All of Jasper Synowski's Comments + Replies

First of all, to Michael and team: Thanks a lot for writing this. I am very happy that this topic is now receiving more attention.

A couple of thoughts on two parts of the manifesto:

1) “The evaluative and experience measures do correlate, suggesting evaluative judgements are, in part if not in whole, determined by how happy people are. “ (OECD 2013, p32-34).

Looking into the source for this claim reveals that the correlation between life satisfaction and positive/negative affect is actually fairly low (r=(-)0.25). Also, this does not tell us much about ... (read more)

3
MichaelPlant
5y
Hello Jasper, thanks for these. On 1), I agree the correlation is only partial, which is why I said that we should use the LS data cautiously, keeping in mind when the two measures come apart. I think it would be worth writing up where they conflict and diverge. In the case of mental health vs poverty, I think moving to affect measures from life satisfaction would would leave the priority ranking unchanged: Dolan and Metcalfe (2012) indicate mental health has a bigger impact on affect than LS, and Kahneman and Deaton (2008) that income has a bigger impact on LS than affect, hence if we ignore the negative externalities of the income transfers on LS, given StrongMinds seems 4x more cost-effective, this would only increase the comparative cost-effectiveness of mental health. I accept this is somewhat complication, and should be written up in greater depth. It's also unfortunate that my claim here is hypothetical rather than based on actually affect measure of poverty alleviate vs mental health treatment. I'm currently talking to a couple of economists in the hope we can actually find this out! 2) You're quite right. I thought about getting into that but reckoned it was too complicated for an already long piece. I agree it would be worth thinking about someone's LS would arc of the course of their whole life. Another worthy research questions!