Former software entrepreneur, I now advise businesses, play the stock market, and attempt non-fiction writing
bfinn
Karma: 89
Coronavirus: how much is a life worth?
Oddly, Britain has never been happier
Dying for a day at the beach
162 benefits of coronavirus
I’ve just been through it all. A great resource—with harms too. Glad to see I had thought of almost all the long-term benefits (!), but have added a few more from it here, and thought of several further points too.
I agree. I’m extremely wary of suggestions that you can compare the strength of children & adults’ emotions/pain from their behaviour (or perhaps any other way). So it seems to me the only reasonable assumption is that they are the same for all humans who are fully conscious. (I.e. possibly lower for young babies, some mentally disabled; though the precautionary principle suggests we shouldn’t assume this.)
Rationality of demonstrating & voting
(Belatedly) Re trusting that people will do the work they say they will: in particular this illustrates that developers are notoriously unreliable & hard to manage (due to typical personality type). And unless they are very experienced, they underestimate how long development will take, by a factor of at least 2; because they fail to take into account the time required for specification, testing, bug-fixing, rewriting, documentation, management, admin, and unforeseen problems. Development is mostly not writing code, but doing these other things.
Additionally, R&D involves research as well as development to varying degrees, and this project required a fair bit of research (e.g. trial & error), as you weren’t sure what you were developing and what might work.
These are well-known, almost universal problems with software startups. In an established business they can be solved by management: hiring an experienced CTO and often also a project manager. With a startup it’s harder, unless a founder or lead developer has sufficient relevant experience. (An experienced advisor can help somewhat.)
Indeed, I looked at Trump’s approval rating over time and it’s been about average for US presidents with little pandemic effect. Possibly the US is a bit of an outlier in this regard though, or it’s a bit early for an assessment.
Because the ultimate Covid death toll will be a stark, objective measure of performance relative to other countries, I suspect later in the year it will be harder for voters anywhere to maintain illusions about how well or badly their country has handled the pandemic. (That said, much is not really down to the leaders, as no-one can really be expected to have known how best to handle it, given the limited information early on and the variety of strategies that have been tried. I have little doubt though that Trump’s decision-making has been particularly poor.)
Indeed I think it will accelerate this issue, though maybe not resolve it.
In the UK, and no doubt elsewhere, universities have cancelled courses for the rest of the year, or are making them online-only, but refusing to refund students; which will make students acutely aware of what value for money they’re getting, or not.
That said I did read somewhere the observation that as degrees are as much about status & signalling as actual learning, it may make little difference. People will still prefer the prestige of an Ivy League or Oxbridge education if they can get it. That said, that prestige is rather bound up with physical attendance in grand surroundings, surrounded by top-notch professors etc.
Well, the specific caller in question aside, a fall from 8⁄10 to 4⁄10 (on a happiness or life satisfaction 0 to 10 scale) is plausible for a significant minority of people, e.g. if you’re elderly and live alone and have nothing much to occupy you indoors. In the UK (more so in some other countries) you’re not allowed out to relax; you need to be exercising, e.g. walking, not sitting on a bench or whatever (and police in my area are enforcing this); and the guideline is max 1 hour per day. And many with underlying health conditions in the UK are being told not to go out at all.
If this tipped you into depression, which it might with some, that could easily cause a fall from 8⁄10 to 4⁄10 or 6⁄10 to 3⁄10.
Of course the precise numbers are not really the point—I was just wanting to illustrate that the loss in quality of life can be large and of a similar scale to loss of longevity, so far from negligible.
I suspect also that if you’re elderly and may only have a few years of life left then you put a very high value on maintaining your regular activities, maybe weighting quality of life rather higher than quantity (no doubt there is research on this). Hence why when very ill they sometimes forego treatment, choose to die sooner at home rather than be kept alive in hospital, etc.
I’ve just updated the figures (in footnote 7) using Imperial College’s latest global forecast of deaths. Previously a global recession like the last one came out as about 1 to 4 times as bad as pandemic deaths (in terms of impact on well-being); now it is 2.8-35 times as bad.
I’m not an expert, but I assume (from a glance at the second paper) this is because the 1%-59% is a cost (opportunity cost), not a value of a life year as such; i.e. in a very poor country you can extend a life by a year for as little as $3, maybe with a vaccine or micronutrient supplement. Actually that seems an order of magnitude too low to me; but nonetheless, it’s a great deal!
On the aging thing I’ve just done a rough estimate. The median age increased about 3 years between 1999 and 2019, and as it’s around 40 which is before the mid-life crisis (life satisfaction being U-shaped as you age, the lowpoint around 50), an age increase of 3 years would if anything lower happiness. (Of course it would be a mix of some going down and others up depending on their ages, but the overall effect would presumably be down. Incidentally the bottom of the U-shape hasn’t noticeably got older as the population aged over this period.)
But the effect is small anyway—the median, getting 3 years older, would lose about 0.07/10 points life satisfaction (when expressed as a score out of 10), which is only about 10% of the 1999-2019 change, as well as in the wrong direction.
Good article. Various things you mention are examples of bad metrics. Another common kind is metrics involving thresholds, e.g. the number of people below a poverty line. Since they treat all people below, or above, the line as equal to each other, when this is far from the case. (Living on $1/day is far harder than $1.90/day.) This often results in organisations wasting vast amounts of money/effort moving people from just below the line to just above, with little actual improvement, and perhaps ignoring others who could have been helped much more even if they couldn’t be moved across the line.
Thanks for this. There’s been quite a bit more research since that paper, including by Easterlin, so not sure how relevant it is now. The latest I know FWIW is from last year’s book by Richard Layard, Can We Be Happier?, which says it’s unclear but maybe economic growth often increases happiness but not always.
A significant further thought:
The above calculation is done on life expectancies, treated as expected utilities; but human psychology doesn’t work like that:
Arguably in Chris’s particular case she may lose somewhat less than half her quality of life by conforming with the lockdown. In which case her behaviour looks irrational in life expectancy terms.
But Chris’s behaviour is rational if she is risk-seeking. She prefers gambling her life (and perhaps others’) by going to the beach, to the alternative of suffering a sure loss of quality of life by staying at home. This is normal behaviour in prospect theory—the same as a ‘desperado’ who, faced with arrest and inevitable jailtime, prefers the higher risk, less certain, lower expected utility option of stealing a car, shooting at cops etc. in the hope of getting away.
I.e. Chris, a 75-year-old desperado, is risking death to avoid imprisonment (and for some people, solitary confinement).
On a separate small point, I think your probability estimate for ESP is too low, for two reasons:
Firstly, it is a taboo topic (like UFOs and the Loch Ness monster), which scientists are therefore far more likely to dismiss from a position of ignorance, or with weakish arguments (e.g. ‘it lacks an explanatory mechanism’, ‘much of the research methodology is flawed’, or ‘some of the research has been on fraudsters’ - hardly disproof). Few skeptics have domain expertise, i.e. of having conducted or investigated research in the area.
Secondly, ESP covers quite a range of rather distinct phenomena. Only one has to be right for ESP to be true. And I’m not sure that all would require completely novel scientific principles (e.g. unknown physical forces); and the fact that our understanding of physics has gaps, and our understanding of consciousness certainly does, may well leave room for some form of ESP to be compatible with current science (not that that is essential).
Thanks, very useful. The World Happiness Report data (from Gallup World Poll; I’d seen the figures before but couldn’t find more info) does show a rise of about 0.25/10 over the period—about one-third of the rise in the other ONS and Eurobarometer results (when Eurobarometer converted to a score out of 10).
I suspect the difference is in the wording of the question, which defines 0 as ‘the worst possible life for you’ and 10 as ‘the best possible life for you’ and asks where they are now. (It doesn’t mention the word ‘satisfaction’). Whereas the ONS question is ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’ where 0 = not at all satisfied and 10 = completely satisfied (Eurobarometer has similar wording AFAIK). They’re rather different, and personally I find the ‘life for you’ wording (which I’ve come across before) a bit confusing, as does 10 mean ‘doing as well as I could given my abilities & circumstances’ or ‘having the best life I can imagine (with no restriction)’?
[ADDED] To put it another way, the Gallup question seems to be asking people to compare with some unclear external scale of what’s possible for their life (in the real world? in a fantasy world in which they could be a rock star or Bill Gates?), rather than how satisfied they feel about their life (a more internal scale of feelings). If they’re comparing where they actually are with what might be possible in a fantasy world, it’s not so surprising it doesn’t go up much, because reality rarely approaches fantasy.
Without deciding which survey has a ‘better wording’, if any of them shows a substantial effect then it suggests something is going on in whatever that question is measuring.
There is a lot of happiness data available, including from the ONS, but there is a tendency now to prefer life satisfaction because it’s more stable (happiness varies with the weather and day of the week) and more all-encompassing. So I didn’t look into it. Though the ONS happiness data show the same trend over time as satisfaction.
(On a lesser point, I don’t know how large the Gallup poll is but I imagine, like Eurobarometer, it’s a few thousand people per country. The ONS is over 150,000 so very reliable. That said, aggregating multiple years removes the sample size problem.)
Very good article. Re marriage, and also the Easterlin Paradox:
Re fig 1, marriage, more recent research shows the apparent reversion of satisfaction to singlehood level (or less) a few years after marriage actually just results from not controlling for age properly. Specifically, from the U-shaped happiness curve during the life course - people tend to marry before middle age, so get less happy as they approach middle age, not because of the marriage. (I think this may be mentioned in the recent Origins of Happiness book.)
Re fig 3 for UK, actually if you look at a longer time-series e.g. Eurobarometer (since 1973), UK life satisfaction has gone up significantly—from around 7.1 in the 1970s to 7.7/10 in 2018 (after transforming to 0-10 scale); and rather more since the only older survey I could find, 5.7/10 in 1948.
Also re China, you say elsewhere ‘it’s SWB seems to have gone down been 1990 and 2015, even though per capita GDP increased by 5 times’. I haven’t read the report you refer to, but I the World Value Survey on happiness (as opposed to life satisfaction) shows the proportion of Chinese who are happy rising from 67% in 1993 to 85% in 2014. (You can check it on the second chart here: https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction# )
So maybe the Easterlin paradox does not exist, or at least, is limited.