As life is good for most people, this is a major advantage.
Seems you’re implying that life is net-good for most people globally? Do you have a source for this as I always assumed the opposite (but would love to be proven wrong)?
I did a short analysis on this where I conclude around 6 % of people have negative lives.
Summary
I estimated the global life satisfaction distribution in this Sheet and this Colab based on the mean and standard deviation of the life satisfaction distribution of 142 countries.
For the neutral life satisfaction of 0.949 (on a scale from 0 to 10) I supposed [mean between 0.6 and 1.5; see below], the distribution I obtained implies the fraction of people with negative lives is 6.37 %.
The above neutral point is based on section “How Many People Have Positive Wellbeing?” of Chapter 9 of What We Owe the Future (WWOF) from William MacAskill:
The relative nature of the scale means that it is difficult to interpret where the neutral point should be, and unfortunately, there have been only two small studies directly addressing this question. Respondents from Ghana and Kenya put the neutral point at 0.6, while one British study places it between 1 and 2 [which I parsed as 1.5 (= (1 + 2)/2)].
Seems you’re implying that life is net-good for most people globally? Do you have a source for this as I always assumed the opposite (but would love to be proven wrong)?
Hi James,
I did a short analysis on this where I conclude around 6 % of people have negative lives.
The above neutral point is based on section “How Many People Have Positive Wellbeing?” of Chapter 9 of What We Owe the Future (WWOF) from William MacAskill: