EA - Taking happiness seriously: Can we? Should we? Would it matter if we did? A debate by MichaelPlant

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Taking happiness seriously: Can we? Should we? Would it matter if we did? A debate, published by MichaelPlant on June 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Mark Fabian and I recently had a debate at EA Global London: 2023. In it, we discuss taking happiness seriously: Can we? Should we? Would it matter if we did? We both really enjoyed doing this. We don't think EAs think enough about well-being or debate enough in general, and we hoped our discussion was a way to bring out some of the issues. We only regret we could get stuck deeper into the topic (and I only regret that couldn't get the clicker working...).(You can see the slides for this talk here and here.)Taking happiness seriously (Happier Lives Institute)Let me start you with a real-life moral dilemma. For £1000 you could double the annual income of one household living in absolute poverty. You could provide 250 bed nets, which would save in expectation 1/6 of a child's life or 1/6 of your child. You could treat 10 women for depression by providing a 10-week course of group therapy, or you could do over 1000 Children. And of course, what we want to do is to do the most good. But the question is, how do we know that we're doing that?Two paths to measuring impactI want to point out there are really two parts to measuring impact. The first is what I've called the objective indicators approach, which I think is just sort of the default approach that society has taken for the last 100 or so years. To think about impact, we look at objective measures of well-being, such as health and wealth, and then we make intuitive trade-offs between them. An example of this is GDP. That's our default measure of social progress. More economic activity is good.However, the objective indicative approach seems to miss something. It seems to miss people's feelings, their happiness, and how their lives are going for them. Where is that in the picture? An alternative, then, is the subjective well-being approach where we use self-reported measures of well-being such as happiness and life satisfaction. The typical case would be 0 to 10. How satisfied are you with your life nowadays?And so my proposal in this session is that we should take happiness seriously. We should set the priorities using the evidence on subjective well-being trying to work out.You might wonder, is this a new radical idea? Well, the first steam train, the Coalbrookdale Locomotive, was built in 1802. And the idea that we should take happiness seriously is as old as that. Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1809 said, “The care of human life and happiness is the first no legitimate object of good government.” Jeremy Bentham, writing in 1776 said, “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.” And looking further back, you have Aristotle who said, “Happiness and meaning and the purpose of life is the whole end and aim of human existence." This idea is old. It's older than the steam trade. It has real lineage to it.What’s new? DataBut what is new is that now we have data. It was only after the Second World War there started to be large-scale surveys of households on how their lives were going. Gallup was founded in 1946. It was in 1972 that there are two countries started having nationally represented examples of subjective well-being. The US General Social Survey, the Gross National Happiness Index in Bhutan. And in 2005, there's the first global survey on well-being. There's the Gallup World Poll, which runs in 160 countries and surveys 98% of the world's population. In 2011, the UK starts to collect and measure data on well-being. The UK is kind of weirdly enough a world leader in measuring well-being. You’ll hear more of that later. In 2012, there was the first edition of the World Happiness Report. People know th...