As far as I can tell, Richard Bruns is talking about the quality-adjusted life year or QALY.
The reason it is a year is essentially arbitrary, a year is decently long without being too long for the purposes of public health where QALYs first got used.
The way we deal with “healthy, happy, and flourishing” as a single unit is much trickier. For traditional QALY calculations, researchers simply ask people how they feel when experiencing certain things (like a particular surgery or a disease) and normalize/aggregate those responses to get a scale where 0 quality is as good as death, 1 is perfect health, and negative numbers can be used for experiences worse than death.
For traditional QALY calculations, researchers simply ask people how they feel when experiencing certain things (like a particular surgery or a disease) and normalize/aggregate those responses to get a scale where 0 quality is as good as death, 1 is perfect health, and negative numbers can be used for experiences worse than death.
This isn’t correct. QALY weights are typically based on hypothetical preferences, not experiences.
What Richard described is more like a WELBY, which has a similar structure but covers wellbeing in some sense rather than just health. See Part 1 of my (unfinished) sequence on this if you’re interested.
As far as I can tell, Richard Bruns is talking about the quality-adjusted life year or QALY.
The reason it is a year is essentially arbitrary, a year is decently long without being too long for the purposes of public health where QALYs first got used.
The way we deal with “healthy, happy, and flourishing” as a single unit is much trickier. For traditional QALY calculations, researchers simply ask people how they feel when experiencing certain things (like a particular surgery or a disease) and normalize/aggregate those responses to get a scale where 0 quality is as good as death, 1 is perfect health, and negative numbers can be used for experiences worse than death.
Then you multiply quality by quantity. The Wikipedia article on this is good and goes into more depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
Note: I don’t know how Bruns intends to measure quality of life yet, I expect we’ll have to wait.
This isn’t correct. QALY weights are typically based on hypothetical preferences, not experiences.
What Richard described is more like a WELBY, which has a similar structure but covers wellbeing in some sense rather than just health. See Part 1 of my (unfinished) sequence on this if you’re interested.
I agree with this; thank you for replying. (I thought I would get email alerts if anyone commented, but I guess I didn’t set that up right.)