Explore our cost-effectiveness analysis of NEPI's innovative programme combining cash transfers and CBT to reduce crime in Liberia. With strong RCT evidence showing significant benefits to both recipients and the wider community, we estimate 22 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated. Read the report to learn how this promising intervention improves wellbeing and reduces criminality over the long term.
Michael Plant
The experiences we have as young children are widely recognized as having lasting impacts in later life. Supporting parents to engage with their children shows clear short-term developmental benefits and may have profound long-term effects on wellbeing, as well as health and achievement later in life.
This report evaluates icddr,b's Reach Up parenting programme. Download and read the report to explore the Happier Lives Institute’s cost-effectiveness analysis, measuring the programme’s impact on long-term wellbeing in WELLBYs.
There can be toxic levels of lead in all sorts of surprising products, including cosmetics. Lead exposure causes a global health burden comparable to malaria and HIV but receives less than 0.1% of their funding - even though malaria and HIV are themselves neglected diseases. Reducing lead exposure also seems feasible, given the strong historical success of advocacy campaigns. We evaluate Pure Earth’s program to reduce lead in cosmetics in Ghana, involving two years of advocacy and data collection followed by three years of enforcement support for a lead ban. We estimate it delivers 108 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated ($9.23 per WELLBY), making it the most cost-effective charity we have reviewed to-date. Optimistic assumptions increase this as high as 1,359 WELLBYs per $1,000 ($0.74 per WELLBY).
Globally, 45 million children suffer from malnutrition, leading to 2.3 million child deaths
annually. But even for those who live, the experience of malnutrition can have lifelong impacts on physical and cognitive health and social-emotional development. There is a consensus on how best to address extreme malnutrition: feeding kids a standard
formula of peanut butter enhanced with vitamins and nutrients alongside basic medical care to prevent or treat infections. This intervention, known as community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM), saves lives and improves health and development. What this report seeks to find out is how effective it is at also improving happiness.
This page is under construction and will be updated soon.
To my surprise and delight, the Happier Lives Institute (HLI) is now five years old. When we started on this ambitious, idealistic project of finding and sharing the most impactful, evidence-based ways to improve happiness for others, I would have been delighted to last one year, let alone five. To celebrate, I’m sharing five lessons from our journey so far.
By: Michael Plant
Dr Michael Plant conducted an in-person site visit to better understand the StrongMinds programme and the people in it. We don’t expect site visits can, or should, be decisive for evaluation purposes (they are ‘anecdata’), but they can nevertheless be informative.
Visitor: Dr Michael Plant, Founder & Research Director at the Happier Lives Institute
Date of visit: 11 April 2024
Document written: 19 April 2024
By: Michael Plant
Dr Michael Plant conducted an in-person site visit to better understand the Friendship Bench programme and the people in it. We don’t expect site visits can, or should, be decisive for evaluation purposes (they are ‘anecdata’), but they can nevertheless be informative.
Visitor: Dr Michael Plant, Founder & Research Director at the Happier Lives Institute
Date of visit: 04 April 2024
Document written: 10 April 2024
By: Michael Plant
We set out our research priorities.
On the 2nd of June 2023, Elie Hassenfeld was interviewed on the 80'000 hours podcast. Here, we present our responses.
By: Michael Plant
In this shallow cause exploration, we explore the impact of lead exposure on subjective wellbeing. We review the literature, model the impact of lead exposure on wellbeing, and conduct some back-of-the-envelope calculations of the cost-effectiveness of various interventions to decrease lead exposure.
We present a pilot of 50 survey questions we intend to use to assess questions of comparability, linearity, and neutrality in subjective wellbeing measurements.
In this shallow cause exploration, we explore the impact of immigration on subjective wellbeing. We review the literature, model the impact of immigration on wellbeing, and conduct some back-of-the-envelope calculations of the cost-effectiveness of various interventions to increase immigration.
In this shallow cause exploration, we explore the relationship between pain and subjective wellbeing; assess the severity and scale of chronic pain in terms of life satisfaction; and offer some novel back-of-the-envelope calculations for the cost-effectiveness of several interventions to treat pain.
In this report, we summarise the debate about the efficacy of deworming, present the first analysis of deworming in terms of subjective wellbeing, and compare the cost-effectiveness of deworming to StrongMinds (our current top recommended charity).
How should we compare the value of extending lives to improving lives? Doing so requires us to make various philosophical assumptions, either implicitly or explicitly. But these choices are rarely acknowledged or discussed by decision-makers, all of them are controversial, and they have significant implications for how resources should be distributed.
We raise twelve critiques of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses. Ten apply to specific inputs for malaria prevention, cash transfers, and deworming. Two are relevant for more than one intervention.
We propose the wellbeing-adjusted life year (WELLBY), the wellbeing equivalent of the DALY or QALY, as the obvious framework to do cost-effectiveness analyses of non-health, non-pecuniary benefits.
We make four recommendations to improve GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses: (1) publicly explain and defend their assumptions about the effect of deworming over time; (2) explain their cost-effectiveness analyses in writing; (3) illustrate the sensitivity of their results to key parameters; (4) make it clear when an estimate is subjective or evidence-based.
This post is a philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritisation Framework, the method they use to compare the value of different outcomes. In practice, the framework focuses on the relative value of just two outcomes, increasing income and adding years of life.
By: Michael Plant
This post explores and evaluates an internal bargaining approach to moral uncertainty. On this account, the appropriate decision under moral uncertainty is the one that would be reached as the result of negotiations between agents representing the interests of each moral theory, who are awarded resources in proportion to your credence in that theory.
By: Michael Plant
Progress Studies has been popularised by academics such as Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker. However, the Easterlin Paradox presents a real challenge to the claim that if we want more progress, we just need to improve the long-run growth rate - a view that Cowen argues for in his book Stubborn Attachments.
By: Michael Plant
We update our previous analysis to incorporate the household spillover effects for cash transfers and psychotherapy. We estimate that psychotherapy is 9 times (95% CI: 2, 100) more cost-effective than cash transfers. The charity StrongMinds is estimated to be 9 times (95% CI: 1, 90) more cost-effective than the charity GiveDirectly.
Drawing on evidence from over 80 studies and over 140,000 participants, we compare the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy by estimating their effect on the recipient's subjective wellbeing and affective mental health.
This report explains how we determined the cost-effectiveness of StrongMinds using subjective wellbeing and affective mental health.
This report explains how we determined the cost-effectiveness of group or task-shifted psychotherapy in low- and middle-income countries using subjective wellbeing and affective mental health.
This report explains how we determined the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers using subjective wellbeing and affective mental health.
This report investigates the global burden of mental illness. It sets out how big the problem is, how much spending it receives, and how those resources are allocated. It then focuses specifically on what can be done to reduce anxiety and depression in low-income countries.
We set out our research priorities.
There are long-standing doubts about whether data from subjective scales are cardinally comparable—should we, for instance, believe that if two people self-report their happiness as '7/10' then they are as happy as each other? It is unclear how to assess whether these doubts are justified without first addressing two unresolved theoretical questions: how do people interpret subjective scales, and which assumptions are required for cardinal comparability? This working paper offers answers to both.
By: Michael Plant
Millions suffer excruciating pain. Millions more suffer moderate or severe pain. They suffer despite the fact that cheap and effective treatments exist. This report briefly discusses the measurement of pain then explores three major causes of pain and what might be done to relieve them.
This short article summarises what philosophers do (and don't) mean by the term "wellbeing". It introduces the three main rival accounts of what wellbeing is and considers their theoretical strengths and weaknesses.
We show how Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Years (WELLBYs) can be used to estimate the value of different outcomes. We then estimate the values of two key inputs in GiveWell’s analysis: doubling consumption for one person for one year and averting the death of a child under 5 years old.
This working paper makes three main claims: 1) life satisfaction theories are indistinguishable from global desire theories; 2) these theories are the only subjectivist accounts of wellbeing; and 3) subjectivism is implausible, although for different reasons from those that are usually given.
By: Michael Plant
We set out our research priorities.
By: Michael Plant
In his DPhil thesis, Michael Plant critiques and develops claims about how individuals can do the most good including discussion of the value of saving lives, how best to improve lives, and cause prioritisation methodology.
By: Michael Plant
​This article gives a brief introduction to the measurement of wellbeing and how to compare the impact of various outcomes, such as improving health or reducing poverty.
By: Michael Plant