Hello LondonGal (sorry, I don’t know your real name). I’m glad that, after your recent scepticism, you looked further into subjective wellbeing data and think it can be useful. You’ve written a lot and I won’t respond to it in detail.
I think the most important points to make are (1) there is a lot more research that you suggest and (2) it didn’t just start around COVID.
You are right that, if you search for “subjective wellbeing”, not much comes up (I get 706 results on PubMed). However, that’s because the trend among researchers to refer to “subjective wellbeing” rather than “subjective well-being”, ie with a hyphen, is very recent (as, AFAIK, is unrelated to COVID). Searching for “subjective well-being” yields, by comparison, 4,806 results.
I’m not an expert in academic databases, so I don’t know how comprehensive PubMed is of all research, but I’m guessing it’s a subset. FWIW, Ed Diener et al. in a 2018 article on subjective wellbeing states that there were “170,000 articles and books published on the topic in the past 15 years” although I haven’t looked into his numbers.
You might be interested in this article in the recent World Happiness Report which looks at various trends related to happiness, including academic interest, and find the fraction of articles on the topic has been trending up since the 80s: note the steady linear increase on the logarithmic y-axis.
Hence, as you suspected, many of the topics you raise here are reasonably quite well-trodden in the literature.
If you’re interested in looking further at the pros and cons of the WELLBY, the easiest thing for me to point you to is HLI’s To WELLBY Or Not To WELLBY report and references therein. You may also find this reading list useful.
In terms of the state of the literature, if you’ll forgive further laziness and self-promotion, I’d suggest my EAG London talk. The short answer is that ‘we’ (ie happiness researchers) know quite a bit about the nature and measurement of wellbeing and its causes and correlates, but relatively little about what the best ways are to increase it; work on WELLBY cost-effectiveness is barely older than COVID.
Hi MichaelPlant, [Edit: Jk—I don’t get the comment about my username/real name, I saw a mix being used on the forum, but I might have missed some etiquette—would you like my real name? Just ‘hello’ is fine if you’d prefer—no offence taken.]
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond! I was hoping to get more insight from people within EA who might be able to fill me in on some of the more philosophical/economic aspects as I’m aware these aren’t my areas of expertise (it was very much a ‘paper’ EA-hat I was trying on!) - I felt furthering my online searches wasn’t as helpful as getting more insight into the underlying concepts from experts and hoped my post would at least show I was interested in hearing more. Thanks for the links as well—I did come across a few of them in my approach to this work, but will take your advice these are worth looking at again if you think I’ve not appraised them properly—you definitely know best in this regard!
Also, apologies—you might be right in saying I didn’t structure a paragraph very well if it has left anyone with the impression I was suggesting subjective wellbeing research has only been in existance since COVID. My own graph disproves this, for starters! I think it’s this paragraph from the first section I’ve not phrased well (italics added).
From my quick literature review, the interest in wellbeing as a research area is a relatively recent phenomenon. There has been rapid growth in papers being published about subjective wellbeing from around 2020 onwards. I’d guess this is due to (1) the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions making this a hugely important topic for public health officials and politicians, and (2) the recent interest in using wellbeing as an outcome when evaluating the effect of a broad range of policy decisions, which has subsequently driven interest in quantifying ‘wellbeing’ for use in cost-impact analyses.
I was trying to emphasise the relatively steep growth in interest over the last few years due to questions about cost-effectiveness (e.g. WELLBY), which as you mention is ‘barely older than COVID’. I don’t actually think we disagree here so I’ll need to think how to rephrase it to avoid conflating this with SWB research as a whole—to be clear, I don’t think your reading of this was unfair and I can phrase it better.
I’m not too sure I was ever arguing I was doing an exhaustive literature review (?) - I felt I stated a few times this was non-scientific, should have no weight, etc. My goal was just trying to get a quick overview as more of a sense-check, but didn’t want to limit my reading to the first x number of pages in case that was biased—I chose very limited terms and stated them so it would be clear how I did the search, which allowed you to double-check I wasn’t pulling anything dishonest (impressive that 7 papers have been added since I did the search last week—clearly there is a lot of interest!). If I set out to do a completely exhaustive review, you’re right to suggest the terms you did (I would add “SWB” as well), but I’m not sure that would be a reasonable expectation of something like an “abstract-only” non-academic review from a visitor with a full-time job when that returns thousands of results...
I’m sorry if it appeared that selecting limited search terms was an attempt to ‘downplay’ SWB research as a field—I mentioned it was my time constraints that were the problem but it’s easy to miss in a long post. I felt I was trying to explain throughout how interesting/useful I found this piece of work, spoke about how it changed my mind in the later sections and identified blind-spots I wasn’t aware I had. I don’t think I was critical of ‘subjective wellbeing’ research as whole—I tried to lay out my very specific concerns very clearly (e.g. in “life satisfaction” being used as an isolated measure for subjective wellbeing) but my overall conclusion was in support of finding a way to incorporate more of the diverse value these researchers were adding to the understanding of how we think about wellbeing estimates e.g. other measures, combining measures, qualitiative research, etc. I was approaching the problem with an open mind and left the exercise positively so I’m sorry to see it might have appeared mal-intentioned.
I hope this doesn’t seem like nit-picking, and it’s not intended as criticism of you personally as you similarly were upfront about not being familiar with PubMed; it can be tricky to get to grips with, but it might be helpful to share a quick point.
For the search that you linked that returned 150k results—if you go to “Advanced” under the search bar and click through you can see this searched “All Fields” and expanded the terms you used as they weren’t in quotation marks (it’s a quirk of the database that perhaps isn’t true for others!). This was the actual search run from your link—for all I know this was your intent, but in case it wasn’t (just judging this as a possibility based on the hyperlink):
With quotations to limit results to those specific terms (I’m not sure if that was your intent) and using Title/Abstract (PubMed also doesn’t really like hyphens as you see above but I used “subjective well” to try and work around this) you get more like 20-30k results. You can use MeSH terms (key words instead), other variations, etc to push it up or down (I tried a few variations to work with ‘well-being’ hence this being #8). And as you rightly say, you can always add more terms to include more papers.
Again, my aim isn’t to down-play SWB research at all with this point (I like the field!), it’s just in case it’s helpful as I use PubMed all the time and it’s one of many databases which contains mental health literature. Whether 2k or 150k+ results (even a few well-written papers wouldn’t necessarily be an argument against the field—it just suggests to me it’s new), I still stand by my OP in being broadly positive about the area as a whole, hence coming up with a framework of my own in inspiration, I just haven’t shifted much in my specific critiques of certain applications of specific aspects of SWB but I’ll have a read of your links and see if it changes my mind! Similarly, if you had any further thoughts, I’d appreciate hearing them for your feedback.
I just wanted to follow-up, as I’ve read your links as promised. I share a genetic trait of speed-reading, so this wasn’t too onerous – please forgive me for not watching a video of your EAG talk (this is inefficient for how I work) but you linked your write-up on the forum which I read instead.
I feel you may be approaching this assuming I’m a bad actor, and I’m going to further endeavour to demonstrate this isn’t the case (I thought offering my meta-analysis skills for free, my arguments above about not over-interpreting an RCT, and this post in general would demonstrate that I’m approaching this in good faith). I care about this topic and I want EA to continue having interest in mental health/wellbeing – I think this could do a lot of good. I’m not sure why being non-EA would suggest I disagree with effective ways of doing altruistic work, or that I’m incapable of contributing anything to a discussion of mental health and wellbeing given this is literally my job, and so shouldn’t offer my perspective on a public-facing forum. I want to understand more about EA approaches to my field but I’m not so selfish to ask someone to do all the work for me (a stranger), hence putting a lot of effort into my post to show I am genuinely interested in trying to understand (side note: thanks again to people who have offered to chat off-forum—it’s really appreciated, and I’m sure my opinions will change in the coming weeks with your help).
I’m wondering if this is coming across instead that I care about making another anti-HLI post – I don’t. I tried approaching this problem (how does mental illness relate to wellbeing) from first principles to see what happened; I thought this was a sort of EA-oriented approach. I vaguely referenced the HLI post I commented on in my introductory comments to explain how this work came to be and interrogate my motivations (allowing others to do the same) - not linking the post/naming HLI, calling my contribution an ‘overly technical diatribe’ and not mentioning HLI at all was meant to dissaude from the idea my involvement in that thread should be considered on it’s merits. It was a reflection of my internal responses which I thought was important to interrogate in trying to adopt a less biased approach in my work (appraisal of SWB as a whole). We reflect all the time on unconscious vs conscious in psychiatry (blame Jung) but maybe this was weird to mention. Either way, It’s not like I’m competing for any EA space/funding which would make this something sinister or detract from HLI, and I’m not a big deal at all to think I could do this even if I wanted to.
Anyway, I’m confused why you’ve said “’we’ (i.e. happiness researchers) know quite a bit about the nature and measurement of wellbeing and it’s causes and correlates, but relatively little about the ways to increase it…” when you’ve linked several resources that suggest my heuristic approach isn’t too bad and my main question was about putting this in practice. I’m not too sure I understand how your comment seems to contrast the idea of my overly/”deliberately” shallow non-academic review with several sources supporting my approach. Isn’t that a good argument for interdisciplinary work? I’m not really understanding the tone of your comment when my post wasn’t ‘here’s my systematic review of wellbeing, it’s a new field with nothing useful to say’ but rather, ‘this is what makes sense to me, this doesn’t seem too out-there?, could this be used helpfully?’
In terms of the Diener, et al. paper– I had come across this author before in my work for this post (but not this specific paper). They use the comment about 170,000 articles (paper was accepted in 2017) in their introductory paragraph as a set-up for their narrative review of the literature – so I don’t need to talk about Google Scholar or try and ‘verify’ the numbers. They only mention it to talk about the growth of interest in SWB, which we all agree with.
This was a lovely piece to read, and I’m glad you directed me to it. It’s an extremely thorough review of wellbeing literature (32 pages excluding refs in PDF form, 439 different references). I’m not too sure why you’ve linked it, as it seems to be really in support of a lot of my work? Perhaps this was your intent as you don’t comment on my more specific criticisms, or my overall framework or findings. It’s not clear in how you framed it, which seemed to be as a counterpoint to me post, but maybe it was an agreement with the broader points you didn’t want to address in detail.
While I’m sure you’ve read this paper as you referenced it, for anyone else following – I can summarise the areas where this review supports my own:
It discusses concerns with single-measure SWB that I identified e.g. issues of subjectivity as a whole, reluctance providing honest answers to researchers, differences of meaning in various contexts, how people retrieve the relevant information to respond (likely too quickly to provide an evaluative judgement) and influenced by current mood/prior discussion (my joke about coffee). They point out that studies ‘on their own, provide little evidence regarding the validity of the measures themselves’, and conclude that, “although different camps have emerged that advocate for one set of measures over others, we believe that such advocacy is premature… we recommend that, when possible, researchers should include a broad array of measures….”
It lists several predictors, correlates and causes of SWB: social relationships/social capital; income and wealth; religiosity; demographic factors (e.g. age); health; genetic and personality factors; internal factors (e.g. self-esteem); basic needs (e.g. food, shelter) and safety; autonomy; ‘freedom’; ‘balanced life’; ‘adaptation’ to life events such as disability; cognitive processes; ‘fair and efficient’ law/government… These were all factors I either included in my framework or identified in review and explained my reasons for excluding.
The paper was arguably even more in favour of cultural contextualisation than I was e.g. “Even when a relevant term such as happiness is clearly defined, it is worth exploring whether the term [is] used in similar ways across cultures and time. Most philosophers and historians agree that the concept of happiness has changed over the years. In antiquity [the authors reference ancient Greece], this concept centred around good luck and fortune, whereas contemporary Americans view happiness as a pleasant experience over which they have control and something that they can actively pursue.” The authors go on to mention the differences of contemporary understandings of happiness between American (personal achievement and intense positive emotion) and Chinese people (spiritual enrichment, harmony and dialectic relation between happiness and unhappiness).
It spends a long time talking about the difficulties of interpreting causal vs correlative relationships, or third-variables, in describing how these factors relate to SWB.
They are consistent in pointing out all the ‘open questions’ that still need to be answered in understanding and measuring SWB, and how to apply this to policy decision-making. They also suggest research into other methodologies to answer questions about predictors and outcomes of wellbeing to define these relationships better, and describe a variety of ways SWB can be measured (outside of various self-report tools).
The conclusion of this paper:
As this review makes clear, growth in the science of SWB over the past decades has been quite rapid, and there are no signs that this growth is slowing. Yet, there are still large numbers of questions in need of research. At this point the most important research goes beyond cross-sectional correlations of self-reported measures of SWB, and includes experimental and longitudinal designs, as well as varying methods for assessing SWB. Furthermore, what is needed now are studies focused on the underlying psychological processes that influence SWB, as well as research on how SWB affects future outcomes. SWB research has become a truly interdisciplinary enterprise that includes all areas of the social, behavioral, and brain sciences.
It seems they think there is a place for me within wellbeing research and I’d discourage anyone adopting the idea that only evaluating a problem from one perspective strengthens your understanding – it’s much more likely the ‘most right’ answer lies in-between various disciplines to maximise experience and expertise.
Your next link – the World Happiness Report, seems to just be cited here to further illustrate growing interest in SWB (which I haven’t disputed). It does highlight as a pull-quote on the first page: “The recent pandemic has likely had a strong impact on popular conceptions of what is most important for a good life, and indeed on how society can foster collective improvements in well-being”
…Again, I’m not sure how this discounts my (poorly-worded) comments about the effect of COVID on the field. It might be to suggest it was an oversight to omit ‘happiness’ from my search which would produce a different graph than the one I used, but I’m struggling to see the relevance of this above what I’ve already addressed (i.e. your graph includes any paper mentioning ‘health’ or a number of other vague terms due to the search) – it seems we all agree there is growing interest in SWB, and there is an increasing interest over the last few years, for one reason or another.
The report goes on to mention the same issue I did in that there are a few early-adopter countries in the field of wellbeing research, but this is becoming more global over time from the ‘earliest mentions’ in the economics literature from the 1970s (they made this comment, not me, hence their graphs starting in 1970):
This was what I was representing in my pie chart (I’ll admit this is slightly prettier) to talk about interpreting the existing research (i.e. the issues the Diener paper raised about cultural understandings of wellbeing/‘happiness’). The report also mentions the diverse number of measures being used for SWB (10 domains and 38 individual measures) to discuss how best to measure world happiness. These are elaborated upon further in the Appendix to the chapter you linked, along with other graphs representing country-based origins of SWB.
In the ‘challenges’ section, it explicitly talks about the difficulties in composing ‘any new indicator framework aimed at capturing a meaningful concept such as well-being or progress’ and how that can combine different measures, or aggregate individual experience into summary numbers for groups or populations, to ‘express values through numerical weights’ – this is exactly what I had a go at doing with my framework/matrix. Interestingly, it also encourages not focusing on over-analytical approaches to “unanswerable questions” (they talk about climate change as an example) and delaying actions which provide benefit for the sake of attempting ‘futile’ over-analytic approaches of far-future impact calculations. This seems to be similar to my conclusion.
The ”To WELLBY or not to WELLBY” I read prior to this work and I’m afraid I still disagree on re-read for the same points I made in my original post (single-measures in isolation, life satisfaction, conversion to different settings). I’ve highlighted that this isn’t a ‘fringe’ opinion derived from my ignorance when looking at the other materials you linked. I also clearly will not agree with ‘Affective mental health, usually measured with depression scales, involves questions about how people feel, which will directly relate to SWB’ (an unreferenced footnote) – I feel I have explained this point very clearly in my post and cannot take HLI’s report as ‘stronger’ evidence that would lead me to reconsider; I have addressed this from my relevant expertise and from listing the PHQ-9 in a previous comment.
Also, I’m really sorry, but that article mentions repeatedly HLI’s psychotherapy meta-analysis I’ve already talked about on this forum (as have others) in terms like “(3) Using SWB will reveal previously under-captured benefits, such as it has already done for psychotherapy,” and alludes to future plans to publish research on issues such as the ‘neutral point’ on SWB scales, and agrees comparing SWB scales isn’t supported in literature (i.e. to convert to the LS evaluation used to support the utility of the WELLBY) but suggests things that ‘could’ be done to manage this. It’s putting me in a difficult position to discuss this link when I’ve explicitly stated I don’t want to reopen old arguments and I feel any further critique of HLI isn’t appropriate at present on this forum. I feel statements like those in the article are otherwise inciting me to dig around HLI’s website to see what was built off these prospective ideas, and it’s just going to devolve from there. Perhaps you could highlight the parts that disagree with my original post in terms of your opinion vs that of HLI if you really think this offers strong counterpoints?
In terms of your linked EAG debate, I’m running into similar problems. I didn’t see much disagreement in the early parts discussing the importance of SWB and ways of measuring it, but otherwise it focusses on HLI’s work and references the meta-analysis, framing it as: “We looked at cash transfers and group therapy for depression. We did a meta-analysis of each. We looked at the available studies. We had about 140,000 people total across both. So we really tried to look at all the available evidence that was there. We did some kind of technical jiggery-pokery to convert it into wellbeing scores. And what we found was that the $1000 cash transfer has about the same per-treatment effect as group therapy for well-being. You can see that the cash transfer does have an effect, has a much longer lasting effect. But the effect of treating depression is larger, but fades sooner.”
From my previous comment on the HLI post on this forum, you must see how this is problematic to link here. It’s not arguing against anything I’ve said in my post, and I can’t go into the reasons why I disagree with later points without restarting settled arguments. I’m assuming you didn’t reply to my comment on your post about HLI as you didn’t want to engage with me about my issues with the meta-analysis etc, and I think it would be implicitly crossing a boundary for me to reproduce those arguments here. I think you are and were completely within your rights to disengage with that discussion and I respect that choice—I don’t want to put you in a position where you feel you have to engage again in something you found negative to avoid appearing to ‘concede’ any points about HLI and so I cannot comment on HLI-related links.
I’m not really ‘online’ very much and it was part of my reflection about my comment on the HLI post—I felt it was only fair to similarly ‘put myself out there’ and invite criticism of my work given how I imagined you and the HLI team might have felt in that thread. I tend to post random artwork etc online—it would feel really harsh if in the middle of some drama, a critic’s sister happened to be an art professor and came in to critique my art. I thought it was only fair to allow the same to happen to me.
Awkwardly, your opponent in this debate seems to support my approach in this post on several fronts. Their conclusion:
OK, so what’s my upshot to conclude? I totally agree with Michael that effective altruism should think harder about well-being. What does it mean for a life to go well? How can we promote good lives, not just more lives? However, I think that we should think about good life in a multidimensional way, in a rich way that takes into account structure and sociological conditions. I think we shouldn’t fixate on RCTs and CBA and shouldn’t use them as a hammer in search of nails. Effective treatments for complex problems are likely to be messy, and we need to develop epistemic frameworks for appreciating that messiness and tolerating it, not assuming it away.
I felt I was doing that but trying to put it in EA terms for CEA-purposes, and it’s not clear to me why this rebuttal was considered ‘wrong’ (?). FWIW, I have also come across the @ryancbriggs post on the capability approach (which is something referenced in the counter-argument) and I felt much more closely aligned with these ideas than HLI’s. [I’m sorry, I don’t know the etiquette on ‘tagging’ here—please ignore me if this isn’t expected when linking to someone’s work].
I’m not going to go through each of the items on the HLI reading list you also suggested (as it’ll be too long), but similarly it wasn’t presented in reference to anything specific, and I’m not sure if it’s just to demonstrate the idea I might benefit from more reading into SWB. I’m struggling to agree that I’m vastly under-competency from the resources you did link to understand how these would be revolutionary to my understanding.
Honestly, I’m pretty confused, perhaps I’m not reading the tone of your post correctly—very possible. I do appreciate you linking these papers/reports but I’m struggling to understand your overall point (my interpretation was you didn’t think I knew enough for my post to be very valuable, especially on the basis of a search you felt I had conducted poorly/with an aim in mind to downplay SWB—FWIW I didn’t think 699 papers was weirdly small to anticipate this being the perception). From the HLI-related links you’ve chosen, perhaps we just disagree on certain things, which is fine, but your comment also didn’t highlight all the ways my approach fit in with other work in this area, and in complete reading of those papers. I think that omission from someone considered well-known in this area in EA does invite negative conclusions of the post as a whole and suggests those sources devalue my work much more broadly.
I’ve been clear I’m not approaching this with any expertise out of my field (mental health), and I have a lot to learn—I’m open to the idea further discussion will lead me to change my mind [I don’t necessarily expect Michael to respond, he certainly shouldn’t feel any obligation, I’m referencing other people kindly offering their time!]. But common ground is helpful as it suggests interdisciplinary work (similar to what went into the DALY, etc) is possible for wellbeing measures too. I’m not sure if taking a stance like “happiness researchers” just know more/everything about wellbeing/SWB is anything more than severely limiting – if so, I suppose I could be saying no philosopher has any right to comment on mental health as “we” (psychologists/psychiatrists) have got it, so shh.
I disagree with this—not only is this a wild take in psychiatry of all disciplines, but experience has taught me multidisciplinary work is key in providing the best care for patients and solve problems much more effectively. It prevents people working in silos and wasting time. Is it really the case in EA that any particular speciality field (or EA as a whole) ‘stakes claim’ on something like wellbeing which is inherently cross-discipline, to say there’s no benefit from other ideas? I think there’s benefit in keeping concepts accessible vs telling people they won’t understand and should consider a ‘reading list’ to contribute—the point of interdisciplinary working is to avoid the need for everyone to be competent in philosophy, economics, psychiatry, psychology and social science etc to have an opinion—you invite people with detailed understanding of their specific area to discuss and find solutions. I’m not suggesting EA people need to do medicine/psychiatry, read textbooks and papers to understand mental health, just maybe there is value outside of the ‘bubble’ of “happiness researchers”.
It 100% may just be a communication thing, but this was more of an olive branch than perhaps it appeared. I think perhaps it is too late for me to strike this tone with HLI and its members (again, this is fine, it doesn’t offend me—it’s completely fair as a take) but felt it was worth responding anyway in case others might have felt I’ve been mean-spirited. Just culturally, this is a small forum with a lot of power, and it’s difficult to understand as an outsider. I was surprised to learn a lot of these linked resources seemed to suggest a closer alignment than I assumed and perhaps there is a role for non-adversarial non-EAs approaching some otherwise intimidating concepts in good faith for good outcomes.
Hey LondonGal, thank you for following up on this. I appreciate you clarifying your intentions about your post. Our team has read your comments and will take your feedback into consideration in our future work. I’ll hope you’ll forgive us for not responding in detail at this time. We are currently trying to focus on our current projects (and to avoid spending too much time on the EA forum, which we’ve done a lot of, particularly recently!). I expect that some (but probably not all) of the points you’ve raised in your original post will be addressed in some of our upcoming research. Thanks again for engaging with our work, and for sending the olive branch. It’s been received and we’ll look forward to future constructive interactions
I don’t think there have been any edits, and I’m sure Michael would identify them if he made any. I was trying to make my comment less personally-directed by broadening the scope (i.e not just talking about HLI and turning to a more general sentiment about input from ‘anonymous’ outsiders on this forum and how they might be perceived—I remain a bit confused about the ‘real name’ comment).
FWIW, I’ve had lots of positive interactions with EA members on this forum (in public and in private), even from such short-lived involvement, so it wasn’t a chip-on-the-shoulder type statement. I mean no smear against EA as a whole. Thanks for prompting me to clarify.
Oh gosh! Not at all, thanks so much for letting me know in that case—I’m sure others are reading it the same way if that was your interpretation.
I’m just being quite cautious in trying to not come across as some strangely specific and verbose troll with an HLI problem. My post wasn’t about HLI and I found it difficult striking a balance to respond to that comment without seeming to make it about HLI i.e. perhaps there could be an interpretation I’m acting in bad faith (should that interpretation exist at all) not due to previous critique of HLI but my short history on this forum. I personally think that is a fair thing to find suspicious (!) and it’s a reason I’ve felt there has been a higher burden on me vs established members in demonstrating I’m trying very hard to understand EA’s philosophy and methods to allow a good faith interpretation vs providing lazy, half-baked criticism—I was trying to allude to this in the end of that comment and in my response to Ray below.
The culture is clearly a bit more challenging for me, and I’m often doing a few things at once when I’m online, so please continue to call me out if I risk being misunderstood.
Hello LondonGal (sorry, I don’t know your real name). I’m glad that, after your recent scepticism, you looked further into subjective wellbeing data and think it can be useful. You’ve written a lot and I won’t respond to it in detail.
I think the most important points to make are (1) there is a lot more research that you suggest and (2) it didn’t just start around COVID.
You are right that, if you search for “subjective wellbeing”, not much comes up (I get 706 results on PubMed). However, that’s because the trend among researchers to refer to “subjective wellbeing” rather than “subjective well-being”, ie with a hyphen, is very recent (as, AFAIK, is unrelated to COVID). Searching for “subjective well-being” yields, by comparison, 4,806 results.
If I expand the search to other keywords, namely “happiness” OR “life satisfaction” OR “subjective wellbeing” OR “subjective well-being”, I get over 150,000 results on PubMed. This is displayed below. Note the results go back to 1838, but the research only really kicks off after 1980.
I’m not an expert in academic databases, so I don’t know how comprehensive PubMed is of all research, but I’m guessing it’s a subset. FWIW, Ed Diener et al. in a 2018 article on subjective wellbeing states that there were “170,000 articles and books published on the topic in the past 15 years” although I haven’t looked into his numbers.
You might be interested in this article in the recent World Happiness Report which looks at various trends related to happiness, including academic interest, and find the fraction of articles on the topic has been trending up since the 80s: note the steady linear increase on the logarithmic y-axis.
Hence, as you suspected, many of the topics you raise here are reasonably quite well-trodden in the literature.
If you’re interested in looking further at the pros and cons of the WELLBY, the easiest thing for me to point you to is HLI’s To WELLBY Or Not To WELLBY report and references therein. You may also find this reading list useful.
In terms of the state of the literature, if you’ll forgive further laziness and self-promotion, I’d suggest my EAG London talk. The short answer is that ‘we’ (ie happiness researchers) know quite a bit about the nature and measurement of wellbeing and its causes and correlates, but relatively little about what the best ways are to increase it; work on WELLBY cost-effectiveness is barely older than COVID.
Hi MichaelPlant, [Edit: Jk—I don’t get the comment about my username/real name, I saw a mix being used on the forum, but I might have missed some etiquette—would you like my real name? Just ‘hello’ is fine if you’d prefer—no offence taken.]
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond! I was hoping to get more insight from people within EA who might be able to fill me in on some of the more philosophical/economic aspects as I’m aware these aren’t my areas of expertise (it was very much a ‘paper’ EA-hat I was trying on!) - I felt furthering my online searches wasn’t as helpful as getting more insight into the underlying concepts from experts and hoped my post would at least show I was interested in hearing more. Thanks for the links as well—I did come across a few of them in my approach to this work, but will take your advice these are worth looking at again if you think I’ve not appraised them properly—you definitely know best in this regard!
Also, apologies—you might be right in saying I didn’t structure a paragraph very well if it has left anyone with the impression I was suggesting subjective wellbeing research has only been in existance since COVID. My own graph disproves this, for starters! I think it’s this paragraph from the first section I’ve not phrased well (italics added).
I was trying to emphasise the relatively steep growth in interest over the last few years due to questions about cost-effectiveness (e.g. WELLBY), which as you mention is ‘barely older than COVID’. I don’t actually think we disagree here so I’ll need to think how to rephrase it to avoid conflating this with SWB research as a whole—to be clear, I don’t think your reading of this was unfair and I can phrase it better.
I’m not too sure I was ever arguing I was doing an exhaustive literature review (?) - I felt I stated a few times this was non-scientific, should have no weight, etc. My goal was just trying to get a quick overview as more of a sense-check, but didn’t want to limit my reading to the first x number of pages in case that was biased—I chose very limited terms and stated them so it would be clear how I did the search, which allowed you to double-check I wasn’t pulling anything dishonest (impressive that 7 papers have been added since I did the search last week—clearly there is a lot of interest!). If I set out to do a completely exhaustive review, you’re right to suggest the terms you did (I would add “SWB” as well), but I’m not sure that would be a reasonable expectation of something like an “abstract-only” non-academic review from a visitor with a full-time job when that returns thousands of results...
I’m sorry if it appeared that selecting limited search terms was an attempt to ‘downplay’ SWB research as a field—I mentioned it was my time constraints that were the problem but it’s easy to miss in a long post. I felt I was trying to explain throughout how interesting/useful I found this piece of work, spoke about how it changed my mind in the later sections and identified blind-spots I wasn’t aware I had. I don’t think I was critical of ‘subjective wellbeing’ research as whole—I tried to lay out my very specific concerns very clearly (e.g. in “life satisfaction” being used as an isolated measure for subjective wellbeing) but my overall conclusion was in support of finding a way to incorporate more of the diverse value these researchers were adding to the understanding of how we think about wellbeing estimates e.g. other measures, combining measures, qualitiative research, etc. I was approaching the problem with an open mind and left the exercise positively so I’m sorry to see it might have appeared mal-intentioned.
I hope this doesn’t seem like nit-picking, and it’s not intended as criticism of you personally as you similarly were upfront about not being familiar with PubMed; it can be tricky to get to grips with, but it might be helpful to share a quick point.
For the search that you linked that returned 150k results—if you go to “Advanced” under the search bar and click through you can see this searched “All Fields” and expanded the terms you used as they weren’t in quotation marks (it’s a quirk of the database that perhaps isn’t true for others!). This was the actual search run from your link—for all I know this was your intent, but in case it wasn’t (just judging this as a possibility based on the hyperlink):
With quotations to limit results to those specific terms (I’m not sure if that was your intent) and using Title/Abstract (PubMed also doesn’t really like hyphens as you see above but I used “subjective well” to try and work around this) you get more like 20-30k results. You can use MeSH terms (key words instead), other variations, etc to push it up or down (I tried a few variations to work with ‘well-being’ hence this being #8). And as you rightly say, you can always add more terms to include more papers.
Again, my aim isn’t to down-play SWB research at all with this point (I like the field!), it’s just in case it’s helpful as I use PubMed all the time and it’s one of many databases which contains mental health literature. Whether 2k or 150k+ results (even a few well-written papers wouldn’t necessarily be an argument against the field—it just suggests to me it’s new), I still stand by my OP in being broadly positive about the area as a whole, hence coming up with a framework of my own in inspiration, I just haven’t shifted much in my specific critiques of certain applications of specific aspects of SWB but I’ll have a read of your links and see if it changes my mind! Similarly, if you had any further thoughts, I’d appreciate hearing them for your feedback.
Hello,
I just wanted to follow-up, as I’ve read your links as promised. I share a genetic trait of speed-reading, so this wasn’t too onerous – please forgive me for not watching a video of your EAG talk (this is inefficient for how I work) but you linked your write-up on the forum which I read instead.
I feel you may be approaching this assuming I’m a bad actor, and I’m going to further endeavour to demonstrate this isn’t the case (I thought offering my meta-analysis skills for free, my arguments above about not over-interpreting an RCT, and this post in general would demonstrate that I’m approaching this in good faith). I care about this topic and I want EA to continue having interest in mental health/wellbeing – I think this could do a lot of good. I’m not sure why being non-EA would suggest I disagree with effective ways of doing altruistic work, or that I’m incapable of contributing anything to a discussion of mental health and wellbeing given this is literally my job, and so shouldn’t offer my perspective on a public-facing forum. I want to understand more about EA approaches to my field but I’m not so selfish to ask someone to do all the work for me (a stranger), hence putting a lot of effort into my post to show I am genuinely interested in trying to understand (side note: thanks again to people who have offered to chat off-forum—it’s really appreciated, and I’m sure my opinions will change in the coming weeks with your help).
I’m wondering if this is coming across instead that I care about making another anti-HLI post – I don’t. I tried approaching this problem (how does mental illness relate to wellbeing) from first principles to see what happened; I thought this was a sort of EA-oriented approach. I vaguely referenced the HLI post I commented on in my introductory comments to explain how this work came to be and interrogate my motivations (allowing others to do the same) - not linking the post/naming HLI, calling my contribution an ‘overly technical diatribe’ and not mentioning HLI at all was meant to dissaude from the idea my involvement in that thread should be considered on it’s merits. It was a reflection of my internal responses which I thought was important to interrogate in trying to adopt a less biased approach in my work (appraisal of SWB as a whole). We reflect all the time on unconscious vs conscious in psychiatry (blame Jung) but maybe this was weird to mention. Either way, It’s not like I’m competing for any EA space/funding which would make this something sinister or detract from HLI, and I’m not a big deal at all to think I could do this even if I wanted to.
Anyway, I’m confused why you’ve said “’we’ (i.e. happiness researchers) know quite a bit about the nature and measurement of wellbeing and it’s causes and correlates, but relatively little about the ways to increase it…” when you’ve linked several resources that suggest my heuristic approach isn’t too bad and my main question was about putting this in practice. I’m not too sure I understand how your comment seems to contrast the idea of my overly/”deliberately” shallow non-academic review with several sources supporting my approach. Isn’t that a good argument for interdisciplinary work? I’m not really understanding the tone of your comment when my post wasn’t ‘here’s my systematic review of wellbeing, it’s a new field with nothing useful to say’ but rather, ‘this is what makes sense to me, this doesn’t seem too out-there?, could this be used helpfully?’
In terms of the Diener, et al. paper– I had come across this author before in my work for this post (but not this specific paper). They use the comment about 170,000 articles (paper was accepted in 2017) in their introductory paragraph as a set-up for their narrative review of the literature – so I don’t need to talk about Google Scholar or try and ‘verify’ the numbers. They only mention it to talk about the growth of interest in SWB, which we all agree with.
This was a lovely piece to read, and I’m glad you directed me to it. It’s an extremely thorough review of wellbeing literature (32 pages excluding refs in PDF form, 439 different references). I’m not too sure why you’ve linked it, as it seems to be really in support of a lot of my work? Perhaps this was your intent as you don’t comment on my more specific criticisms, or my overall framework or findings. It’s not clear in how you framed it, which seemed to be as a counterpoint to me post, but maybe it was an agreement with the broader points you didn’t want to address in detail.
While I’m sure you’ve read this paper as you referenced it, for anyone else following – I can summarise the areas where this review supports my own:
It discusses concerns with single-measure SWB that I identified e.g. issues of subjectivity as a whole, reluctance providing honest answers to researchers, differences of meaning in various contexts, how people retrieve the relevant information to respond (likely too quickly to provide an evaluative judgement) and influenced by current mood/prior discussion (my joke about coffee). They point out that studies ‘on their own, provide little evidence regarding the validity of the measures themselves’, and conclude that, “although different camps have emerged that advocate for one set of measures over others, we believe that such advocacy is premature… we recommend that, when possible, researchers should include a broad array of measures….”
It lists several predictors, correlates and causes of SWB: social relationships/social capital; income and wealth; religiosity; demographic factors (e.g. age); health; genetic and personality factors; internal factors (e.g. self-esteem); basic needs (e.g. food, shelter) and safety; autonomy; ‘freedom’; ‘balanced life’; ‘adaptation’ to life events such as disability; cognitive processes; ‘fair and efficient’ law/government… These were all factors I either included in my framework or identified in review and explained my reasons for excluding.
The paper was arguably even more in favour of cultural contextualisation than I was e.g. “Even when a relevant term such as happiness is clearly defined, it is worth exploring whether the term [is] used in similar ways across cultures and time. Most philosophers and historians agree that the concept of happiness has changed over the years. In antiquity [the authors reference ancient Greece], this concept centred around good luck and fortune, whereas contemporary Americans view happiness as a pleasant experience over which they have control and something that they can actively pursue.” The authors go on to mention the differences of contemporary understandings of happiness between American (personal achievement and intense positive emotion) and Chinese people (spiritual enrichment, harmony and dialectic relation between happiness and unhappiness).
It spends a long time talking about the difficulties of interpreting causal vs correlative relationships, or third-variables, in describing how these factors relate to SWB.
They are consistent in pointing out all the ‘open questions’ that still need to be answered in understanding and measuring SWB, and how to apply this to policy decision-making. They also suggest research into other methodologies to answer questions about predictors and outcomes of wellbeing to define these relationships better, and describe a variety of ways SWB can be measured (outside of various self-report tools).
The conclusion of this paper:
It seems they think there is a place for me within wellbeing research and I’d discourage anyone adopting the idea that only evaluating a problem from one perspective strengthens your understanding – it’s much more likely the ‘most right’ answer lies in-between various disciplines to maximise experience and expertise.
Your next link – the World Happiness Report, seems to just be cited here to further illustrate growing interest in SWB (which I haven’t disputed). It does highlight as a pull-quote on the first page: “The recent pandemic has likely had a strong impact on popular conceptions of what is most important for a good life, and indeed on how society can foster collective improvements in well-being”
…Again, I’m not sure how this discounts my (poorly-worded) comments about the effect of COVID on the field. It might be to suggest it was an oversight to omit ‘happiness’ from my search which would produce a different graph than the one I used, but I’m struggling to see the relevance of this above what I’ve already addressed (i.e. your graph includes any paper mentioning ‘health’ or a number of other vague terms due to the search) – it seems we all agree there is growing interest in SWB, and there is an increasing interest over the last few years, for one reason or another.
The report goes on to mention the same issue I did in that there are a few early-adopter countries in the field of wellbeing research, but this is becoming more global over time from the ‘earliest mentions’ in the economics literature from the 1970s (they made this comment, not me, hence their graphs starting in 1970):
This was what I was representing in my pie chart (I’ll admit this is slightly prettier) to talk about interpreting the existing research (i.e. the issues the Diener paper raised about cultural understandings of wellbeing/‘happiness’). The report also mentions the diverse number of measures being used for SWB (10 domains and 38 individual measures) to discuss how best to measure world happiness. These are elaborated upon further in the Appendix to the chapter you linked, along with other graphs representing country-based origins of SWB.
In the ‘challenges’ section, it explicitly talks about the difficulties in composing ‘any new indicator framework aimed at capturing a meaningful concept such as well-being or progress’ and how that can combine different measures, or aggregate individual experience into summary numbers for groups or populations, to ‘express values through numerical weights’ – this is exactly what I had a go at doing with my framework/matrix. Interestingly, it also encourages not focusing on over-analytical approaches to “unanswerable questions” (they talk about climate change as an example) and delaying actions which provide benefit for the sake of attempting ‘futile’ over-analytic approaches of far-future impact calculations. This seems to be similar to my conclusion.
The ”To WELLBY or not to WELLBY” I read prior to this work and I’m afraid I still disagree on re-read for the same points I made in my original post (single-measures in isolation, life satisfaction, conversion to different settings). I’ve highlighted that this isn’t a ‘fringe’ opinion derived from my ignorance when looking at the other materials you linked. I also clearly will not agree with ‘Affective mental health, usually measured with depression scales, involves questions about how people feel, which will directly relate to SWB’ (an unreferenced footnote) – I feel I have explained this point very clearly in my post and cannot take HLI’s report as ‘stronger’ evidence that would lead me to reconsider; I have addressed this from my relevant expertise and from listing the PHQ-9 in a previous comment.
Also, I’m really sorry, but that article mentions repeatedly HLI’s psychotherapy meta-analysis I’ve already talked about on this forum (as have others) in terms like “(3) Using SWB will reveal previously under-captured benefits, such as it has already done for psychotherapy,” and alludes to future plans to publish research on issues such as the ‘neutral point’ on SWB scales, and agrees comparing SWB scales isn’t supported in literature (i.e. to convert to the LS evaluation used to support the utility of the WELLBY) but suggests things that ‘could’ be done to manage this. It’s putting me in a difficult position to discuss this link when I’ve explicitly stated I don’t want to reopen old arguments and I feel any further critique of HLI isn’t appropriate at present on this forum. I feel statements like those in the article are otherwise inciting me to dig around HLI’s website to see what was built off these prospective ideas, and it’s just going to devolve from there. Perhaps you could highlight the parts that disagree with my original post in terms of your opinion vs that of HLI if you really think this offers strong counterpoints?
In terms of your linked EAG debate, I’m running into similar problems. I didn’t see much disagreement in the early parts discussing the importance of SWB and ways of measuring it, but otherwise it focusses on HLI’s work and references the meta-analysis, framing it as: “We looked at cash transfers and group therapy for depression. We did a meta-analysis of each. We looked at the available studies. We had about 140,000 people total across both. So we really tried to look at all the available evidence that was there. We did some kind of technical jiggery-pokery to convert it into wellbeing scores. And what we found was that the $1000 cash transfer has about the same per-treatment effect as group therapy for well-being. You can see that the cash transfer does have an effect, has a much longer lasting effect. But the effect of treating depression is larger, but fades sooner.”
From my previous comment on the HLI post on this forum, you must see how this is problematic to link here. It’s not arguing against anything I’ve said in my post, and I can’t go into the reasons why I disagree with later points without restarting settled arguments. I’m assuming you didn’t reply to my comment on your post about HLI as you didn’t want to engage with me about my issues with the meta-analysis etc, and I think it would be implicitly crossing a boundary for me to reproduce those arguments here. I think you are and were completely within your rights to disengage with that discussion and I respect that choice—I don’t want to put you in a position where you feel you have to engage again in something you found negative to avoid appearing to ‘concede’ any points about HLI and so I cannot comment on HLI-related links.
I’m not really ‘online’ very much and it was part of my reflection about my comment on the HLI post—I felt it was only fair to similarly ‘put myself out there’ and invite criticism of my work given how I imagined you and the HLI team might have felt in that thread. I tend to post random artwork etc online—it would feel really harsh if in the middle of some drama, a critic’s sister happened to be an art professor and came in to critique my art. I thought it was only fair to allow the same to happen to me.
Awkwardly, your opponent in this debate seems to support my approach in this post on several fronts. Their conclusion:
I felt I was doing that but trying to put it in EA terms for CEA-purposes, and it’s not clear to me why this rebuttal was considered ‘wrong’ (?). FWIW, I have also come across the @ryancbriggs post on the capability approach (which is something referenced in the counter-argument) and I felt much more closely aligned with these ideas than HLI’s. [I’m sorry, I don’t know the etiquette on ‘tagging’ here—please ignore me if this isn’t expected when linking to someone’s work].
I’m not going to go through each of the items on the HLI reading list you also suggested (as it’ll be too long), but similarly it wasn’t presented in reference to anything specific, and I’m not sure if it’s just to demonstrate the idea I might benefit from more reading into SWB. I’m struggling to agree that I’m vastly under-competency from the resources you did link to understand how these would be revolutionary to my understanding.
Honestly, I’m pretty confused, perhaps I’m not reading the tone of your post correctly—very possible. I do appreciate you linking these papers/reports but I’m struggling to understand your overall point (my interpretation was you didn’t think I knew enough for my post to be very valuable, especially on the basis of a search you felt I had conducted poorly/with an aim in mind to downplay SWB—FWIW I didn’t think 699 papers was weirdly small to anticipate this being the perception). From the HLI-related links you’ve chosen, perhaps we just disagree on certain things, which is fine, but your comment also didn’t highlight all the ways my approach fit in with other work in this area, and in complete reading of those papers. I think that omission from someone considered well-known in this area in EA does invite negative conclusions of the post as a whole and suggests those sources devalue my work much more broadly.
I’ve been clear I’m not approaching this with any expertise out of my field (mental health), and I have a lot to learn—I’m open to the idea further discussion will lead me to change my mind [I don’t necessarily expect Michael to respond, he certainly shouldn’t feel any obligation, I’m referencing other people kindly offering their time!]. But common ground is helpful as it suggests interdisciplinary work (similar to what went into the DALY, etc) is possible for wellbeing measures too. I’m not sure if taking a stance like “happiness researchers” just know more/everything about wellbeing/SWB is anything more than severely limiting – if so, I suppose I could be saying no philosopher has any right to comment on mental health as “we” (psychologists/psychiatrists) have got it, so shh.
I disagree with this—not only is this a wild take in psychiatry of all disciplines, but experience has taught me multidisciplinary work is key in providing the best care for patients and solve problems much more effectively. It prevents people working in silos and wasting time. Is it really the case in EA that any particular speciality field (or EA as a whole) ‘stakes claim’ on something like wellbeing which is inherently cross-discipline, to say there’s no benefit from other ideas? I think there’s benefit in keeping concepts accessible vs telling people they won’t understand and should consider a ‘reading list’ to contribute—the point of interdisciplinary working is to avoid the need for everyone to be competent in philosophy, economics, psychiatry, psychology and social science etc to have an opinion—you invite people with detailed understanding of their specific area to discuss and find solutions. I’m not suggesting EA people need to do medicine/psychiatry, read textbooks and papers to understand mental health, just maybe there is value outside of the ‘bubble’ of “happiness researchers”.
It 100% may just be a communication thing, but this was more of an olive branch than perhaps it appeared. I think perhaps it is too late for me to strike this tone with HLI and its members (again, this is fine, it doesn’t offend me—it’s completely fair as a take) but felt it was worth responding anyway in case others might have felt I’ve been mean-spirited. Just culturally, this is a small forum with a lot of power, and it’s difficult to understand as an outsider. I was surprised to learn a lot of these linked resources seemed to suggest a closer alignment than I assumed and perhaps there is a role for non-adversarial non-EAs approaching some otherwise intimidating concepts in good faith for good outcomes.
Hey LondonGal, thank you for following up on this. I appreciate you clarifying your intentions about your post. Our team has read your comments and will take your feedback into consideration in our future work. I’ll hope you’ll forgive us for not responding in detail at this time. We are currently trying to focus on our current projects (and to avoid spending too much time on the EA forum, which we’ve done a lot of, particularly recently!). I expect that some (but probably not all) of the points you’ve raised in your original post will be addressed in some of our upcoming research. Thanks again for engaging with our work, and for sending the olive branch. It’s been received and we’ll look forward to future constructive interactions
I can’t see anything in Michael’s comment about you being non-EA, have there been edits on the comment?
I don’t think there have been any edits, and I’m sure Michael would identify them if he made any. I was trying to make my comment less personally-directed by broadening the scope (i.e not just talking about HLI and turning to a more general sentiment about input from ‘anonymous’ outsiders on this forum and how they might be perceived—I remain a bit confused about the ‘real name’ comment).
FWIW, I’ve had lots of positive interactions with EA members on this forum (in public and in private), even from such short-lived involvement, so it wasn’t a chip-on-the-shoulder type statement. I mean no smear against EA as a whole. Thanks for prompting me to clarify.
Ah ok makes sense. I had read your comment as saying that Michael suggested you weren’t EA enough.
Oh gosh! Not at all, thanks so much for letting me know in that case—I’m sure others are reading it the same way if that was your interpretation.
I’m just being quite cautious in trying to not come across as some strangely specific and verbose troll with an HLI problem. My post wasn’t about HLI and I found it difficult striking a balance to respond to that comment without seeming to make it about HLI i.e. perhaps there could be an interpretation I’m acting in bad faith (should that interpretation exist at all) not due to previous critique of HLI but my short history on this forum. I personally think that is a fair thing to find suspicious (!) and it’s a reason I’ve felt there has been a higher burden on me vs established members in demonstrating I’m trying very hard to understand EA’s philosophy and methods to allow a good faith interpretation vs providing lazy, half-baked criticism—I was trying to allude to this in the end of that comment and in my response to Ray below.
The culture is clearly a bit more challenging for me, and I’m often doing a few things at once when I’m online, so please continue to call me out if I risk being misunderstood.