Research Agenda 2021-2022
Our vision and mission
Let us state the obvious: happiness is important. Even if it is not the sole thing of importance, it is still important. Not only do we seek happiness for ourselves, but we hope others experience it too. In fact, many of us devote considerable time and effort to reducing misery and creating joy for the world at large. Last, but not necessarily least, we want our governments to keep us safe and create the conditions that allow us all to thrive.
These statements of the obvious lead us to ask a question whose answer is not at all obvious: if we want to improve global well-being and, further, do so by as much as possible, what should we do? The world faces many challenges. Resources are scarce. We cannot solve every problem, at least not immediately. Therefore, if we want to have the biggest impact on others' lives, we must prioritise.
Few actors (individuals or institutions) give serious and explicit consideration to how to use their resources to help others by as much as possible. One reason, among many, is that prioritisation is an off-puttingly hard task that requires us to tangle with a knot of complex theoretical and empirical questions. Examples include: What is well-being? How should it be measured? What increases well-being? How should we weigh the interests of those who are alive today against those that may come after us?
Attempts to engage in global priorities research, in order to cut through this knot, are nascent. They are associated, in large part, with the effective altruism movement, which exhorts actors to do the most good they can with their spare resources. The effective altruism project requires little motivation: helping others is good; helping others by more is better. The movement has produced and pushed forward novel and exciting ideas about how to do good. One example, among many, is that if citizens of wealthy countries want to help others through their charitable giving, they can usually do a lot more good by supporting organisations that provide highly cost-effective, and evidence-based, health and economic interventions to those in absolute poverty, rather than if they donate domestically.
Quite independently of the growth of effective altruism, the last two decades has seen an explosion of research in economics and psychology into subjective well-being (SWB), self-reported measures of happiness, life satisfaction, and meaning. Efforts to collect large-scale datasets of self-rated quality of life only started around sixty years ago. Interest began to grow when it became clear that large increases in economic prosperity over time were associated with modest, if any, improvements in subjective well-being—the so-called ‘Easterlin Paradox.’ More generally, it’s become clear that there are systematic differences between what we expect will increase our happiness, and what does in reality.
Subjective well-being measures are now being taken seriously by citizens and policymakers as a complement—if not an alternative—both to gross domestic product as a measure of overall social progress and a means of assessing the effectiveness of individual government policies. They hold the promise of allowing us to measure, with scientific rigour, what makes people’s lives go well, after which we can work out what should be done to most impactfully help those lives go better. The use of self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, and meaning, represents a substantial stride forward over our current best methods for working out what helps others. The status quo approach is to use some combination of crude and objective approximations for well-being, such as wealth or health, as well as decision-makers’ intuitive judgements of what makes life go well for others.
While these two lines of thought—prioritising the most effective ways to help others and working out what helps people by using individuals’ own assessment of their subjective well-being—have a natural and obvious affinity, little work has been done so far to fuse them together. The effective altruism community has not (yet) attempted to evaluate its top recommendations using subjective well-being; subjective well-being researchers have, in just the last few years, begun to evaluate what should be done, but have primarily focussed on policy making in high-income countries. All told, efforts to identify the most cost-effective ways to make people happier from an impartial, global perspective have barely begun.
The Happier Lives Institute (HLI) was founded in 2019 to help address this gap: to undertake and promote rigorous global priorities research using the lens of subjective well-being. We expect some combination of academic and independent research is the optimal mix for this task, with specific outputs depending on factors such as the topic and intended audience. Our firm belief is that a better understanding of how to measure and increase well-being is not only achievable, but can be successfully communicated to decision-makers, public and private, who will then take actions that increase it. The result should be a substantial, wide-ranging, and long-lasting improvement in the experience of life, one that will not be achieved without deliberate effort.
Given all this, our vision and mission are as follows:
Vision: a world where everyone lives their happiest life.
Mission: to conduct and promote clear, useful, and rigorous research into how best to measure and increase global well-being.
Research agenda and context
Our mission is broad and draws on research across multiple academic disciplines, primarily economics, philosophy, and psychology, but also others, such as neuroscience and medicine. The purpose of this document is two-fold.
First, to set out the wider research context that is relevant to this mission: below we specify three research areas. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this project, we expect interested readers and researchers familiar with one field, say philosophy, to be unfamiliar with the topics and existing literature in another, say economics; issues which may appear new and intractable in one discipline may be considered ‘old hat’ in another and it is important to know this. Therefore, in an effort to bridge such gaps, this document aims to give the reader a lay of the intellectual landscape. Of course, we do not have the capacity to address all these questions in each research area, nor is further work on each of them all equally important.
The second, and more important, purpose is to articulate, within each research area, where additional research seems more (or less) useful, and therefore what our research agenda is for the next one to two years.For clarity, we can formalise the counterfactual cost-effectiveness of research as follows:
((value per unit of resource counterfactually reallocated) * (expected total of resources reallocated due to the research))/total cost to produce research.
In theory, this neatly generates a cost-effectiveness figure for each research item. In practice, supplying reasonable numbers for the equation is hard to do.
We hope this information is useful for fostering coordination with researchers interested in this area; if you are one of those researchers, we strongly encourage you to contact us.
In what follows, we set out, in some depth, the three research areas that comprise our research context, and our research agenda within each area. Before doing this, we provide a summary of what these are. In the summary, we also note our recent work, so readers can see how our research has developed. Our main current focus, and where the majority of our effort will go, is area 2.3: using subjective well-being scores to compare the cost-effectiveness of highly-regarded health and development interventions used in low-income countries.
Summary of the research areas and priorities, and our past work
Research Area 1: Foundational Research into Measuring Well-being
Specifically, this concerns issues related to determining the value of outcomes in terms of subjective well-being metrics.
Research priorities:
- Examining how best to convert between different SWB, as well as other, measures (1.2.1)
- Investigating how to compare existence to non-existence using subjective well-being scales: determining the ‘neutral-point’ (1.3.1)
Recent prior work:
- Understanding the nature and plausibility of life satisfaction theories of well-being (1.1)
- Investigating the comparability of subjective self-reports, e.g. of happiness (1.2)
Research Area 2: Applied Research to Identify and Evaluate the Most Cost-Effective Ways to Increase Well-Being
Research priorities:
- Estimating, in terms of SWB, the impact of potentially highly-effective interventions, including: psychotherapy for common mental disorders; cataract surgery for blindness; deworming tablets to improve lifelong earnings (2.3)
- Setting out how different moral assumptions—about what well-being is, the badness of death, and population ethics—alter those cost-effectiveness estimates and may alter the priorities (2.3; 1.3).
Recent prior work:
- A meta-analytic review of the impact of cash transfers, in low income contexts, on SWB (2.3)
- Using SWB to estimate the moral weights of averting deaths and reducing poverty (2.3)
- A problem area report into alleviating pain (2.3.2)
Research Area 3: Understanding the Wider Global Priorities Context
Research priorities:
- Exploratory research into the plausibility and implications of the longtermist paradigm, the idea that the primary determinant of the value of our actions today is how those actions influence the very long-run future (3.1).