The difference in subjective well-being is not as high as we might intuitively think.
(anecdotally: my grandparents were born in poverty and they say they had happy childhoods)
The average resident of a low-income country rated their satisfaction as 4.3 using a subjective 1-10 scale, while the average was 6.7 among residents of G8 countries
Doing a naive calculation: 6.7 / 4.3 = 1.56 (+56%).
The difference in the cost of saving a live between a rich and a poor country is 10x-1000x.
It would probably be good to take this into account, but I don’t think it would change the outcomes that much.
“Doing a naive calculation: 6.7 / 4.3 = 1.56 (+56%).”
Perhaps I rate things differently to most survey respondents, but for me anything less than 5⁄10 is net suffering and not worth living for its own sake.
Consider the difference between “saving” 10 people who will live 1⁄10 lives (maybe, people being tortured in a north Korean jail) and one person who will love a 10⁄10 life
I think you raise an important point: people legitimately have different opinions on what the scale should mean, and there might also be cultural factors that skew how people perceive they should respond on aggregate. If there is such a thing as a true hedonic scale for how people actually feel about their life that can be compared from person to person, survey data isn’t an ideal proxy for it.
But I don’t think the average person responding assumes the valence symmetry that you probably assume. Most people do want to go on living and so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the bottom half of the scale which goes all the way up to the “best possible life” isn’t supposed to represent different degrees of unbearable torture. I imagine most of the large fraction of the world’s population who awarded themselves a 4⁄10 on that scale would be utterly horrified by the idea that this might imply their life wasn’t worth living.
The difference in subjective well-being is not as high as we might intuitively think.
(anecdotally: my grandparents were born in poverty and they say they had happy childhoods)
Doing a naive calculation: 6.7 / 4.3 = 1.56 (+56%).
The difference in the cost of saving a live between a rich and a poor country is 10x-1000x.
It would probably be good to take this into account, but I don’t think it would change the outcomes that much.
“Doing a naive calculation: 6.7 / 4.3 = 1.56 (+56%).”
Perhaps I rate things differently to most survey respondents, but for me anything less than 5⁄10 is net suffering and not worth living for its own sake.
Consider the difference between “saving” 10 people who will live 1⁄10 lives (maybe, people being tortured in a north Korean jail) and one person who will love a 10⁄10 life
I think you raise an important point: people legitimately have different opinions on what the scale should mean, and there might also be cultural factors that skew how people perceive they should respond on aggregate. If there is such a thing as a true hedonic scale for how people actually feel about their life that can be compared from person to person, survey data isn’t an ideal proxy for it.
But I don’t think the average person responding assumes the valence symmetry that you probably assume. Most people do want to go on living and so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the bottom half of the scale which goes all the way up to the “best possible life” isn’t supposed to represent different degrees of unbearable torture. I imagine most of the large fraction of the world’s population who awarded themselves a 4⁄10 on that scale would be utterly horrified by the idea that this might imply their life wasn’t worth living.
Very good point. Yeah, it seems like a 1⁄10 life has to be net negative. But a 4⁄10 life I’m not sure it’s net negative.