One essay that I thought about a lot growing up is The Quality of Life. It argues that the metrics of wellbeing that we optimize for are basically meaningless, the dreams of bureaucrats rather than of people.
Why isn’t the most important financial threshold in the inner lives of many, rich or poor, the subjective notion of fuck-you money, the first thing to study? Why isn’t there a major UN study tracking what people consider fuck-you money? Why aren’t Nobel-winning behavioral economists designing clever experiments to tease out how we think about this quantity? It is, after all, our main subjective measure of how not-free we perceive ourselves to be.
Nobody, other than bureaucrats who fund research and economists, asks the question “how much income is needed to be happy?” We already know that talking about happiness without talking about what trade-offs we are making to pursue it is meaningless. The rest of us real people ask the question “how much wealth is required to be free of scripts that dictate what trade-offs you are allowed to make?”
It does not really matter if you generalize beyond income to various in-kind quality-of-life elements like a clean environment or access to healthcare. If you are not measuring prevailing levels of freedom you are measuring nothing relevant. Until people start answering $0 to the fuck-you-money question across the planet, you can be sure that they do not perceive themselves to be free enough to properly pursue quality of life.
This essay definitely had an impact on me, highlighting the agency benefits of cash transfers and pushing me towards a large recurring GiveDirectly donation. Re-reading it today, it feels terribly confusing and difficult to grok. But it feels difficult to grok in a way that suggests it’s not a confused or incoherent or obviously wrong take. It’s just pointing out the water we swim in, which is a valuable thing for more EAs to keep in mind.
One essay that I thought about a lot growing up is The Quality of Life. It argues that the metrics of wellbeing that we optimize for are basically meaningless, the dreams of bureaucrats rather than of people.
This essay definitely had an impact on me, highlighting the agency benefits of cash transfers and pushing me towards a large recurring GiveDirectly donation. Re-reading it today, it feels terribly confusing and difficult to grok. But it feels difficult to grok in a way that suggests it’s not a confused or incoherent or obviously wrong take. It’s just pointing out the water we swim in, which is a valuable thing for more EAs to keep in mind.