I’m concerned that there seems to be some elision of cardinality and comparability here.
Couldn’t it be possible that
everyone’s stated happiness levels in fact are comparable in an ordinal sense, so we know that someone who states “5/10” is happier than someone who states “4/10″
but
these scales are not cardinal so we cannot know if
“a movement from 1-2 is the same increase in happiness as an increase in 4-5 (or 9-10)” …
(nor any other known correspondence … such as ‘log self reported happiness changes are equivalent’
?
This is important because if we want to compare policies that tend to increment happiness from different starting points, we need to know “is moving from 1-3 as valuable as moving from 4-6” etc.
I’m concerned that there seems to be some elision of cardinality and comparability here.
Couldn’t it be possible that
everyone’s stated happiness levels in fact are comparable in an ordinal sense, so we know that someone who states “5/10” is happier than someone who states “4/10″
but
these scales are not cardinal so we cannot know if
“a movement from 1-2 is the same increase in happiness as an increase in 4-5 (or 9-10)” …
(nor any other known correspondence … such as ‘log self reported happiness changes are equivalent’
?
This is important because if we want to compare policies that tend to increment happiness from different starting points, we need to know “is moving from 1-3 as valuable as moving from 4-6” etc.