TL;DR: hunter-gatherers would probably rate themselves at a similar level to us on subjective wellbeing surveys, therefore they're silly.
Big claims from wellbeing surveys
The Happier Lives Institute (HLI) has recently made big claims based on WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years) interpreted from wellbeing/life-satisfaction surveys.
Their report on StrongMinds (a charity which offers therapy to people in developing countries to improve their mental health) estimates StrongMinds as being between 0.75× to 12×as effective as The Against Malaria Foundation. Great news if true!
Their analyses suggest some surprising findings, such as that the grief from the death of a child equates to a loss of 7.26 WELLBYs [Appendix 2 of The Elephant In The Bednet] while an individual treated in the StrongMinds program can expect a gain of approx. 3 to 20 WELLBYs!!! [Figure 2, Don’t just give well, give WELLBYs: HLI’s 2022 charity recommendation]
HLI have just produced a study supporting the use of wellbeing surveys in charity evaluation: Can we trust wellbeing surveys? A pilot study of comparability, linearity, and neutrality.
Something doesn't sit right with me about the use of subjective wellbeing surveys for serious charity analysis. I will try to articulate it with this reductio ad absurdum argument:
Are you happier than the Sentinelese?
Consider the Sentinelese people of the North Sentinel islands, who are one of the few remaining uncontacted (mostly) peoples in the world, and who probably live with a similar level of technology and culture as the average human did 20,000 years ago.
I ask myself: If asked to rate their life satisfaction in a survey, would the Sentinelese people rate their life satisfaction as significantly lower than mine?
If NO (my personal suspicion):
- Using WELLBYs, the implication is that technological and cultural development over the last 20,000 years has largely been a mistake for wellbeing and that a spontaneous return to pre-agricultural society would be better for global wellbeing. This is an established worldview, but one I think should be discarded because of its drastic implications.
If YES:
- Is the difference in WELLBYs significant enough to justify the hundreds of trillions of dollars and hours of effort and suffering (and negative WELLBYs) that have gone (and continue to go) into technological, economic and cultural development to give us our modern lives?
- This seems unlikely to me given the magnitude of resources and negative WELLBYs that have been spent on development efforts
My conclusion is that wellbeing surveys shouldn't be used to compare wellbeing on a global scale, because doing so leads to absurd conclusions. Instead, objective measures of health, wealth, education, and access to amenities should be used at this scale, with wellbeing surveys possibly useful when comparing similar groups.
I think that it may be helpful to unpack the nature of perceived happiness and wellbeing a little bit more than this post does. I think the idea of hedonic adaptation is pretty well known—most of us have probably heard of the hedonic treadmill (see Brickmann & Campbell, 1971). The work on hedonic adaptation points to the fact that perceived happiness and wellbeing are relative constructs that largely depend on reference points which are invoked. To oversimplify things a little bit, if everyone around me is bad off, I may already be happy if I am only slightly better of than them. At the same time, I might be unhappy if I am pretty good off but everyone around me is much better off. As such, it is entirely reasonable to expect that hunter-gatherers when asked about their life feel quite good and happy about it as long as they don't feel like everyone else around them is much better off.
The conclusion of this post should not be that perceived happiness and wellbeing should not be used to compare the effects of interventions but that they simply measure something different than "objective measures". They aim to measure how people feel about their life in general as they compare it to others, not how they score on a particular metric in isolation. Whether you prefer one or the other approach largely depends on your perspective on what is valuable in life. Some people may find making progress on metrics that they find particularly valuable is the way to go and others prefer a more self-organizing perspective where the affected people themselves are more involved in determining what is valuable.
In sum, this post seems a little bit confused on what the WELLBY debate is about. I can recommend the cited article to get some idea on why something like a WELLBY approach may be interesting to consider even if one doesn't like it at first glance.
Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–305). Academic Press. https://archive.org/details/adaptationlevelt0000unse_x7d9/page/287/mode/2up
To me it seems like you have a wrong premise. A wellbeing focused perspective is explicitly highlighting the fact that Sentinelese and the modern Londoners may have similar levels of wellbeing. That's the point! This perspective aims to get you thinking about what is really valuable in life and what the grounds for your own beliefs about what is important are.
You seem to have a very strong opinion that something like technological progress is intrinsically valuable. Living in a more technically advanced society is "inherently better" and, thus, every... (read more)