Our philosophy
Five ideas, one thread: take happiness seriously.
Our philosophy at the Happier Lives Institute, in brief:
- Doing good is goodA small cost to us can mean a large benefit to someone else.
- Doing more good is betterWhere you give matters far more than most people think.
- Happiness mattersHealth and wealth matter because of how they make people feel.
- We can measure happinessAsk people, carefully, and their answers are reliable.
- We should look for, and support, the best ways to increase happinessSome charities create hundreds of times more happiness per dollar than others.
1. Doing good is good
The classic argument for doing good, even when it costs you something, comes from the philosopher Peter Singer (1972). He asks us to imagine we are walking past a shallow pond, when we suddenly see that a child is drowning. We can jump in and save that child, but this will ruin our brand new suit. Are we morally required to save the child at some cost to ourselves?
The reaction most people have is that we must wade in. The principle that appears to explain this reaction is that, as Singer (1972, p. 231) puts it:
“if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable importance, we ought, morally, to do it”.
If Peter Singer provides the “bad cop” case for benevolence, we can also articulate a more inspiring aspect of altruism: it enriches both the giver and the receiver. Imagine you’re at a coffee shop with a friend. You’re about to leave for a date when they open up to you about their struggle with depression – so you risk being late in order to listen. A year later you get a message from the friend saying the conversation changed the direction of their life. What would it mean to hear something like that?
These dilemmas are not merely theoretical. There are people suffering, and whose lives could flourish instead, all around the world.
Even if we can’t help them directly, we could give some shareHow much? Perhaps 1% for middle earners in rich countries and higher amounts for even wealthier people. of our income to charities that can. This may not feel the same as doing it ourselves when the person is right in front of us. But the outcome may be identical: a large benefit to them at a small cost to ourselves. It seems that, if we have a moral duty to rescue the child, we have a moral duty to give something to charity.Singer’s thought experiment of whether we ought to save a drowning child from a shallow pond has since generated a huge literature in philosophy, one we cannot hope to summarise here. Interested readers can find articles on this by going to https://philpapers.org/ (a philosophy database) and searching for “shallow pond” and/or “drowning child”. And if we imagine that our lives would feel fuller from helping a friend tame their suffering, then we should realise it’s well within our power to have that sort of impact on the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, simply by donating a small share of our lifetime income – even if we never get to meet the people we help.
You may not feel wealthy enough to give, but you can probably do more than you expect with what you can contribute (see idea 5). And you may be wealthier than you think. If you earn the median US salary of $42k ($115 a day), you’d be in the top 2% of the global income distributionThe median individual income figure of $42,220 comes from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (2023), based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The income percentile this falls into comes from Gapminder’s (2023) data on global income distribution after converting the yearly income to $115 a day. Extreme poverty is living on $2 a day or less and is experienced by around 10% of the global population.. By $56k ($155 a day) you’re in the top 1% globally.
While there’s a strong ethical case for giving, that’s not the only reason to do so: altruism is also its own reward. Research shows that charitable giving increases the giver’s happiness, especially when the person has a choice on how to give and they understand its impactSee Aknin et al. (2020) and Aknin et al. (2022) for pre-registered reports tackling the topic of the personal wellbeing benefits of beneficence.. Many people are proud to give because it’s part of who they are: they want to be someone that cares for and helps others.
If you are not sure if giving will make you happier, why not try it and find out?
2. Doing more good is better
Buy goodness when it’s cheap.
If you earn a salary of $56k and donate 1% a year for 10 years, you’d give $5,600. Based on current data, that could do any one of these:
| What $5,600 could do | How |
|---|---|
| Double the household income of 5 families in extreme poverty for a year | Cash transfers, such as GiveDirectly’s |
| Treat about 126 people for depression | Group psychotherapy through StrongMinds, at $44.56 a person |
| In expectation, prevent 1 child from dying | About 1,100 anti-malaria bed nets at $5 a net |
| Pay less than 1% of the cost of one sea rescue | A rescue mission by the UK’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution |
| Pay less than 5% of the cost of a guide dog | Providing a guide dog in the UK |
But which one should you choose?
We don’t think the main purpose of giving to charity is to make ourselves happier. Rather, the main purpose is to make a difference to others. So, we should try and make the biggest difference we can, or, at least, a bigger difference. In other words, we think you should be an ‘effective giver’. This may seem common sense. Indeed, in one survey 87% of respondents said they’d reallocate donations to a highly effective charity away from what they previously gave to.
But only a small fraction of people are effective givers. Being an effective giver means donating with heart and head: it means thinking about where your money will make the most difference, not just what you’re passionate about. However, in a survey by Elsey and Moss (2024), out of the 53% of Americans who reported giving to charity last year, less than 2% donated using a charity evaluator, and only 0.04% used one that focused on effective giving (such as the Happier Lives Institute or GiveWell). So what gives?
Research has found that the most common barriers to effective giving are that people:
- don’t know how to give effectively, or whether it matters (information)
- prefer to support causes they are attached to, even if this would have less impact (motivation).
Information about impact
According to recent research, donors predict that, among the charities helping the global poor, the best charities are only 3 times better than the average ones. Of course, if you believe that charities don’t differ much by cost-effectiveness, it doesn’t make sense to invest time looking for a slightly better option. But this is incorrect. As we argue later, charities vary enormously in how good they are compared to each other (up to 1,000 times more cost-effective).
Motivation
It’s understandable that people want to support projects close to their hearts. This is especially if you think we can’t compare charities’ impact, or they’re all about as good.
While we think we should give where it goes furthest, you don’t have to choose between giving to what you’re connected to and what creates the most good.
There’s a simple solution: you can split your donations. Perhaps you give 90% of your yearly donation to effective causes, and put aside 10% for things close to your heart. But certainly, we think some of our giving should be going to the charities that create the most happiness with our money.
And if you’re worried about looking weird – don’t worry. Research finds that donors who gave both to their favourite charity and a highly impactful one are viewed as the most competent and warm.
3. Happiness matters
So you want to do the most good. Great, but what is ‘goodness’ made out of?
Given that we’re the Happier Lives Institute, you may be shocked to hear that we think happiness is what, in the end, matters. We seek it for ourselves. Parents say it’s all they really want for their children. The US Declaration of Independence goes so far as to call the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. People value it in most cases more than anything else (Adler et al., 2017; Benjamin et al., 2012). So, given all that, we think charitable giving should focus on increasing happiness.
A conventional approach, when thinking about impact for charities (or policies), is to focus on poverty or health. However, we don’t believe that reducing poverty or improving health are the ultimate goals. We think health and wealth are important, but as the means to an end, the end being happiness.
Here’s one way to bring this out. If you ask someone, “why do you want to be richer?” they might point to what that money will allow them to do – buy food, a house, go on holiday – or even just say it will make them happier. But if you ask someone, “why do you want to be happier?” you can expect a confused look: happiness is what ultimately matters, so no further justification is needed or possible.
What do we mean by ‘happiness’?
We are using the word ‘happiness’ in the same way people understand it in normal life. Happiness, simply, is feeling good overall: when you experience more joy than suffering.
We use ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ interchangeably.We use ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ as synonyms here and throughout. This is, admittedly, an abuse of terminology, though not one we expect readers to mind. In philosophy, ‘wellbeing’ refers to what makes life ultimately good for us. Philosophers have three accounts of wellbeing. The first is hedonism, on which wellbeing consists in happiness (a positive balance of enjoyment over suffering). The second is desire theories, on which wellbeing consists in having one’s desires satisfied. The third is the objective list, which claims there can be things that make a person’s life go better which are neither pleasurable to nor desired by them. Classic items for the objective list include success, friendship, knowledge, and virtuous behaviour. Hence, wellbeing refers to happiness only on one of these accounts. That said, the debate amongst philosophers is generally about whether happiness is the only thing that matters for our wellbeing. Those holding desire or objective list accounts will tend to say that happiness matters for wellbeing somehow, either because we desire happiness, or because it is one of the goods that matter intrinsically. A view of wellbeing that held that our experiences, including suffering, did not matter in any way would be a peculiar, implausible view of wellbeing. We direct readers to Crisp (2021) for the best introduction to the topic; it is open access.
4. We can measure happiness
How do we measure happiness?
It’s surprisingly easy. You simply ask people how they feel. They can then say how good or bad they, subjectively, are feeling. The question of how good or bad you feel is different from what’s causing those good or bad feelings.
Okay, there is a bit more to it. To get comparable results, you have to ask the questions carefully, in a standardised way. And you have to realise there are quite a few different types of questions you can ask.
The science of asking people about their quality of life is known as subjective wellbeing. The most common types of questions are about:
- (1) How you feel during your life (experience)
- (2) How you assess life as a whole (evaluative)
- (3) A wider set of things that make life go well such as meaning, purpose or worthwhileness (eudaimonic)These measures intend to capture a wider set of things that make life go well. By the nature of their greater breadth they aren’t as easily summarised. A representative measure is the Flourishing index. In addition to asking about sense of satisfaction and feelings of happiness it also inquires about meaning, virtue, close relationships and mental and physical health. Eudaimonic wellbeing corresponds naturally to objective list theories of wellbeing..
Try it yourself
How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?
They’re typically framed on a 0 to 10 scale, bounded by the extremes of the state in question. As an example, see the image below from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS asks various questions to about 300,000 people each year. Note that even though it asks four different questions, the pattern of responses is still very similar!
People seem to find these questions easy to answer, suggesting they find these questions intuitive and unproblematic. The median response time for subjective wellbeing questions is less than 30 seconds (ONS, 2011). And SWB questions have low non-response rates (Rässler and Riphahn, 2006), and in three of the largest SWB datasets we see a 10 to 100 times higher response rate for wellbeing than income questions (OECD, 2013). In other words, people find it very easy to say how happy they are. This shouldn’t be a surprise: we spend lots of time thinking and feeling about how our lives are going.
Who cares about happiness, anyway?
The study of happiness and subjective wellbeing data is relatively new: the first large, nationally representative surveys started in the 1970s. However, academic interest has boomed in recent years as this graph shows. The field has grown from a curiosity to a maturing field with its own journals and conferences.
Beyond the ivory tower
Both the UK and New Zealand Treasuries have guidelines on using happiness data in principle, to assess whether different policies are good value for money. Academics, like the LSE value for money group, have also used this data, in practice, to evaluate specific policies.
In the past two decades, 37 countries have started measuring the subjective wellbeing of their citizens.
5. We should look for, and support, the best ways to increase happiness
Let’s pull these ideas together. Doing good is good. One way we can do good is by giving to charity. Doing more good is better. Happiness matters and we can measure it.
So, the natural conclusion is that we should donate something to the charities that create the most happiness with our money. But what are those charities? Well, the Happier Lives Institute was set up in 2019 to find out. We’re the first and only organisation that looks for the most cost-effective, evidence-based ways globally to improve happiness, and we’ve been beavering away at the area ever since we started.
What we’ve found is this. Some charities are enormously more impactful than others in how much happiness they create with your money. It turns out that we can make a much bigger difference to others, without a significant extra cost to ourselves. This opportunity isn’t merely hypothetical.
Research to work out how to spend money to get the most happiness is new. Evaluations of policy and charity cost-effectiveness in terms of happiness only started in the last few years. The first ones we know of were in Plant (2019), followed by the work published in 2021 by Frijters and Krekel, State of Life, and here at the Happier Lives Institute.
Happiness per dollar: putting the WELLBY to work
We and others like the LSE value for money group, Pro Bono Economics, and State of Life quantify impact in ‘wellbeing-adjusted life years’, or WELLBYsSee Brazier and Tsuchiya (2015), Layard and Oparina (2021)..
One WELLBY is equivalent to a 1-point increase on a 0-10 self-reported wellbeing scale (typically life satisfaction) for 1 person for 1 year. If your wellbeing went from 5/10 to 6/10 for 2 years, that would be an increase of 2 WELLBYs.
At its simplest, a charity evaluation might look at the total amount an organisation spends to provide a service, how many people it provides that service to, and then estimate the average benefit per person reached. So, if a charity spent $1 million, reached 50,000 people, and they each got a 1 WELLBY benefit, that’s 50,000 WELLBYs for $1 million, a cost-effectiveness of $1 million / 50,000 = $20 per WELLBY.
The WELLBYWhat a wellbeing-adjusted life year is, how to calculate one, and how charities and policies compare.Read more Our methodologyHow we find, evaluate and compare charities.Read moreSome things create way more happiness per dollar
In our chapter in the World Happiness Report (published March 2025), we undertook the first ever global comparison of how much happiness different charities produce with your money. We brought together all the pre-existing work (by ourselves and others) and tried to fill some obvious gaps. We’ve extended this to a living review of WELLBY cost-effectiveness analyses that is regularly updated.
What we found is that some charities are considerably more impactful than others – hundreds or even thousands of times more impactful. To make life easier for you, we curate a list of recommended charities, where you can find more information and analysis on them.
Scroll sideways to see the whole chart.
There are huge differences in cost-effectiveness for creating happiness with your money, whether we’re thinking about private resources or public ones. So, by picking carefully, we can have vastly more impact on happiness for the same cost.
Here’s one way to bring this home. If a friend told you they gave $1,000,000 to a charity, you’d probably be extremely impressed – that could be their life’s savings. Our conclusion is it’s possible to have that sort of impact for a fraction of the cost: giving $1,000 to the best charities may do just as much good as $1,000,000 to a randomly selected one.
Another way is to think about buying things for ourselves: we are typically delighted when there’s a sale and we discover we can get 20% more for our money. But when it comes to buying happiness for other people, we can potentially get 100 to 1,000 times for our money by going with the best options. It would be like a store running a secret campaign where if you spend $10 on a phone charger you get given a complimentary $1,000 MacBook.
The difference you can make to people’s happiness globally is perhaps far greater than you ever thought – if you follow the evidence and support the best charities.
We often want to do something to help other people and make the world better, but feel like there’s nothing we can do. We hope we’ve shown that’s not true. We can do a great deal. It’s up to each of us to decide whether we take action.
So, you want to contribute to a happier world?
If you share our philosophy, here are the ways you can help. And if you feel moved to give, share your motivation and our research with others: if you encourage one friend to give as much as you do, you’ve doubled your impact.