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The guess is based on a recent (unpublished and not sure I can cite) survey that I think did the best job yet at eliciting people’s views on the neutral point in three countries (two LMICs).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.
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.