We’ve had several decades of research on subjective well-being around the world. The big takeaway is that most people are (surprisingly) happy, even in poor countries, and that almost everybody experiences net positive utility.
The real selection bias is that isolated, alienated, single, childless, careerist, consumerist Westerners imagine that everybody else shares their depression & anxiety.
A note on the “positive utility” bit. I am very uncertain about this. We don’t really know where on subjective wellbeing scales people construe wellbeing to go from positive to negative. My best bet is around 2.5 on a 0 to 10 scale. This would indicate that ~18% of people in SSA or South Asia have lives with negative wellbeing if what we care about is life satisfaction (debatable). For the world, this means 11%, which is similar to McAskill’s guess of 10% in WWOTF.
And insofar as happiness is separate from life satisfaction. It’s very rare for a country, on average, to report being more unhappy than happy.
This is interesting! What is your guess of 2.5/10 based on? I guess this fuzziness makes me feel innately sceptical about such scales—I think one can get well-calibrated at tracking mood or wellbeing with numbers, but I think if you just ask a person who hasn’t done this, I wouldn’t expect Person A’s 5 and Person B’s 5 to be the same.
The guess is based on a recent (unpublished and not sure I can cite) survey that I think did the best job yet at eliciting people’s views on the neutral point in three countries (two LMICs).
I agree it’s a big ask to get people to use the exact same scales. But I find it reassuring that populations who we wouldn’t be surprised as having the best and worst lives tend to rate themselves as having about the best and worst lives that a 0 to 10 scale allows (Afghanis at ~2/10 and Finns at ~8/10.
That’s not to dismiss the concern. I think it’s plausible that there are systematic differences in scale use (non-systematic differences would wash out statistically). Still, I think people self-reporting about their wellbeing is informative enough to find and fix the issues rather than give up.
For those somehow interested in this nerdy aside, for further reading see Kaiser & Oswald (2022) on whether subjective scales behave how we’d expect (they do), Plant (2020) on the comparability of subjective scales, and Kaiser & Vendrik (2022) on how threatened subjective scales are to divergences from the linearity assumption (not terribly).
Full disclosure: I’m a researcher at the Happier Lives Institute, which does cause prioritization research using subjective well-being data, so it’s probably not surprising I’m defending the use of this type of data.
The research I’ve seen has done nothing convincing to control for a) selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners?), b) social desirability bias (being happy is attractive—of course we want to announce it!), or c) the hopeless task of communicating positive valence in a standardised way to different global cultures.
selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners
In the west I think being willing to spend time to fill in a survey in return for $1.00 is probably a negative selection effect. Happy people are too busy being awesome.
We’ve had several decades of research on subjective well-being around the world. The big takeaway is that most people are (surprisingly) happy, even in poor countries, and that almost everybody experiences net positive utility.
The real selection bias is that isolated, alienated, single, childless, careerist, consumerist Westerners imagine that everybody else shares their depression & anxiety.
A note on the “positive utility” bit. I am very uncertain about this. We don’t really know where on subjective wellbeing scales people construe wellbeing to go from positive to negative. My best bet is around 2.5 on a 0 to 10 scale. This would indicate that ~18% of people in SSA or South Asia have lives with negative wellbeing if what we care about is life satisfaction (debatable). For the world, this means 11%, which is similar to McAskill’s guess of 10% in WWOTF.
And insofar as happiness is separate from life satisfaction. It’s very rare for a country, on average, to report being more unhappy than happy.
This is interesting! What is your guess of 2.5/10 based on? I guess this fuzziness makes me feel innately sceptical about such scales—I think one can get well-calibrated at tracking mood or wellbeing with numbers, but I think if you just ask a person who hasn’t done this, I wouldn’t expect Person A’s 5 and Person B’s 5 to be the same.
The guess is based on a recent (unpublished and not sure I can cite) survey that I think did the best job yet at eliciting people’s views on the neutral point in three countries (two LMICs).
I agree it’s a big ask to get people to use the exact same scales. But I find it reassuring that populations who we wouldn’t be surprised as having the best and worst lives tend to rate themselves as having about the best and worst lives that a 0 to 10 scale allows (Afghanis at ~2/10 and Finns at ~8/10.
That’s not to dismiss the concern. I think it’s plausible that there are systematic differences in scale use (non-systematic differences would wash out statistically). Still, I think people self-reporting about their wellbeing is informative enough to find and fix the issues rather than give up.
For those somehow interested in this nerdy aside, for further reading see Kaiser & Oswald (2022) on whether subjective scales behave how we’d expect (they do), Plant (2020) on the comparability of subjective scales, and Kaiser & Vendrik (2022) on how threatened subjective scales are to divergences from the linearity assumption (not terribly).
Full disclosure: I’m a researcher at the Happier Lives Institute, which does cause prioritization research using subjective well-being data, so it’s probably not surprising I’m defending the use of this type of data.
The research I’ve seen has done nothing convincing to control for a) selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners?), b) social desirability bias (being happy is attractive—of course we want to announce it!), or c) the hopeless task of communicating positive valence in a standardised way to different global cultures.
In the west I think being willing to spend time to fill in a survey in return for $1.00 is probably a negative selection effect. Happy people are too busy being awesome.
What is “net positive utility”? What is the zero point?