I don’t think this makes sense, no, sorry. The HLI meta-analysis results are from cash transfers, which make a few individuals happier over time, not looking at the average of an entire society. It’s well-studied that people care about their relative income, not just their absolute income. So we should be particularly worried about extrapolating from what works for individuals to what works for societies—especially where we think the benefit to the individual could be from comparisons. Hence, I think it is not justified to start from the HLI numbers.
IIRC, in the HLI cash transfer meta-analysis, we found that cash transfers had no effect on those in nearby villages (‘across-village’ effect). In other words, there was, on average, no relative income effect. I was puzzled by it and I find it hard to believe—our CEA does, however, despite my disbelief, assume there are no negative spillovers from cash transfers. I was puzzled by this because there’s such consistent evidence of a relative income effect in rich countries. I also thought it was weird the effect from cash transfers was zero. To put this in context, imagine a bunch of people down the road from you get given $40,000 for each household. Would you expect that to have no effect on you? It wouldn’t make you envious? Or, it wouldn’t make you excited that this might happen to you? I’d expect the effect of income to be (almost) wholly relative in rich countries, but not that there was no relative income effect in the very poor. However, there wasn’t loads of across-village data in the HLI meta-analysis, so I didn’t update much. It would be good to have a bigger and better analysis of the relative income effect in very poor contexts.
I don’t think this makes sense, no, sorry. The HLI meta-analysis results are from cash transfers, which make a few individuals happier over time, not looking at the average of an entire society. It’s well-studied that people care about their relative income, not just their absolute income. So we should be particularly worried about extrapolating from what works for individuals to what works for societies—especially where we think the benefit to the individual could be from comparisons. Hence, I think it is not justified to start from the HLI numbers.
IIRC, in the HLI cash transfer meta-analysis, we found that cash transfers had no effect on those in nearby villages (‘across-village’ effect). In other words, there was, on average, no relative income effect. I was puzzled by it and I find it hard to believe—our CEA does, however, despite my disbelief, assume there are no negative spillovers from cash transfers. I was puzzled by this because there’s such consistent evidence of a relative income effect in rich countries. I also thought it was weird the effect from cash transfers was zero. To put this in context, imagine a bunch of people down the road from you get given $40,000 for each household. Would you expect that to have no effect on you? It wouldn’t make you envious? Or, it wouldn’t make you excited that this might happen to you? I’d expect the effect of income to be (almost) wholly relative in rich countries, but not that there was no relative income effect in the very poor. However, there wasn’t loads of across-village data in the HLI meta-analysis, so I didn’t update much. It would be good to have a bigger and better analysis of the relative income effect in very poor contexts.