Pllus, if you can convince the bots on Omegle as well, that gives us a head start on the alignment problem!
Alexander de Vries
Ending Poverty: Today or Forever? Potential Error in GiveDirectly’s Rational Animations Video
[Question] How likely is it that malaria vaccines will soon become more effective than bednets?
Some Technical Problems With Measuring Happiness (and some solutions)
I agree with a lot of these points, but it seems like you’re arguing for reading fiction, while the people you refer to are arguing for podcasts over non-fiction. It would be interesting to see someone fully articulate the case for reading a non-fiction book rather than a summary of the main points or a podcast where the author explains the whole thing in a far shorter time.
The factors being only caused by GDP is not at all central to my argument against your analysis, nor is it a claim I would make. The key point is that any causal effect of GDP on happiness must necessarily run through other factors like shelter, clean water, health, etc. Nobody (except economists like me) feels more satisfied with their life as a result of hearing that GDP/cap has gone up by 3% this year.
As such, if you control for all of those mediating factors, it will be literally impossible to find a significant effect of GDP/cap on happiness whether or not such an effect actually exists. If the effect is real, such an analysis would necessarily find a false negative.
Similarly, your counterexample would be valid, if I were claiming that GDP is the only factor in happiness. Again, I do not claim that, nor does anyone I know of. There are plenty of factors which account for national average life satisfaction, one of which is GDP. It is perfectly possible for Costa Rica to be higher in other factors and therefore be happier than the US despite a lower GDP.
There are some economists who oppose GDP as a measure of value, and some who support it. If you’re appealing to expertise, there’s a huge difference between consensus view and “some experts agree with me”.
Context: there has recently been a new phase 1/2b RCT in The Lancet, confirming a ~80% effectiveness rate for the R21/MM malaria vaccine (and confirming that booster shots work).
Quoting https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62797776:
’Prof Hill said the vaccine—called R21 - could be made for “a few dollars” and “we really could be looking at a very substantial reduction in that horrendous burden of malaria”.
He added: “We hope that this will be deployed and available and saving lives, certainly by the end of next year.”′
If the vaccine makes it through phase III trials, this seems intuitively like a much more effective malaria intervention than bednets.
Great point, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Indeed, if you consider “increase in de facto consumption income over the next 4 years” to be a production increase (which I now agree is a reasonable point of view to take), then the long term effects on production are positive. I need to think more about how exactly that works out, but you’ve possibly convinced me of this.
My remaining point of contention, then, is that you say this argument isn’t intuitive to those without experience in the field, which is true, but GiveDirectly didn’t even try to make it! The only argument they affirmatively used to support their big claim was pointing vaguely at the Eggers (2022) spillovers study, which has general equilibrium models and economic slack as its focus, saying very little about durable consumption goods at all. So if GD wants to explain their reasoning to anyone, they should do it more like you did, and IMO a full analysis of multiple pages would be not just worthwhile but necessary.
Thanks for bringing your considerable expertise here! To be clear, my contention was that GiveDirectly hasn’t shown this, not that the evidence doesn’t exist. If they had made something like your comment, I would never have written this post in the first place.
That said, to engage with what you’re saying:
-Many durable goods are a permanent or long-term increase in quality of life (like the metal roofs and cement floors you mentioned) without bringing an increase in productive capacity. Those goods are important in their own right, but don’t support the claim made.
-Here I’m really going out of my knowledge zone, but based on what I currently know, I’m skeptical that kids going to school more in developing countries has a large total effect. The main reason I’m worried about this is that I’ve seen too many studies where it turns out that most of the teachers aren’t showing up at these schools, or the kids can’t actually write simple words by age 10, that kind of stuff. This opinion is lightly held because I’m not very familiar with the literature here.
-I do believe some poverty traps exist, and there is probably a long-term effect of cash transfers, mostly through investments like those you described. I just think the effect is likely small to medium.
The main reason I feel like I can make some of these statements with reasonable confidence (besides my econ background) is that, well, anyone can interpret a randomized controlled trial. And the few randomized controlled trials done show mixed to no effects, over the long term. More data coming in a few years though!
Thanks for doing the back of the envelope calculation here! This made me view blood donation as significantly more effective than I did before. A few points:
Your second source doesn’t exactly say that one third of blood is used during emergencies, but rather that 1/3rd is used in “surgery and emergencies including childbirth”. Not all surgeries are emergencies, and not all emergencies are potentially fatal.
However, I think this is more than balanced out by the fact that according to the same source, the other two thirds are used to treat “medical conditions including anemia, cancer, and blood disorders.” A lot of those conditions are potentially fatal, so I think it probably actually ends up at more than 1/3rd of blood donated going to life-saving interventions.
I’d love to see someone do the full calculation sometime. Based on this, I expect that for a lot of people, donating blood is sufficiently effective that they should do it once in a while, even instead of an hour of effective work or earning-to-give.
Acronyms for Happiness, part 1: how countries try to measure economic well-being
Great post! You convinced me that the Astronomical Value Thesis is less likely than I thought.
I’d like to point out, though, that of the risks with which you labeled space exploration “less helpful”, by far the largest is AI risk. But it seems to me that any AI which is capable of wiping out humans on other planets would also, if aligned, be capable of strongly reducing existential risk, and therefore make the Time of Perils hypothesis true.
Thanks! Glad this works well as a summary.
I haven’t looked into the age-happiness curve all that much, but from the studies I have read, I think it’s a bit suspicious that none of them seem to control for ERS. If ERS really is U-shaped (seems like a slight majority opinion), then a lot or even all of the age-happiness curve could be explained by that. Then again, surely someone in the field would have found that out by now if it were true, right? Might look into it further in a future post
Thanks for the link! I hadn’t seen it before, definitely useful information.
So I did a fair bit more research on this subject for a post I’m writing on it, and from what I can tell, that Blanchflower study you mentioned is making the exact mistake Bartram points out, and if you use controls correctly, the u-shape only shows up in a few countries.
This study by Kratz and Brüderl is very interesting—it points out four potential causes of bias in the age-happiness literature and make their own study without those biases, finding a constant downwards slope in happiness. I think they miss the second-biggest issue, though (after overcontrol bias): there is constant confusion between different happiness measures, as I described in my post above, and that really matters when studying a subject with effects this small.
If I ever have time, I’m planning on doing some kind of small meta-analysis, taking the five or so biggest unbiased studies in the field. I’d have to learn some more stats first, though :)
I don’t quite get your right foot/left foot example. Cassie says that Utopi-doogle will soon ‘likely’ (I’ll assume this is somewhere around 70%-90%) explode, killing everyone, and that the only solution is for everyone to stamp the same foot at once; if they guess correctly as to which foot to stamp, they survive, otherwise, they die.
To me, it seems that the politician who starts the Left Foot Movement is attempting to bring them from ‘likely’ death (again, 70-90%), the case if nothing is done or if the foot stamps aren’t coordinated, to a new equilibrium with 50% chance of death; either he is correct and the world is saved, or he is wrong and the world is destroyed.
How is this a Pascal’s Mugging? If the politician’s movement succeeds, x-risk is reduced significantly, right?
Thank you :)
You’re right, I shouldn’t have taken them at their word there, it’s probably not a small portion of philanthropic spending. US phil spending is about 500 billion per year, and the US has the highest spending as % of GDP. Can’t find sources for total worldwide spending online, but if I had to guess, it’s about 1.5 trillion, in which case the named figure is some 20-ish percent of the total.
Will edit post.
No, I hadn’t heard of qualia formalism yet, though it sounds kind of like the way I implicitly conceptualize qualia. Principia Qualia seems really intriguing and I’ll definitely be reading it!
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Others have pointed out that most of the factors you take into account are (often strongly) correlated with GDP per capita. What I think is more important from an econometric perspective is that many of them are caused by GDP per capita. If you’re trying to measure the effect of (average) income on happiness, and you control for almost all the mediators of income’s effect on happiness, of course you’ll find that there is almost no independent effect of income left over!
In my opinion, this analysis, while certainly interesting and useful for other purposes, says nothing at all about the effect of GDP per capita on life satisfaction or happiness.