Barry Grimes

Karma: 1,148

I coordinate the annual publication of the World Happiness Report, the world’s foremost publication on global wellbeing and human progress. Working in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the editorial board, I promote the latest research on global happiness and how to increase it.

In 2019, I helped to create the Happier Lives Institute, a charity evaluator that compares the impact of international NGOs using subjective wellbeing measures. In 2022, I was part of the organising team for the Wellbeing Research & Policy Conference in Oxford. Most recently, my work at the International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders has supported greater collaboration across the sector.

Barry Grimes Nov 26, 2024, 8:47 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Charlie_Guthmann’s comment on: What are the best available studies on the effects of smartphone/instagram/facebook/tiktok/etc use on humans, specifically children?
Personally, I think it’s a bit hasty because we’re not sure if it will do more harm than good. Ideally, they would have piloted this in a smaller region first but that probably wasn’t feasible politically.

Barry Grimes Nov 26, 2024, 7:24 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Charlie_Guthmann’s comment on: What are the best available studies on the effects of smartphone/instagram/facebook/tiktok/etc use on humans, specifically children?
Ferguson (2024) is a meta-analysis of 27 experimental studies that finds causal effects are statistically no different than zero (but with significant heterogeneity).

Haidt & Rausch criticised Ferguson’s methodology on their blog and this sparked much debate. They argue that many of the studies only capture withdrawal symptoms and don’t follow subjects long enough to get past that stage and onto more positive experiences.
Another good study makes use of a natural experiment by looking at changes in student wellbeing at US universities in the early years of Facebook’s gradual roll out.
I’m not aware of any governments blocking experimental studies. Policymakers are desperate for better evidence to inform their regulatory decisions. Despite the ongoing debate among researchers, Australia are going full steam ahead and recently announced a ban on social media for all under-16s.

Barry Grimes Nov 26, 2024, 9:33 AM
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What are the best available studies on the effects of smartphone/instagram/facebook/tiktok/etc use on humans, specifically children?
It’s fair to say that the evidence is mixed at the moment. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has captured a lot of attention, but many researchers dispute his arguments. This episode of the Freakonomics podcast provides a balanced perspective with voices from both sides of the debate.
There are many competing theories for the decline in youth wellbeing in Western countries (trends in other parts of the world are different), but they’re mostly based on correlational evidence; causal evidence is weak and limited.

Some studies I recommend are:

“The Declining Mental Health Of The Young And The Global Disappearance Of The Hump Shape In Age In Unhappiness,” by David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu (NBER Working Paper, 2024).
“Further Evidence on the Global Decline in the Mental Health of the Young,” by David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, Anthony Lepinteur, and Alan Piper (NBER Working Paper, 2024).
“To What Extent are Trends in Teen Mental Health Driven by Changes in Reporting?” by Adriana Corredor-Waldron and Janet Currie (Journal of Human Resources, 2024).
“Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age,” by Matti Vuorre and Andrew K. Przybylski (Clinical Psychological Science, 2023).
“Are Mental Health Awareness Efforts Contributing to the Rise in Reported Mental Health Problems? A Call to Test the Prevalence Inflation Hypothesis,” by Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews (New Ideas in Psychology, 2023).
“The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use,” by Amy Orben and Andrew K. Przybylski (Nature Human Behaviour, 2019).
Social Media and Adolescent Health (Consensus Study Report)
What do we know about mental health and the internet in young people? (MQ Mental Health Research)

Barry Grimes Sep 23, 2024, 4:27 PM
2 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Announcing Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week (Oct 7-13)
Maybe you should have a separate debate week on the most appropriate name for the “global health” cause area ;o)

Barry Grimes Sep 23, 2024, 4:16 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Announcing Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week (Oct 7-13)
Thanks Toby! Health is part of wellbeing, so “global wellbeing” would be sufficient.

However, it’s worth noting that “global wellbeing” should apply to all moral patients, whereas “global health” is usually understood as a human-specific set of interventions.

Barry Grimes Sep 23, 2024, 12:23 PM
9 points
4 ∶ 1
on: Announcing Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week (Oct 7-13)
It would be better to call this: Animal Welfare vs Human Welfare Debate Week

When your scope extends to “any intervention which primarily aims to increase the wellbeing of animals, or decrease their suffering, and...the same for humans”, the term “global health” only represents a sub-set of possible interventions.

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Barry GrimesMay 9, 2024, 9:14 AM

34 points

0 comments2 min readEA link

(worldhappiness.report)

Barry Grimes Feb 8, 2024, 10:36 AM
20 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Self-guided mental health apps aren’t cost-effective… yet
Welcome to the forum! Thanks so much for taking the time to dig into this question and sharing your findings. The treatment gap in global mental health is enormous and apps are an essential tool for addressing this challenge.
I didn’t have time to review your calculations in detail, but I have a few general reflections that may be useful.

1) There is a brand new meta-analysis on the efficacy of mental health apps which includes 176 RCTS (Linardon et al, 2024). They conclude that “apps have overall small but significant effects on symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety, and that specific features of apps – such as CBT or mood monitoring features and chatbot technology – are associated with larger effect sizes.”

2) There is a substantial difference in efficacy between self-help and guided self-help apps. Kaya Guides (incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship) is using WhatsApp to pilot the WHO’s guided self-help intervention in India. Their founder wrote an excellent summary of their work here.

3) Be careful with using a single WELLBY number for AMF. The wellbeing effects of life-extending interventions vary widely depending on philosophical choices, so it is better to use the range of possible outcomes rather than a single figure (see The Elephant in the Bednet).

4) John Torous is a leading researcher and thought leader in digital mental health. If you’d like to spend more time learning about this topic, I recommend looking at his recent publications.
5) The current market for mental health apps is completely unregulated and there are major concerns about privacy and data protection. Wellcome recently awarded £1.8m to MHRA and NICE to explore how the market could be regulated more effectively to protect patient safety.

Barry Grimes Jan 25, 2024, 9:22 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: sn’s comment on: Mental Health Report (CEARCH) [Executive Summary]
You may be interested in this recent meta-analysis on the efficacy of mental health apps. The authors conclude that: “apps have overall small but significant effects on symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety, and that specific features of apps – such as CBT or mood monitoring features and chatbot technology – are associated with larger effect sizes.”

Barry Grimes Jan 8, 2024, 1:48 PM
11 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Whose life matters more—a baby’s or an adult’s?
I recommend The Elephant in the Bednet as an accessible introduction to the different philosophical theories for the badness of death.

Barry Grimes Dec 31, 2023, 1:42 PM
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Wellbeing alignment—proposal to The Happier Lives Institute with focus on systemic changes
This comment helps to highlight the importance of language when discussing this topic. Happiness and wellbeing are not the same thing and it can lead to confusion when the two terms are used interchangeably.
This post explains the three main theories of wellbeing: hedonism, desire-based views, and objective list views. If you’re a hedonist, then failing to optimise for happiness would be a mistake. However, as Owen points out, people often trade off happiness for other things they value which is more consistent with the objective list theory.
Over recent decades, the field of wellbeing science has settled on ‘life satisfaction’ as the primary metric for subjective wellbeing. It’s still important to track other measures too (e.g., positive/negative affect, sense of meaning/purpose), but I share the view that life satisfaction should be the goal of society.
That’s because life satisfaction is the common unit that people use when they make trade-offs between happiness, purpose, duty etc. It’s the ‘all things considered’ assessment of a person’s life, according to what they value. Many attempts to measure wellbeing rely on a dashboard of indicators, but in all those cases, the relative weightings of the indicators are decided by the researchers rather than the subjects of the research and, in my view, that misses the whole point. Having said that, I’ve read some compelling arguments against the life satisfaction approach from Plant (2023) and Thoma (2021) which readers may find insightful.

Barry Grimes Dec 11, 2023, 11:19 AM
23 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: Gregory Lewis🔸’s comment on: Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded
I’m feeling confused by these two statements:
Although there are other problems, those I have repeated here make the recommendations of the report unsafe.
Even if one still believes the bulk of (appropriate) analysis paths still support a recommendation, this sensitivity should be made transparent.
The first statement says HLI’s recommendation is unsafe, but the second implies it is reasonable as long as the sensitivity is clearly explained. I’m grateful to Greg for presenting the analysis paths which lead to SM < GD, but it’s unclear to me how much those paths should be weighted compared to all the other paths which lead to SM > GD.

It’s notable that Cuijpers (who has done more than anyone in the field to account for publication bias and risk of bias) is still confident that psychotherapy is effective.

I was also surprised by the use of ‘unsafe’. Less cost-effective maybe, but ‘unsafe’ implies harm and I haven’t seen any evidence to support that claim.

Barry Grimes Dec 8, 2023, 4:36 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded
Thanks Rebecca. I will delete the duplicates.

Barry Grimes Dec 8, 2023, 10:01 AM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded
I recently discovered that GiveWell decided to exclude an outlier in their water chlorination meta-analysis. I’m not qualified to judge their reasoning, but maybe others with sufficient expertise will weigh in?
We excluded one RCT that meets our other criteria because we think the results are implausibly high such that we don’t believe they represent the true effect of chlorination interventions (more in footnote).[4] It’s unorthodox to exclude studies for this reason when conducting a meta-analysis, but we chose to do so because we think it gives us an overall estimate that is more likely to represent the true effect size.

Barry Grimes Dec 8, 2023, 9:59 AM
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded
I recently discovered that GiveWell decided to exclude an outlier in their water chlorination meta-analysis. I’m not qualified to judge their reasoning, but maybe others with sufficient expertise will weigh in?
We excluded one RCT that meets our other criteria because we think the results are implausibly high such that we don’t believe they represent the true effect of chlorination interventions (more in footnote).[4] It’s unorthodox to exclude studies for this reason when conducting a meta-analysis, but we chose to do so because we think it gives us an overall estimate that is more likely to represent the true effect size.

Barry Grimes Dec 6, 2023, 12:19 PM
21 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Burner1989’s comment on: Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded
[Disclaimer: I worked at HLI until March 2023. I now work at the International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders]
Gregory says
these problems are sufficiently major I think potential donors are ill-advised to follow the recommendations and analysis in this report.
That is a strong claim to make and it requires him to present a convincing case that GiveDirectly is more cost-effective than StrongMinds. I’ve found his previous methodological critiques to be constructive and well-explained. To their credit, HLI has incorporated many of them in the updated analysis. However, in my opinion, the critiques he presents here do not make a convincing case.
Taking his summary points in turn...
1. The literature on PT in LMICs is a complete mess. Insofar as more sense can be made from it, the most important factors appear to belong to the studies investigating it (e.g. their size) rather than qualities of the PT interventions themselves.
I think this is much too strong. The three meta-analyses (and Gregory’s own calculations) give me confidence that psychotherapy in LMICs is effective, although the effects are likely to be small.
2. Trying to correct the results of a compromised literature is known to be a nightmare. Here, the qualitative evidence for publication bias is compelling. But quantifying what particular value of ‘a lot?’ the correction should be is fraught: numerically, methods here disagree with one another dramatically, and prove highly sensitive to choices on data exclusion.
There is no consensus on the appropriate methodology for adjusting publication bias. I don’t have an informed opinion on this, but HLI’s approach seems reasonable to me and I think it’s reasonable for Greg to take a different view. From my limited understanding, neither approach makes GiveDirectly more cost-effective.
3. Regardless of how PT looks in general, StrongMinds, in particular, is looking less and less promising. Although initial studies looked good, they had various methodological weaknesses, and a forthcoming RCT with much higher methodological quality is expected to deliver disappointing results.
We don’t have any new data on StrongMinds so I’m confused why Greg thinks it’s “less and less promising”. HLI’s Bayesian approach is a big improvement on the subjective weightings they used in the first cost-effectiveness analysis. As with publication bias, it’s reasonable to hold different views on how to construct the prior, but personally, I do believe that any psychotherapy intervention in LMICs, so long as cost per patient is <$100, is a ~certain bet to beat cash transfers. There are no specific models of psychotherapy that perform better than the others, so I don’t find it surprising that training people to talk to other people about their problems is a more cost-effective way to improve wellbeing in LMICs. Cash transfers are much more expensive and the effects on subjective wellbeing are also small.
4. The evidential trajectory here is all to common, and the outlook typically bleak. It is dubious StrongMinds is a good pick even among psychotherapy interventions (picking one at random which doesn’t have a likely-bad-news RCT imminent seems a better bet). Although pricing different interventions is hard, it is even more dubious SM is close to the frontier of “very well evidenced” vs. “has very promising results” plotted out by things like AMF, GD, etc. HLI’s choice to nonetheless recommend SM again this giving season is very surprising. I doubt it will weather hindsight well.
HLI had to start somewhere and I think we should give credit to StrongMinds for being brave enough to open themselves up to the scrutiny they’ve faced. The three meta-analyses and the tentative analysis of Friendship Bench suggest there is ‘altruistic gold’ to be found here and HLI has only just started to dig. The field is growing quickly and I’m optimistic about the trajectories of CE-incubated charities like Vida Plena and Kaya Guides.
In the meantime, although the gap between GiveDirectly and StrongMinds has clearly narrowed, I remain unconvinced that cash is clearly the better option (but I do remain open-minded and open to pushback).

Barry Grimes Nov 23, 2023, 12:55 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Snowden🔸’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Thanks for providing such a thoughtful response. These value judgments are extremely difficult and it looks like you did the best you could with the evidence available. I haven’t looked into the subjective wellbeing of suicide survivors but, if there’s enough data, this could provide a helpful sense-check to your original discount rate.
Although means restriction is very successful at reducing suicide rates, I’m curious how it compares to social determinants (or psychotherapy) if the goal is DALYs/QALYs/WELLBYs. It seems plausible that public health interventions that focus on improving quality of life could lead to a larger overall benefit (for a larger population) than ones that focus solely on reducing suicides (depending on philosophical views of course!)

Barry Grimes Nov 21, 2023, 3:29 PM
15 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
I’m very pleased to see public health become a distinct part of OP’s portfolio. In particular, the continued support for suicide prevention is very welcome.

I’m curious about how you model the future wellbeing of the people whose suicides are prevented. Given that your focus is on LMICs, it’s very unlikely they’ll receive mental health treatment, so what happens to them? Do they make a full recovery or do they (and their families) continue to suffer?

I don’t think this was your intention, but this post implies that OP only cares about reducing the deaths and you’re not planning to do anything to alleviate the suffering.

Within the field of global mental health, there is growing interest in how to influence social determinants of mental health. Lund (2023) makes some tentative suggestions for public health interventions which may be of interest to you.

Barry Grimes Jun 23, 2023, 7:39 PM
7 points
1 ∶ 3
on: Correctly Calibrated Trust
This is a very half-baked idea, but most trust-based services (e.g. Uber, Airbnb, Trustpilot) seem to have settled on five-star ratings and/or reviews as a solution. Perhaps you could experiment with adding similar functionality to EA Forum profiles for orgs and/or individuals, although I’m sceptical the benefits would outweigh the potential downsides.

Barry Grimes Jun 23, 2023, 7:01 PM
13 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Justin Sandefur’s comment on: How economists got Africa’s AIDS epidemic wrong
I noticed that much of the political tractability discussion has focussed on counterfactuals involving other diseases (e.g. malaria) but I’m more confused why the government prioritised treatment over prevention.

Oster’s article argued that prevention would be a better bet than treatment and that was written in 2005 when Congress had approved the budget and the prices of the drugs had come down. You also highlight the importance of, “the evidence from those who had worked in the field that antiretroviral drugs and preventive measures could be deployed effectively and at reasonable cost, even in very poor settings”. (emphasis added)

So both options had evidence of feasibility and efficacy, the money was already there, and it seems like, at that time, they didn’t know which option would scale better or get cheaper quicker.

I’m struggling to see what Oster got wrong. Was the decision to prioritise treatment over prevention mostly driven by the emotional appeal of the ‘Lazarus effect’?

Barry Grimes

Sub­mit a chap­ter pro­posal for the 2025 World Hap­piness Report

Submit a chapter proposal for the 2025 World Happiness Report