Unexpectedly daring suggestion: Increase happiness rather than merely health and riches
What would you do if I offered you a total of five right now and told you to use it whatever you thought would most benefit people?
With that amount of money, 1,000 bed nets that prevent malaria can be purchased, saving the life of one child on average. Alternatively, it can increase five impoverished households’ incomes by $1,000 apiece. Alternatively, it can cover the cost of a few months of group treatment for thirty individuals suffering from depression, which may have long-term benefits.
Nobody can be certain, and that is a dilemma that affects everyone, from common citizens looking to donate a few dollars to governments with millions to spend on public policy. It can be difficult to determine which is more beneficial — saving one life, alleviating poverty for a small number of people, or treating mental illness for dozens of people — and it can be unethical to even pose the question. However, if we want our money to go as far as possible toward helping people, we cannot avoid it.
The amount of money in an account or the total amount of deaths in a community are two examples of things that economists prefer to quantify objectively. Thus, they have concentrated on gauging wealth and health during the past century. The policies that, for example, save the greatest number of lives or significantly boost GDP are considered to be the finest for society.
Currently, an increasing number of experts contend that the ultimate goal of assisting people should be to make them happier, not simply wealthier or healthier, and that asking people directly is the best approach to find out how happy they are. This group contends that rather than relying just on objective measures like GDP, we should pay much more attention to people’s subjective well-being, or how content they are with their life, based on the things that they claim are most important to them. We can learn things from subjective well-being that objective metrics cannot.
It’s a shift in perspective that’s gaining traction in both the governmental and nonprofit sectors, and it’s beginning to challenge accepted beliefs about the most effective means of doing good.
Here’s one striking illustration from the charitable sector. The goal of the Happier Lives Institute, a research center dedicated to discovering evidence-based strategies for enhancing happiness, was to determine if providing people with cash or therapy would have a greater positive impact on their well-being. Thus, HLI conducted a direct comparison between GiveDirectly, a company that provides financial transfers, and StrongMinds, a company that offers group treatment for individuals with depression, using data from about 80 research and 140,000 participants. Both provide services to extremely underprivileged Africans.
Remarkably, HLI discovered that the therapy improved self-reported well-being nine times more cheaply than the money. Some evaluators disagree with this finding, pointing out that StrongMinds is less cost-effective than HLI’s findings suggest. They take issue, for instance, with HLI’s analysis’s assumption that raising someone’s depression score by a certain amount is equivalent to raising their overall life satisfaction by the same amount. However, the results have put empirically driven philanthropy’s funding allocation practices to the test.
A lot is changing in the field of policies as well. UN Secretary-General António Guterres pushed for countries to track progress beyond GDP in May on a global scale. From Finland and Iceland to Scotland and Wales, governments have already started to place a higher priority on well-being when formulating policies.
The first nation to use well-being as the guiding concept of its national budget was New Zealand in 2019. All new spending has to support certain well-being objectives, like improving the mental health of the people, according to the budget. This led to quick action, including the nation’s largest-ever investment in domestic and sexual abuse services — more than $200 million — for survivors of these crimes.
Globally, a renewed emphasis on enhancing subjective well-being is leading to a paradigm change in the way we attempt to do good. However, the strategy is fraught with debate. Says some that it’s overkill. Some claim it isn’t going far enough.
How the subjective well-being fluctuated between being hot and not at all
If you were to ask me, “What is life’s ultimate purpose?” and I replied, “Health” or “Wealth,” you would think that a little strange. We cherish those things not for their own sake, but rather because they frequently increase our level of happiness or life satisfaction. The most important thing to us is our well-being.
This viewpoint, which has long been prevalent among philosophers, peaked in acceptance during the 18th century. Early proponents of utilitarianism, such as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, contended that happiness ought to serve as the sole yardstick by which we evaluate the relative worth of other commodities, such as riches and health. With the intention of promoting happiness for the populace, Adam Smith studied economic theories. Furthermore, according to Thomas Jefferson, “the first and only object of good government is the life and happiness of the people.”
However, there was a significant reversal in the 1920s when behaviorism gained popularity among economists like Lionel Robbins and psychologists like Ivan Pavlov (yep, the dog man). The behaviorist school of thought maintained that it is useless to attempt to comprehend people’s subjective experiences as we are unable to know what they are thinking or feeling on the inside.
Michael Plant, the director of the Happier Lives Institute, clarified, “Basically, economists wanted to be more scientific.” They believed that an idea can only be considered scientific if it can be measured objectively. Emotions are not science since they cannot be measured objectively.
Economists shifted their focus from subjective notions like happiness to objective measures of well-being, such as GDP. Even though the concept’s creator, Simon Kuznets, cautioned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,” GDP emerged as the standard method for gauging well-being in the postwar era.
Metrics used to evaluate the merits of various health interventions were also welcomed by economists. The quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is one of them. A year of exceptionally good health is equivalent to one QALY. Therefore, a policy is judged to be better the more QALYs it secures for a population.
However, a few significant discoveries starting in the 1970s caused the intellectual balance to shift back toward subjective well-being.
Economists first began to reconsider their presumptions regarding human nature. They have long held the belief that people act in a “rational” manner, only making decisions that will allow them to achieve their goals. However, behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky contended in the 1970s that because we are not very good at anticipating what will make us happy, each of us is actually a pretty irrational mess, rife with cognitive biases, and frequently behaves in ways that don’t maximize our happiness. This means that you have to ask them how happy they are and try to figure out what makes them happy rather than assuming that you can tell by looking at their behavior alone.
Second, as economist Richard Easterlin demonstrated in 1974, wealth does not always translate into happiness. As an illustration, consider the fact that although the US has had significant economic growth after World War II, Americans’ standard of living has not changed. This came to be known as the Easterlin Paradox, and while it is still up for debate, it played a significant role in making people understand that measuring subjective well-being rather than merely GDP is crucial.
Because of this, some nations started gathering demographic census data in the 1970s. “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” was a typical survey question. The data trickled in over fifty years.
Subjective well-being begins to reappear
Not much was spoken about the well-being data until around 2009, with the exception of Bhutan, whose king declared in the 1970s that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.” Then came the world financial crisis.
In the midst of all the pain, economists came to the realization that they knew very little about how people coped with crises and what kinds of policies might help reduce their detrimental effects on wellbeing. National happiness thus started to be discussed in policy meetings and university courses. Economists Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi were commissioned by France to do a research on the subject; their findings indicated that politicians had become too focused on GDP and had become blind to other facets of societal well-being.
The first well-being report on member nations was produced by the OECD in 2011, while the UN started publishing its yearly report on world happiness in 2012. Additionally, more advanced methods of gathering data on well-being were used by individual nations.
In order to prevent respondents from being primed in ways that could skew their happiness levels, they first carefully constructed the surveys. It is not appropriate, for instance, to question someone about their political views before inquiring about their level of life pleasure. Additionally, surveys were better at controlling for reporting disparities related to culture, such as whether or not it’s acceptable to voice complaints about one’s lot in life.
Sen also highlighted the problem with surveys: a person’s self-reported well-being could easily adjust to whatever social context they have become accustomed to, meaning that it might not accurately represent actual deprivations in that context — particularly ones that have persisted long enough to become accepted as the norm.
Carol Graham, a senior scientist at Gallup and a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, said, “Just because somebody poor in Guatemala says they’re happy at a daily level, that doesn’t mean we should say they’re all fine, let’s not worry about them.” Graham has written extensively about how to measure subjective well-being.
Early surveys had a significant issue with this, partly due to the fact that they only included one broad indicator of well-being. They did not distinguish between an emotive, short-term measure such as stress or contentment and a long-term measure such as life satisfaction. Therefore, it was impossible for researchers to distinguish between a fleeting happiness and long-lasting life pleasure.
The UK government now collects two types of data on well-being: more objective data on factors known to contribute to societal well-being, such as wealth and health, unemployment and crime rates, time spent in nature, and volunteer work, as well as subjective data based on the questions from the ONS4 survey mentioned above. The 52 total subjective and objective measures are used by the government to direct public spending.
Other countries are likewise basing their policy decisions on a combination of objective and subjective well-being metrics. For example, New Zealand’s government started tracking progress using 61 well-being metrics, which track factors like loneliness and faith in government institutions, after passing its ground-breaking well-being budget. Although it went above GDP, it did not eliminate it. The rise of our living standards is not guaranteed by GDP alone, as former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern observed.
Persistent mistrust regarding subjective well-being statistics — and the approaches being taken by experts
Many people continue to have doubts about attempts to gauge subjective well-being. That makes sense because the name contains the term “subjective.”
Consider Elie Hassenfeld, the CEO and co-founder of GiveWell, a charity evaluator. He is doubtful that questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” can accurately measure subjective well-being because he is accustomed to measures like QALYs.
“When you pose this question, what precisely are you measuring? In the same way that I know what it means for someone to not have a broken limb, I don’t really know what it means for someone to say, “I’m a 6 out of 10,” he said to me.
He said, “And I wouldn’t know what it means for someone else to the extent that I could know what it means for someone else.” To put it another way, does someone’s six match someone else’s six? Additional study is necessary to address this open question.
Hassenfeld further wonders if a subjective well-being index captures the essence of what makes life meaningful and meaningful to us. “My grandfather came over and worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, owning a diner for so many years. He survived the Holocaust,” the man remarked. Furthermore, I don’t believe he would have responded favorably to a subjective well-being question in any of those years. But there’s significance there — he saved up enough cash to pay for my mom’s and aunt’s college education.
What Hassenfeld is trying to say is that we don’t need to be joyful right now in order to believe that life is worthwhile. Our hope that we will be able to truly accomplish our goals and the fulfillment we get from working toward them in the future are what contribute to our happiness, not the things we can do in the here and now.
Graham considers this criticism to be serious. “People in certain impoverished nations often score higher than one might expect, and part of that is because they believe that things can improve and have hope for progress,” the expert stated. “On the other hand, people in wealthy nations who witness significant population declines in comparison to their counterparts tend to lose hope for the future.”
Graham contends that hope must be included in measures of well-being in his most recent book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us From Despair. One quite significant reader that she has already persuaded is the UK government, which recently increased the number of survey questions in their collection. Graham told me, “I’m really happy that hope is now a measure.”
According to Plant of the Happier Lives Institute, your level of happiness may be influenced by the meaning and hope you have in your life. However, he pointed out that people’s responses to surveys about happiness most likely already reflect that. People can incorporate whatever important to them into their evaluations, which is one of the subjective approach’s virtues. Thus, your level of life meaning may have an impact on it.
Is subjective well-being the sole metric to be used?
Plant says that the evidence on well-being is now strong enough that we should be confident enough to go beyond than countries like New Zealand have.
Plant informed me that a true well-being budget would compare items using well-being units, something the New Zealand government does not do. According to him, the number of well-being units that each policy generates should be used to evaluate it, and the winning intervention should be funded by legislators.
Numerous metrics are currently used by New Zealand and other countries to evaluate the results of policies; some measure subjective well-being directly, while others collect objective well-being-related information. But Plant argues that when one outcome is measured in units of well-being and the other in dollars, how is it possible for anyone to compare two approaches precisely? Apples to oranges, that is.
Plant contends that instead, we ought to evaluate the benefits of many options in terms of a single “currency,” or more precisely, the number of Wellbys, or years of adjusted life expectancy, that each produces. On a scale of 0 to 10, producing a Wellby corresponds to a one-point increase in life satisfaction over a one-year period. Some economists, such as those who create the World Happiness Report, are beginning to accept this measure. Analyzing each strategy according to the number of Wellbys it generates would enable us to make fair comparisons between them.
Plant told me, “I’m pretty bullish about just using well-being as the [single] measure.”
However, no government has completely abandoned more traditional criteria in favor of sticking with Wellbys thus far. Graham believes it would be a bad idea to do that. “The Wellby is a practical metric. “A lot of my coworkers support it,” she remarked. She insists, however, that it shouldn’t be the exclusive metric. She clarified, saying that what’s most helpful is “when you find gaps between objective and subjective measures, and then you can ask what’s driving that.” She said she had no interest in replacing GDP or any other objective indicator.
Consider the paradox of unhappy growth in nations experiencing rapid economic expansion, such as China and India, where life satisfaction declines and suicide rates climb during these times, according to Graham. “Subjective well-being metrics reflect people’s experiences and feelings about life, while GDP tracks the rate of growth. People dislike instability, cultural shifts, and rising inequality that come with rapid growth. Over time, these things normally level off, although unhappy times tend to occur during times of change, particularly sudden change.
Graham also pointed out that “GDP levels and unemployment rates suggest prosperity and stability” in the US. However, they conceal incredibly high levels of desperation, which include an increase in mortality from depressive deaths, and inequality, which is one of the reasons why Americans are growing more and more miserable. “That story cannot be told by GDP alone.”
Conversely, subjective well-being by itself might not provide the whole picture. Sometimes people in low-income countries report being happier than their income levels would indicate, but this could be because they have optimism for better times ahead. We shouldn’t allow it to hide the reality that they’ve been compelled to live in poverty as a result of widespread injustice. Graham stated, “You still need to look at their disease rate, life expectancy, and so on.” “I believe you require both types of measures because of this. They catch things that we would miss otherwise.
Similarly, Hassenfeld hesitated when I asked him if he could see GiveWell eventually doing away with objective metrics entirely, such as QALYs, and relying solely on subjective well-being to compare cost-effectiveness amongst charities. He remarked, “I mean, never say never.” “However, I don’t believe we would ultimately bet everything on this metric.”
Which should come first: enhancing lives or saving them? And who makes the final decision?
An easy way to make decisions about what to finance is to directly evaluate the relative benefits of various initiatives in a single currency. But the good life cannot be reduced to a single, universal mathematical formula, regardless of the unit of measurement you choose — GDP, QALYs, Wellbys, or something else entirely. It will always rely on the philosophical presumptions you hold.
One philosophical dilemma you’ll have to answer if you have to pick between prolonging and improving lives is: Is it worse for an adult to die or a small child? There are three primary perspectives in Western philosophy regarding this.
Deprivationism holds that it is preferable to save the youngest children since, should they pass away now, they will be deprived of their prime years.
The time-relative interest school of thought holds that it is preferable to preserve an older person since they are more interested in becoming that older self because they have the psychological capacity to consider that future self.
Furthermore, Epicureanism holds that there is no real harm done to the deceased (after all, how can anything be harmful for someone who doesn’t exist?). Therefore, it seems sense to prioritize living well over living long.
Your stance on any of these philosophical issues will have a significant impact on how cost-effective the programs or charity you’re assessing are.
Plant and colleagues demonstrated this by comparing the number of Wellbys generated by three charitable organizations: the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), GiveDirectly, and StrongMinds. It found out that preventing malaria and saving lives was marginally more economical than StrongMinds — that is, if you subscribed to the philosophical school of thought that supports life preservation the most. In the event that an alternative assumption, such as deprivationism, was adopted, AMF’s cost-effectiveness plummeted to 12 times that of StrongMinds, or around the same as GiveDirectly.
It’s important to remember that there is no one philosophical viewpoint that is inherently correct; rather, it all boils down to your own beliefs and values. For this reason, the problem cannot be solved mathematically.
There’s also a growing consensus that it would be paternalistic to do anything else than give the people who benefit from charity or policy decisions the power to express their ideas and opinions. Governments such as those in Wales and New Zealand have asked their citizens directly what is most important to them. The world of charity is also beginning to catch on.
GiveWell questioned incredibly impoverished people in Ghana and Kenya a few years ago about their “moral weights.” How do they balance preserving life with enhancing it (by lowering poverty, for example)? The answers were overwhelmingly in favor of saving lives, particularly those of the young.
While asking recipients about their preferences was a wonderful idea, there were two regrettable aspects of the way it was carried out. First of all, because the questions demanded a thorough comprehension of probability, they were written in a convoluted manner that would have confounded responders. Secondly, GiveWell incorporated the opinions of its employees and donors into its decision-making process, rather than solely relying on the expressed preferences of the participants in the survey.
They made the decision to prioritize [the points of view] based on whatever response, in their opinion, made the most sense initially. It’s round, Plant remarked. “I’m tempted to take the opposing stance, which is to argue that this is extremely complex, uncomfortable to consider, and individuals will choose differently.”
It must seem like a frustrating place to end up. However, that is accurate. Although we now have more advanced techniques, subjective well-being is still difficult to measure. The moral discomfort that arises from considering the concerns this kind of measuring poses is real. Most significantly, there is always a component of these problems that cannot be answered just by math as they involve values, which are, well, subjective.
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