How robust is your assumption about the value life events staying constant? If it were not true, then there may not be any rescaling to explain. Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much. In other words, if my life is already a 9, is it realistic to expect getting married will take me to a 10—a perfect life?
HLI have a good, but very preliminary, look at the linearity/compression of wellbeing here, and it seems like linearity/compression is actually very under-studied. This seems odd to me, considering that it would probably dramatically shift where you allocate resources if linearity was true vs if there were bigger gains to be made in the middle of the spectrum.
I can’t think of a good theoretical reason why true effects should fall so significantly – like 40%. That’s striking. The same attenuation result holds, even including income/age/event prevalence.
“Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much.”
This is true. Another way of saying this is: “the true effects fall as you get happier”. But then, given reported happiness has stayed constant, why would the effects fall?
Hm, I don’t think I agree with you on linearity. Andrew Oswald was writing about this in 2008. One option is that the function is logistic/arctan: i.e,. quite concave/flat at high latent happiness levels. That is, you can’t shift reported happiness above a 10 (a ceiling effect), even if you get happier.
In this case: even if the reporting function is non-linear (and assuming true effect sizes are constant), why would the observed effects fall? Because people are getting happier. Again, this is a different way of saying rescaling is happening.
How robust is your assumption about the value life events staying constant? If it were not true, then there may not be any rescaling to explain. Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much. In other words, if my life is already a 9, is it realistic to expect getting married will take me to a 10—a perfect life?
HLI have a good, but very preliminary, look at the linearity/compression of wellbeing here, and it seems like linearity/compression is actually very under-studied. This seems odd to me, considering that it would probably dramatically shift where you allocate resources if linearity was true vs if there were bigger gains to be made in the middle of the spectrum.
(Apologies if you have addressed this somewhere)
Hello, Huw!
I can’t think of a good theoretical reason why true effects should fall so significantly – like 40%. That’s striking. The same attenuation result holds, even including income/age/event prevalence.
“Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much.”
This is true. Another way of saying this is: “the true effects fall as you get happier”. But then, given reported happiness has stayed constant, why would the effects fall?
Hm, I don’t think I agree with you on linearity. Andrew Oswald was writing about this in 2008. One option is that the function is logistic/arctan: i.e,. quite concave/flat at high latent happiness levels. That is, you can’t shift reported happiness above a 10 (a ceiling effect), even if you get happier.
In this case: even if the reporting function is non-linear (and assuming true effect sizes are constant), why would the observed effects fall? Because people are getting happier. Again, this is a different way of saying rescaling is happening.