[Note, I can’t speak for Michael, but I work with Michael at the Happier Lives Institute.]
Without taking a stance on the broader thesis of this report, I think the evidence of hedonic adaptation is easy to overstate. Latent state-trait models show that changes in circumstances have detectable changes on well-being at least 10 years later, especially for affective measures. Winning the lottery also has long-term effects of well-being (though more so on life satisfaction), contra the Brickman study that played a role in popularizing hedonic adaptation.
Fair enough, hedonic adaptation in its stronger form, the claim that people will quickly return to a set point of wellbeing, has holes. But I don’t think the strong form was what was referenced in the text. I also see it as pretty uncontroversial that many things we could buy as a country would only give us fleeting enjoyment—which is, I think, Michael’s point.
The claim I think most consistent with the paradox and existing evidence is that people do not fully adapt to higher levels of income, AND they also don’t fully adapt to their neighbors getting richer (see Kaiser, 2020). So really, what we care about isn’t adaptation per se but whether the benefits of income gains for everyone last. And maybe if everyone else gets more prosperous at the same time by similar amounts (unlike in most lottery studies or cash transfer RCTs), those benefits don’t last. How long benefits and harms last is a complex topic that I think the literature doesn’t study enough. But even if we had an excellent model of individual adaptation to change, I’m not sure how well that’d predict what happens when everyone’s circumstances change.
“Also in this context, the research by my own organisation, the Happier Lives Institute, finds that cash transfers to the very poor — those on the global poverty line — actually do have a small but significant effect on subjective wellbeing, one that continues over several years (McGuire, Kaiser, Bach-Mortensen, 2022).”
I would suggest also citing the evidence that this result may be an artifact of publication bias.
In our meta-analysis, we did check for publication bias using methods that existed at the time of the analysis—and found nothing major. The Bartos et al. (2022) comment utilises a novel method with unclear merit that reaches a puzzling finding: cash transfers to impoverished people don’t make them happier. I’m not sure what to make of it. If they’re right, I wouldn’t be surprised if most social science meta-analyses suffered the same fate.
[Note, I can’t speak for Michael, but I work with Michael at the Happier Lives Institute.]
Fair enough, hedonic adaptation in its stronger form, the claim that people will quickly return to a set point of wellbeing, has holes. But I don’t think the strong form was what was referenced in the text. I also see it as pretty uncontroversial that many things we could buy as a country would only give us fleeting enjoyment—which is, I think, Michael’s point.
The claim I think most consistent with the paradox and existing evidence is that people do not fully adapt to higher levels of income, AND they also don’t fully adapt to their neighbors getting richer (see Kaiser, 2020). So really, what we care about isn’t adaptation per se but whether the benefits of income gains for everyone last. And maybe if everyone else gets more prosperous at the same time by similar amounts (unlike in most lottery studies or cash transfer RCTs), those benefits don’t last. How long benefits and harms last is a complex topic that I think the literature doesn’t study enough. But even if we had an excellent model of individual adaptation to change, I’m not sure how well that’d predict what happens when everyone’s circumstances change.
In our meta-analysis, we did check for publication bias using methods that existed at the time of the analysis—and found nothing major. The Bartos et al. (2022) comment utilises a novel method with unclear merit that reaches a puzzling finding: cash transfers to impoverished people don’t make them happier. I’m not sure what to make of it. If they’re right, I wouldn’t be surprised if most social science meta-analyses suffered the same fate.