Research Agenda 2023-2024

The idea that the quality of a society should be judged by the happiness of its people is an old idea, stretching back at least to the Enlightenment, if not Aristotle. What’s new is that now we have data: in the last few decades, researchers have developed valid and reliable ways to measure wellbeing through self-reports, and amassed a treasure trove of evidence. For the first time in human history, we can work out the best ways to improve the human condition in a scientifically rigorous way.

But what are these ways? That’s what the Happier Lives Institute was set up to find out. We are the first organisation to combine the principles of effective altruism (that is, we should do the most good we can with the available resources) with the idea of taking happiness seriously (by prioritising using happiness data to figure out what does the most good).

We conduct foundational research on the nature and measurement of wellbeing, as well as applied research where we synthesise the existing data on subjective wellbeing to discover which interventions and organisations are the most cost-effective. Our research draws on and further develops previous work in the fields of philosophy, economics, and psychology. Ultimately, we measure impact in WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years), a method born in academia and now used by, for example, the UK Treasury, that we are developing and deploying.

We aim to have impact by:

1. Identifying the most cost-effective ways to make lives happier, then communicating these to philanthropists and policymakers.
2. More broadly, engineering a paradigm shift towards a wellbeing approach among decision-makers: vast sums of resources are aimed at improving people’s lives, and if those can be spent even a bit better, that would do enormous good. But we think they can be spent substantially better.

This is our third research agenda, which sets out our research goals through the end of 2024 (see our first and second agendas). When we started in 2019, we wanted to know if taking happiness seriously might change the priorities for donors seeking to do the most good. That is, if we evaluated – for the first time – different interventions in terms of their impact on subjective wellbeing, would we uncover different top charities?

To that end, our first major line of applied research explored the impact of mental health interventions on wellbeing. We found that psychotherapy was a promising – yet overlooked – intervention in low-income countries. We compared the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to other well-evidenced interventions, including cash transfers, antimalarial bednets, and deworming pills. From this work, we’ve found that psychotherapy is several times more cost-effective than cash transfers or deworming for improving happiness. We concluded that comparing psychotherapy to antimalarial bednets, a life-saving intervention, depends heavily on various philosophical assumptions: treating depression ranges from about as good as to several times better than antimalarial bednets, depending on the assumptions. This has led us – and others¹– to conclude that evaluating interventions in terms of their impact on subjective wellbeing is an important approach to setting global priorities.

Along the way, we’ve also pursued foundational research to better understand the nature and measurement of wellbeing. This has included evaluating philosophical views of wellbeing and life satisfaction, pioneering methods to conduct cost-effectiveness analyses using wellbeing, and conducting novel research on wellbeing measurement. We strive for maximum rigour in our work, so this fundamental research is key to ensuring that we are doing the most good possible by aiming for the right outcomes.

As a small team, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in these four years, but there is still much to do. Looking ahead, we plan to:

• Assess a wider range of interventions and charities to find more opportunities for donors to improve the wellbeing of existing people.
• Conduct further theoretical work: although we have established the feasibility of the subjective wellbeing approach in general, we will continue to refine our approach as we push the boundaries of research on the nature and measurement of wellbeing.

Read on for specific details about what we have planned.