The lack of improvement in developed countries is relatively easy to explain: they had a high starting base and many of the material gains accrued to those at the top—wide distribution of gains is really important when you’re measuring average happiness. We do see rich countries having fairly consistently higher reported happiness levels than poor ones, it’s just that average differences of subjective wellbeing are only a couple of points despite a very large difference in average incomes.
How much of that is genuine hedonic adaptation and how much of it is a culture of not reporting being very unhappy because your neighbours are even poorer is open for debate (it’s probably both, and personally I’d hate people to make too many decisions about my welfare based on a semi arbitrary self assessment on a ten point scale). But it might be a moot point anyway, because if GDP growth mean the country can afford a range of interventions to halve infant mortality, that’s a lot of extra WELLBYS even if average happiness only changes from 5.2 to 5.4 (Granted, “promoting economic growth” may not be the most efficient way to do this, but ultimately the history of economic growth in much of the world is why there are people with enough disposable income to consider donating to other ways of improving happiness...).
I also think that it’s worth drawing a distinction between the direct interventions which aim to boost individual businesses like the One Acre Fund and the indirect interventions aimed at policy reform like supporting think tanks. The former are much more tractable, they have relatively fast positive effects on individuals (relative to others so hedonic adaptation and Easterlin Paradox arguments don’t really apply) and there’s definitely room for more spending
On the other hand, promoting economic reform is an all-or-nothing intervention; either the government acts or it doesn’t. And whilst advocacy has tractable results in other fields: few are as politicised and competitive and thoroughly studied as development economics, so it’s very hard to see where an EA institute or funding would have any impact at the margin. Many plausible economic policy interventions also can be expected have negative impacts on welfare or even growth if actually implemented [in the wrong circumstances]. So I think “many strategies to promote economic growth probably don’t work” is a better critique than macro data on subjective wellbeing
The lack of improvement in developed countries is relatively easy to explain: they had a high starting base and many of the material gains accrued to those at the top—wide distribution of gains is really important when you’re measuring average happiness. We do see rich countries having fairly consistently higher reported happiness levels than poor ones, it’s just that average differences of subjective wellbeing are only a couple of points despite a very large difference in average incomes.
How much of that is genuine hedonic adaptation and how much of it is a culture of not reporting being very unhappy because your neighbours are even poorer is open for debate (it’s probably both, and personally I’d hate people to make too many decisions about my welfare based on a semi arbitrary self assessment on a ten point scale). But it might be a moot point anyway, because if GDP growth mean the country can afford a range of interventions to halve infant mortality, that’s a lot of extra WELLBYS even if average happiness only changes from 5.2 to 5.4 (Granted, “promoting economic growth” may not be the most efficient way to do this, but ultimately the history of economic growth in much of the world is why there are people with enough disposable income to consider donating to other ways of improving happiness...).
I also think that it’s worth drawing a distinction between the direct interventions which aim to boost individual businesses like the One Acre Fund and the indirect interventions aimed at policy reform like supporting think tanks. The former are much more tractable, they have relatively fast positive effects on individuals (relative to others so hedonic adaptation and Easterlin Paradox arguments don’t really apply) and there’s definitely room for more spending
On the other hand, promoting economic reform is an all-or-nothing intervention; either the government acts or it doesn’t. And whilst advocacy has tractable results in other fields: few are as politicised and competitive and thoroughly studied as development economics, so it’s very hard to see where an EA institute or funding would have any impact at the margin. Many plausible economic policy interventions also can be expected have negative impacts on welfare or even growth if actually implemented [in the wrong circumstances]. So I think “many strategies to promote economic growth probably don’t work” is a better critique than macro data on subjective wellbeing