - First global survey: Gallup World Poll starts in 160 countries
• 2011 - UK’s Office of National Statistics start collecting SWB data
• 2012 - First edition of the World Happiness Report
• 2022 - UK’s Treasury publishes a wellbeing supplement to the Green Book
• Now - 20 countries are measuring wellbeing
• We now know lots about how to measure happiness and what drives it.

• However, efforts to work out the priorities - and take action - have barely begun!
• Two projects here: (1) direct impact, (2) causing a paradigm shift

The case for taking happiness seriously

1. Happiness matters.
2. It can be measured by asking people how they feel.
3. Our predictions about happiness are often wrong.

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Therefore, we should take happiness seriously, set priorities using the evidence on subjective wellbeing.

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1. Happiness matters

• Wellbeing definitely matters
• Wellbeing refers to what is ultimately (or intrinsically) good for someone.
• Wealth and health are only instrumentally good for us.
• Three theories of wellbeing
• Preference satisfaction: Your life goes well to the degree you get what you want (even if you don’t experience it).
• Hedonism: Your life goes well to the degree you are happy, you have overall positive experiences.
• The objective list: There’s more to life than your desires and your experiences. Leading contenders: love, knowledge, success.
• You don’t need to think happiness is the only thing that matters to think it matters.
• Yet, standardly, when setting priorities, we don’t directly account for happiness

QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years)

A well-established measure of health,

combining quality & quantity of life.

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1 QALY = 1 year of healthy life

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Based on hypothetical trade-offs, not evidence on people’s experiences

GiveWell’s moral weights

GiveWell (2020) 2020 update on GiveWell's moral weights

2. Happiness can be measured

Let’s replace the Objective Indicators approach with:

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Wellbeing-Adjusted �Life Years (WELLBYs)

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1 WELLBY equals:

• a 1-point increase
• on a 0-10 scale
• for 1 year

UK Office of National Statistics (2021)

Can we rely on subjective measures?

Wealth

Health

Being in a partnership

What your friends say

How often you smile

Suicide

Kahneman and Krueger (2006)

Layard (2020) Can We Be Happier?

World Happiness Report 2022

Challenges with happiness data

• Data quality:
• Are scales linear, e.g. does going from 4/10 to 5/10 represents the same size change as going from 8/10 to 9/10?
• Are they comparable, e.g. is your 7/10 the same as my 7/10?
• Data availability, particular in low-income countries
• Data interpretation/moral questions: how do we trade-off happiness against life satisfaction? What about increasing quality vs quantity of life?
• These aren’t unique challenges!
• See Samuelsson et al (2023) and Plant (2020) for further discussion.

3. Our predictions about happiness are often wrong

• Boring, obvious claim: we’re often wrong in general and should do research

We’re often wrong (about happiness)

Ord (2013) The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health

3. Our predictions about happiness are often wrong

• Boring general claim: we’re often wrong and should do research
• How do we get happiness wrong?
• Failures of affective forecasting: we’re good at guessing whether something something is good/bad, but not at how good/bad it is or how long it will last (Coleman, 2022)
• One source of bias are focusing illusions (Schkade and Kahneman, 1998)
• Raises the question: have we got the priorities wrong?
• That’s why I started to look into this during my PhD

But, does it matter? HLI investigates

• Thanks to support of EA donors, I was able to set up HLI in 2019
• Our initial plan was to re-assess, in WELLBYs, the ‘canonical’ EA recommendations to see if taking happiness seriously changed the priorities - a proof of concept
• We compared four interventions: cash transfers, treating depression, deworming, bednets
• At the end of 2022 we completed that work and concluded it does.

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GiveWell figures come from their CEA (2022)

Effects over time of cash and therapy

(Author’s own figure)

Summary of cash v therapy results

Deworming: unclear effects

Figure from Dupret et al. (2022)

GiveWell figures come from their CEA (2022), and SWB re-analysis of StrongMinds and AMF (2023). HLI figures from reports on StrongMinds (2021), GiveDirectly (2021), updated in (2022) and (2023), AMF (2023) and deworming (2023).

Accounting for uncertainty

GiveWell figures come from their CEA (2022), and SWB re-analysis of StrongMinds and AMF (2023). HLI figures from reports on StrongMinds (2021), GiveDirectly (2021), updated in (2022) and (2023), AMF (2023) and deworming (2023).

Comparing life-extending (bednets) versus

life-improving (cash, therapy, worms)

Two tricky philosophical issues:

1. What is the correct account of the badness of death?
• Deprivationism (prioritise the youngest)
• Time-relative interest account (prioritise older children over infants)
• Epicureanism (prioritise living well over living long)
2. Where is the neutral point?
• When is existence as good as non-existence? 0/10? 5/10? Somewhere else?

It makes a big difference

Where bednets are more cost-effective than treating depression

Where respondents seem to put the neutral point

Figure from Plant et al. (2022) (annotated)

GiveWell figures come from their CEA (2022), and SWB re-analysis of StrongMinds and AMF (2023). HLI figures from reports on StrongMinds (2021), GiveDirectly (2021), updated in (2022) and (2023), AMF (2023) and deworming (2023).

Wrapping up

• We’ve shown we can and should take happiness seriously: happiness matters; we can measure it; we’re often wrong about it.
• For us, the immediate next steps:
• Search for even more cost-effective interventions and organisations
• Foundational work developing the WELLBY methodology
• Broad global priorities research
• Short-term goal: find new funding opportunities
• Long-term goal: change the paradigm
• This is an exciting moment - and you can help!

References

• GiveWell (2020): GiveWell's 2020 moral weights
• GiveWell (2023): Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds
• GiveWell (2022): Cost-effectiveness analysis of charities
• HLI (2020): The philosophy of wellbeing
• HLI (2022): Can we trust wellbeing surveys? A pilot study of comparability, linearity, and neutrality
• HLI (2022): Affective forecasting
• HLI (2021): Psychotherapy: cost-effectiveness analysis
• HLI (2021): StrongMinds: cost-effectiveness analysis
• HLI (2021): Cash transfers: cost-effectiveness analysis
• HLI (2022): A can of worms: the non-significant effect of deworming on happiness
• HLI (2022): Elephant in the bednet: the importance of philosophy when choosing between extending and improving lives
• Kahneman and Krueger (2006), Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being
• Layard (2022) Can We Be Happier? Pelican Books
• UK Office of National Statistics (2021)
• World Happiness Report (2021; 2022)