In 2025 we published research showing some charities are 1,000x more impactful than others in the World Happiness Report. It didn’t go how we expected.
Reflections one year on from our World Happiness Report chapter
We’ve just had World Happiness Day (20 March 2026). A belated happy happiness day to you, in case you missed it.
A year ago, we published a chapter in the World Happiness Report. This was the first global comparison of charity impact, where we assess NGOs by how much wellbeing they create per dollar (we’re keeping this up to date with a living review).
We found something remarkable: some charities appear to have hundreds — even thousands — of times more impact than others.
I assumed that once people saw this, it would quickly change how they give.
It didn’t.
What’s happened instead has been slower, stranger, and, I think, more interesting.
We overestimated the short-term impact of our chapter in the World Happiness Report
When the research came out, I had a vague hope that within a few days I’d have billionaires sliding into my inbox saying: “This is amazing. I can’t believe I’ve never thought about doing good this way. How big a cheque would you like?”.
You think I’m joking, but I really was hoping for this.
In retrospect, this was obviously fanciful. The chapter was long, full of tables and caveats, and the World Happiness Report is not what you read if you have money burning a hole in your pocket.
There was a bump. About a week later, Vox covered the research, and some of the charities in the report told us they saw a surge of donations — in the tens of thousands of dollars in a few weeks. We did a number of media appearances, including Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek’s Lives Well Lived podcast.
But overall, it was a trickle of donations, not a flood.
We underestimated the long-term impact
After that slow start, I lowered my expectations quite a lot. That was also a mistake.
Sometimes you only notice something when it’s not there.
What disappeared, after the chapter came out, was the background scepticism I’d been used to. Once I could point to the World Happiness Report, conversations felt different. The pushback I expected just… didn’t show up.
I assume this was due to some combination of:
- having research published somewhere people had heard of
- doing a genuinely global comparison, rather than comparing a few top charities
- showing there was now a broader ecosystem of wellbeing-based research (including in the UK Treasury), rather than it being just Michael Plant and his merry band of nerds doing something weird
Whatever the exact mechanism, it felt like the work had crossed a credibility threshold.
And once that happened, doors opened.
Over the following months:
- we started advising High Impact Athletes on their ‘Race for Impact’ partnership with Hyrox, which is set to raise millions for mental health charities in 2026
- I was able to invite myself onto Sam Harris’s Making Sense podcast – which probably did cast, which probably raised almost $100k for our recommended charities almost overnight
- we were invited to advise the UK Treasury on updating their wellbeing framework
- a summary of the chapter was translated into French, Italian, and Danish by effective giving organisations
- our recommended charities told us many of their donors were mentioning the World Happiness Report as a reason for giving.
None of this happened immediately. But it did happen.
The lesson, I think, is that research can change what people take seriously — it just takes time.
The pushback on charity cost-effectiveness never came
When the report came out, we were in a slightly odd position. We were both expecting emails from billionaires and in a defensive crouch, expecting a hail of objections.
We thought people might push back on:
- calling this the first global comparison of charity cost-effectiveness
- using a relatively unfamiliar metric (wellbeing-adjusted life years, or WELLBYs)
- finding that the best charities globally are ~150x more cost-effective than typical ones in high-income countries
- the fact we’d published cost-effectiveness estimates for specific charities
- the implication that some large, well-known NGOs are probably not very good value for money
- saying that a big claim made by the effective altruism community – “the best charities are 100x the average” – hadn’t had a direct evidential basis prior to this research.
But very little of this happened.
We did hear complaints from a few charities we’d mentioned – but only three out of the 20-odd. But nothing about there having already been a global comparison of charities, and so on.
This is puzzling, because in a survey we also ran in 2025, we found people typically guessed that the best charities are only about 3x better than average ones. So, presumably, this isn’t a view that people hold strongly.
If anything, people seemed more inclined to object to the implication — that we should try to maximise our impact — than to the empirical claim itself. This was, as Sherlock Holmes would have put it, the dog that didn’t bark.
Since then, we’ve revisited the data and concluded our original estimate (~150x) was probably too conservative. We now say we think the best charities have around 1,000x more impact than typical ones. But, we’ve not heard protests on this either.
Perhaps the objections are en route. But the experience of presenting research and not encountering serious criticism does, over time, increase your confidence in it.
Once you know some charities are 1,000x more effective, you can't unknow it
Imagine your friend tells you they’re trying to get better at golf. The next week, you see them at the driving range. They’re clearly putting in the hours.
But you — a golf wizard — look at their technique and think they’re doing it wrong. So wrong that, with a couple of pointers, they could improve 1,000 times faster.
Or imagine a friend is trying to invest their money to save for a house. You look at their strategy and think that, with a few small changes, their returns could be 1,000 times higher.
In either case, you’d be very tempted to rush over and tell them.
But you probably wouldn’t. Because if you did, they’d think you’d lost the plot.
These scenarios feel unrealistic because, in most areas of life, they are. If someone thoughtful is trying hard to do something, they’re unlikely to be off by orders of magnitude.
But in one of life’s most important domains — how we try to help others — this genuinely does seem to be the case.
Once you take seriously the possibility that some ways of doing good really are 1,000x more effective than others, it becomes very hard not to think about.
But thinking about it is also disorientating. Because you quickly realise that almost no one else is thinking about it, and if you bring it up, you risk sounding rude or deranged.
As a real example, last week there was a fundraiser for a local charity organised by a co-working space. I found myself thinking: “This is great — you want to make a difference — but you’re probably having about 0.1% of the impact you could have had.”
I said nothing. Was that polite? Was it cowardly? I’m not sure.
Important ideas don’t have to ‘go viral’
We’re so used to the concept of viral content, and it’s easy to think that if something doesn’t spread instantly and visibly, then it doesn’t spread at all.
But, what this experience has taught me is that important ideas do get out there.
The weird thing is that you often won’t have any idea that they have until months later.
It takes that time for concepts to percolate in people’s minds and become plausible until they cross a threshold where they are taken seriously enough to change behaviour.
So, for those of us trying to make a difference through effective giving and charity research, I guess that’s all the more reason to keep plugging away – and hope we really are onto something.
If you want to discover our key takeaways from the 2026 World Happiness Report and the full country rankings for this year, read this blog post.