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From Preprints

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+Looking at this type of data, Plant said, “I don’t have much time for feelings-measurement skepticism. I think the counterarguments there just aren’t very strong.” +

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+Even skeptics like Hassenfeld do believe that subjective well-being data is getting at something real. In a recent podcast interview, he said, “I think the pro of subjective well-being measures is that it’s one more angle to use to look at the effectiveness of a program. It seems to me it’s an important one, and I would like us to take it into consideration.” This warming toward subjective well-being is a big deal, given that his organization, GiveWell, influences how over $500 million is spent on charity each year. +

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+Should subjective well-being be the only measure? +

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+According to Plant, well-being data is now robust enough that we should feel emboldened to go further than nations like New Zealand have gone. +

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+“To be a full-blown well-being budget, you would actually compare things in terms of units of well-being, which the New Zealand government isn’t doing,” Plant told me. He believes each policy should be evaluated according to how many well-being units it produces, and policymakers should invest in the intervention that comes out on top. +

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+Right now, New Zealand and other nations are using dozens of measures to assess policy outcomes, some that capture subjective well-being directly and others that capture objective facts that relate to well-being. But how is anyone supposed to compare two policies with precision, Plant reasons, when one outcome is in units of well-being and the other is in dollars? That’s apples to oranges. +

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+Instead, Plant argues we should compare how much good different things do in a single “currency” — specifically, how many well-being-adjusted life years, or Wellbys, they produce. Producing one Wellby means increasing life satisfaction by one point (on the 0-10 life satisfaction scale) for one year. It’s a metric that some economists, including those behind the World Happiness Report, are coming to embrace. If we were to evaluate every policy in terms of how many Wellbys it produces, that would allow for direct apples-to-apples comparisons. +

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+“I’m pretty bullish about just using well-being as the [single] measure,” Plant told me. +

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+So far, however, no government has fully thrown away more conventional metrics in favor of using only Wellbys. Graham thinks doing that would be a bad idea. “The Wellby is a reasonable measure. Many of my colleagues are in favor of it,” she said. But she’s adamant that it should not be the only measure. “I’m not interested in replacing GDP or all the other objective measures,” she explained, because what’s most useful is “when you find gaps between objective and subjective measures, and then you can ask what’s driving that.” +

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+“Take the paradox of unhappy growth in rapidly growing countries like China and India, where life satisfaction falls and suicides rise at periods of rapid growth,” Graham said. “GDP captures the growth rate, and subjective well-being measures capture how people are experiencing and feeling about life. Rapid growth brings uncertainty, cultural change, and rises in inequality, all things people do not like. These things usually even out over time but periods of change, especially rapid change, tend to be unhappy ones.” +

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+And in the US, Graham noted, “GDP levels and unemployment rates suggest prosperity and stability.” But they mask extremely high levels of inequality — one of the reasons why Americans are becoming more miserable — and high levels of despair, including rising mortality due to deaths of despair. “GDP alone cannot tell that story.” +

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+On the flip side, subjective well-being alone also may not tell the full story. People in poor countries sometimes score higher on happiness than their income levels would predict, but their happiness could stem from the hope that things will improve. We shouldn’t let it occlude the fact that they’ve been forced into situations of deprivation because of global injustice. “You still need to look at their life expectancy, their disease rate, and so on,” Graham said. “That’s why I think you need both kinds of measures. They capture what we wouldn’t otherwise notice.” +

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+Likewise, when I asked Hassenfeld if he could imagine GiveWell ever completely doing away with objective measures like QALYs and only using subjective well-being to compare cost-effectiveness across charities, he demurred. “I mean, never say never,” he said. “But I think it’s unlikely that we would ultimately go all-in on this metric.” +

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+Should we prioritize saving lives or improving them? And who gets to decide? +

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+When you’re deciding what to fund, it’s definitely helpful if you can directly compare how much good different things do in a single currency. But whether the currency you use is GDP or QALYs or Wellbys or something else, the good life isn’t reducible to a universal mathematical equation. It’ll always depend on your philosophical assumptions. +

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+If you have to choose between extending and improving lives, one philosophical question you’ll have to face is this: Is it worse for a little kid to die, or an adult? In Western philosophy, there are three main views one could take on this. +

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+According to deprivationism, it’s best to save the youngest kids, because they stand to be deprived of the most good years if they die now. +

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+According to the time-relative interest school of thought, it’s best to save someone older because they’ve got the psychological capacity to think about their future self, so they have more interest in getting to become that older self. +

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+And according to Epicureanism, death isn’t actually bad for the person who dies (how can something be bad for them if they don’t exist?). So it makes sense to give more weight to living well, not living long. +

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+Which of these philosophical views you subscribe to can dramatically alter the cost-effectiveness of the charities or policies you’re evaluating. +

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+Plant’s team showed this by comparing how much good three charities do — StrongMinds, GiveDirectly, and the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) — in terms of how many Wellbys each produces. It turned out saving lives by preventing malaria was a bit more cost-effective than StrongMinds, but only if you held the philosophical view most favorable to saving lives. If you embraced a different assumption, like deprivationism, AMF’s cost-effectiveness nosedived to 12 times less cost-effective than StrongMinds, or around the same as GiveDirectly. +

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+The crucial point here is that because no one philosophical view is objectively right — this comes down to your own personal values and opinions — the issue can’t just be mathematized away. +

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+And there’s a growing consensus that those on the receiving end of charity or policy decisions should be the ones whose values and opinions carry the day; anything else would be paternalistic. Governments like those of Wales and New Zealand have directly sought the input of their populations to ask what matters most to them. And the charity world is catching on, too. +

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+A few years ago, GiveWell asked extremely poor people in Ghana and Kenya about their “moral weights.” How do they weigh saving lives versus improving lives (say, by reducing poverty)? The respondents came out very strongly in favor of saving lives, especially young lives. +

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+It was a good impulse to survey recipients about their preferences, but there were two unfortunate things about how it was done. First, the questions were formulated in a complicated way that could have confused respondents, since they required a solid understanding of probabilities. And second, instead of just basing its spending decisions on the stated preferences of the respondents, GiveWell also polled its own staff and donors for their personal views and folded those into its decision-making. +

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+“They decided to weight [the views] on the basis of the answer they thought was most sensible in the first place. That’s circular,” Plant said. “I’m inclined to go the other way — to say, this is really complicated, it’s unpleasant to think about, and people will make different choices.” +

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+That probably feels like an annoying place to end up. But it’s true. We’ve now got more sophisticated methods for measuring subjective well-being, but it’s still complicated. It feels morally uncomfortable to think about the questions this type of measurement raises. And, most importantly, these questions are not answerable through math alone — some of this will always be about values, and those are, well, subjective. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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