Good to hear what you’re up to, seems like a very promising project to me! A few questions about WELLBY though
1) How do you envision WELLBY interacting with the SWB community? Is the long term plan that this will remain a metric developed by you or is the long term plan for this to be a more independent measurement that for SWB researchers use and improve upon without any involvement from you
2) Do you see it being a long term “competitor” to other metrics such as QALYs and DALYs as they are used in global health today, or do you imagine it being something that only organizations in EA or perhaps mental health use in the foreseeable future?
3) how does “Well-being-adjusted life years” get shortened into “WELLBY” rather than “WALY”, “WBALY” or at least “WELLBALY”??? :( Did you consider the negative effects on the reader’s WELLBY caused by the confusion about how that abbreviation works? :’(
Thanks for the comment! In response to your comments:
To clarify, the WELLBY is something that has come out of the academic SWB community—bits of economics and psychology, mostly. It’s not been developed by us, as there are only a handful of papers that have used it so far; hence we’re among the first to be applying it. I should add that, if you’re already using measures of SWB, say, a 0-10 life satisfaction scale, it’s not a big innovation to look at how much something changes that, then multiplying that by duration, which is really all the WELLBY is. (The more innovative bit is using SWB at all, rather than using WELLBYs given you’re already using SWB.) So, it easiest to think of us as using a relatively new, but existing, methodology and applying it to new problems—namely, (re)assessing the cost-effectiveness of things EAs already focus on.
That said, there are some theoretical and practical kinks to be worked out in using WELLBYs—e.g. on the ‘neutral point’, mentioned above. Our plan—which we are already engaged in—is to do the work we think is necessary to improve the WELLBY approach, then feed that back into SWB academia. More generally, it’s not unusual that a measurement tool gets developed and then refined.
Ideally, we’d like to see SWB metrics used across the board, where feasible, and we are pushing to make this happen. Part of the issue with Q/DALYs is that they are measures of health. Even if you thought they were the ideal measures of health (or, the contribution of health to well-being) you run into an issue comparing health to non-health outcomes. A chief virtue of SWB metrics is that you can measure changes in any domain in one currency, namely their impact on SWB.
Having said this, Q/DALYs are quite ingrained in the medical world and it’s an open question how valuable it is to push for change their vs do other things.
I think the rules can be bent in search of a good name, and we’re really just following what other SWB researchers call them. It has been suggested, notably by John Broome, that it should be the ‘WALY’, but that sounds a bit, well, silly (in British English, a ‘wally’ is a synonym for ‘fool’). Personally, I also like the SWELLBY, but that’s yet to catch on...
Good to hear what you’re up to, seems like a very promising project to me! A few questions about WELLBY though
1) How do you envision WELLBY interacting with the SWB community? Is the long term plan that this will remain a metric developed by you or is the long term plan for this to be a more independent measurement that for SWB researchers use and improve upon without any involvement from you
2) Do you see it being a long term “competitor” to other metrics such as QALYs and DALYs as they are used in global health today, or do you imagine it being something that only organizations in EA or perhaps mental health use in the foreseeable future?
3) how does “Well-being-adjusted life years” get shortened into “WELLBY” rather than “WALY”, “WBALY” or at least “WELLBALY”??? :( Did you consider the negative effects on the reader’s WELLBY caused by the confusion about how that abbreviation works? :’(
Hello Engelhardt,
Thanks for the comment! In response to your comments:
To clarify, the WELLBY is something that has come out of the academic SWB community—bits of economics and psychology, mostly. It’s not been developed by us, as there are only a handful of papers that have used it so far; hence we’re among the first to be applying it. I should add that, if you’re already using measures of SWB, say, a 0-10 life satisfaction scale, it’s not a big innovation to look at how much something changes that, then multiplying that by duration, which is really all the WELLBY is. (The more innovative bit is using SWB at all, rather than using WELLBYs given you’re already using SWB.) So, it easiest to think of us as using a relatively new, but existing, methodology and applying it to new problems—namely, (re)assessing the cost-effectiveness of things EAs already focus on.
That said, there are some theoretical and practical kinks to be worked out in using WELLBYs—e.g. on the ‘neutral point’, mentioned above. Our plan—which we are already engaged in—is to do the work we think is necessary to improve the WELLBY approach, then feed that back into SWB academia. More generally, it’s not unusual that a measurement tool gets developed and then refined.
Ideally, we’d like to see SWB metrics used across the board, where feasible, and we are pushing to make this happen. Part of the issue with Q/DALYs is that they are measures of health. Even if you thought they were the ideal measures of health (or, the contribution of health to well-being) you run into an issue comparing health to non-health outcomes. A chief virtue of SWB metrics is that you can measure changes in any domain in one currency, namely their impact on SWB.
Having said this, Q/DALYs are quite ingrained in the medical world and it’s an open question how valuable it is to push for change their vs do other things.
I think the rules can be bent in search of a good name, and we’re really just following what other SWB researchers call them. It has been suggested, notably by John Broome, that it should be the ‘WALY’, but that sounds a bit, well, silly (in British English, a ‘wally’ is a synonym for ‘fool’). Personally, I also like the SWELLBY, but that’s yet to catch on...