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This is: 2020 Annual Review from the Happier Lives Institute, published by ClareDonaldson, MichaelPlant on the AI Alignment Forum.
This (cross-)post is an update from the Happier Lives Institute (HLI) and contains our 2020 Annual Review. In it, we describe and explain the research we conducted in 2020; comment on our research evaluation procedure, the outcomes of our work (that we are aware of), and some lessons learned; lay out our research priorities and plans for 2021, and our longer-term vision; describe ways you can support us on our mission.
This review is about 5,000 words in length. We have provided an executive summary and note some readers may want to check the contents sidebar, then go straight to specific sections, rather than read the whole thing in order.
Executive Summary
HLI searches for the best ways to measure and increase global well-being; we believe that subjective well-being (SWB) scores (self-rated happiness and life satisfaction) are both a highly promising and under-utilised tool for this purpose. 2020 was HLI's first full year of research and operations as an organisation - it was an opportunity to focus on addressing the most important questions on our research agenda, and to develop our capacities as an organisation that conducts careful and action-relevant research.
The ‘backbone’ of our work is assessing the value of different outcomes in terms of ‘Wellbeing-Adjusted Life-Years’ or ‘WELLBYs’, an approach recently pioneered in economics that we are applying and developing. In our post on ‘moral weights’ we explain the method and use it to compare, for the first time, the relative values of two actions that are particularly relevant for the effective altruism community: doubling household consumption for a year and averting the death of an under-5, both in low-income contexts.
We worked on the theoretical underpinnings of the WELLBY framework by producing: a working paper on the nature of well-being; another on the comparability of subjective scales; and a report on the validity of SWB (to be published soon).
We also applied the WELLBY methodology to evaluating interventions and programmes. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on the impact of cash transfers on SWB, and started work on other interventions - cataract surgery, lay-delivered psychotherapy and positive education. Further, we reviewed two cause areas - pain and mental health (coming soon) - as a way to scan the horizon for potentially highly cost-effective interventions. We also continued to work on our mental health programme evaluation project, aiming to identify impactful donation opportunities in global mental health.
We mainly saw 2020 as a year to establish and develop our research capacity, but we are pleased that various academics and organisations in the effective altruism community are already using our work. Founders Pledge, for example, used the results from our ‘moral weights’ post in their internal prioritisation of charities.
Our main focus for 2021 is to continue applying the WELLBY framework to various ‘micro’-interventions. We will continue to investigate whether using SWB indicates new priorities for the effective altruism community. Further, we hope to further demonstrate that WELLBYs enable comparisons to be made between a wide range of interventions, and search for new, potentially highly cost-effective interventions.
As we demonstrated in our moral weights post last year, this analysis is highly sensitive to various moral assumptions, such as the views taken about what well-being consists in, the badness of death, or population ethics. We plan to present the ‘results’ for various viewpoints, so readers can make their own moral judgements.
We also plan to continue our foundational work on measuring well-being, for example, by investigating how to comp...
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