Samuel Dupret: Can Money Buy Happiness? (Happier Lives Institute) #17
Samuel, a Research Manager at the Happier Lives Institute, discusses why improving wellbeing in global development can be a highly effective career choice, and why using evidence-based research to measure impact is key. He also talks about how pursuing a career in this field can lead to both personal fulfillment and global impact.
Articles, organisations, and other media discussed in this episode
Costa Rica and Happiness Reports – Known for its high levels of wellbeing when self-measured.
Effective Altruism for Christians (EACH) – Spotlights highly effective charities that reduce suffering and improve lives globally.
Friendship Bench Zimbabwe – Offers mental health support through community-based therapy in Zimbabwe.
Gallup – Conducts research and collects data that contributes to the World Happiness Report, tracking global wellbeing and happiness trends.
GiveDirectly – Organisation that provides unconditional cash transfers to people living in poverty.
GiveWell – Charity evaluator that supports highly cost-effective organisations.
GiveWell Analysis of Happier Lives Institute’s Assessment of Strong Minds
Happier Lives Institute’s Response to GiveWell’s Analysis
Giving What We Can – Encourages 10% income pledge to the most effective charities.
Happier Lives Institute Report - Can We Trust Wellbeing Reports? – Examines the reliability of wellbeing surveys and their use in global assessments.
Happier Lives Institute Report - The Elephant in the Bednet – Discusses considerations of extending and/or improving lives when choosing health interventions.
Pure Earth – Most cost-effective charity that HLI has evaluated.
Ryan Dwyer’s Paper – How wealth redistribution can positively impact happiness and wellbeing globally.
State of Life – Promotes and evaluates strategies to improve long-term life satisfaction and happiness globally.
Strong Minds – Provides psychotherapy services to individuals in Uganda to help improve mental health and wellbeing.
Strong Minds and Friendship Bench v4 Analysis - Intervention in Zimbabwe for mental health.
World Happiness Report Chapter - Contributions from the Happier Lives Institute
Taimaka – A malnutrition-focused charity evaluated by Happier Lives Institute, working to combat hunger and malnutrition in West Africa.
The Bible Project – Beatitudes Series – Looks at how these teachings relate to human happiness.
The Bible Project – Sermon on the Mount Series – Explores Jesus’ teachings on ethics, wellbeing, and the kingdom of God.
Dr Caspar Kaiser – Researcher and expert on wellbeing and happiness, with a collection of recommended literature on the subject.
Episode Highlights:
Does Money Buy Happiness?
“To some extent, yes, money does buy happiness for others. So you can give some of your money to charities that will improve the happiness of other people. And when I'm talking about happiness, I'm not saying some sort of woo thing about yoga mats and berries. Just like the core thing about what makes life go well, what's a good life. So this philosophical understanding of well-being and happiness.”
Measuring Wellbeing:
“The measurement of wellbeing is quite easy. You just ask people to report it. So if I want to know how well your life is going, I could look at your bank account and your medical records and say, well, this is how good JD's life is. Or I could ask you, on a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life or how happy are you?”
Why Measure Happiness?
“And an advantage of the wellbeing measures is that it's a measure that has had a lot of interest, like economists, psychologists, development people, policy people, they're all interested in this. So that is probably one of the subjective measures that has been like the most tested. Asking people about their household income in some places is also very demanding compared to asking them on zero to 10, how's your life? Asking them how many cows and assets and food they have is a whole process as well, the simplicity of this is an advantage.”
Comparing Interventions and Cost-Effectiveness:
“So for example, Strong Minds delivers group psychotherapy in Uganda, which is a place where people otherwise don't really have access to psychotherapy, have little knowledge about depression and wellbeing and psychology. And that we've calculated overall, including the spillovers and the effect over time, that improves wellbeing by about 1.8 well-being. So it's the equivalent of a 1.8 increase over a year, but it's actually a smaller increase over a longer period of time. So 1.8 for this, a big cash transfer is much bigger, it's closer to 10 wellbeings, but it costs a lot more to send $1,000 as a cash transfer than to fund psychotherapy for someone. So it costs between $15 and $50 to give group psychotherapy to someone in low income country, it costs over a thousand dollars to send a thousand dollars to someone in low income country.”
A Christian Approach to Wellbeing and Happiness:
“And I would say that ultimately, or, we all need a renewed relationship with our creator that God allows because God the son became incarnate, died on a cross for our sins and came back to life. So death is a big end on wellbeing. Resurrection and new creation, big bonus for wellbeing.”
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JD (00:01)
Does money buy happiness? I'm joined here today with a researcher, Samuel Dupret from happier lives Institute who wants to argue. Yes, it does, but with a caveat. So stay tuned. We get into it in one minute from now, but as a roadmap, we begin the episode talking about how you can measure happiness. That's what Samuel's trying to do. And he's done it and produced a chapter in the world happiness report, which is.
Basically one of the main authorities on this topic. Now we talk about how to think about this as Christians, whether we should be optimizing for happiness, how to think about suffering and how to think about finding meaning amidst your happiness or unhappy moments. Uh, we talk about what charities can provide the most bang for your buck. And Samuel claims that the best charities aren't just a little bit better than average. There are a thousand times better than average. We also.
close this episode looking at what Jesus meant by blessed are the poor in spirit and give some career advice for any of you listeners who are interested in pursuing a career with maximum impact on pressing global issues. So if you enjoy this episode, please like and subscribe, but also check out our show notes for, for detailed timestamps or our website for more information about how you can make an impact on the world. Let's dive in.
JD (01:23)
Awesome. Samuel, hey, thanks so much for coming on.
Samuel (01:26)
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
JD (01:28)
So I know you pretty well at this point, but for those who don't know you, take maybe two minutes, share a bit about yourself, what you do and how it is you impact the world for God's kingdom.
Samuel (01:39)
I'm Samuel. I was born in a Christian family, grew up in the Geneva area, came to the UK to do university. I did cognitive science and now I'm a research manager for the Happier Lives Institute. We do two sorts of research, some fundamental research about what is wellbeing and how do you measure it and some cost effectiveness research about what are the best interventions and charities to do the most good for your money.
JD (02:09)
That's awesome. And you guys famously came out quite recently with a chapter in the world happiness report, which to my knowledge is kind of like the biggest report on happiness, subjective wellbeing that comes out every, is it every year now or.
Samuel (02:24)
Every year since 2012, I think this is like a collaboration with the UN and very big names like Halliwell and others involved in this. And every year they publish a ranking of the most happy countries to the least happy countries that have been surveyed. But what people don't really know about is that there are chapters beyond the rankings. And at the Happier Lives Institute this year, we've
We've written a chapter about cost effectiveness and charities.
JD (02:57)
What were some of the key findings? And, yeah, I was really intrigued by that headline. Like does money buy happiness? So Samuel does money buy happiness?
Samuel (03:05)
To some extent, yes, money does buy happiness for others. So you can give some of your monies to charities that will improve the happiness of other people. And when I'm talking about happiness, I'm not saying some sort of woo thing about yoga mats and berries. Just like the core thing about what makes life go well, what's a good life. So this philosophical understanding of well-being and happiness.
this is the first kind of review of cost effectiveness of charities in terms of wellbeing. this is, something that, we've been working on for a while. We're really proud of, and the core thing, the core finding is that you can increase the good you do a hundred times or even a thousand times for no cost to yourself by just giving money to the most cost effective charities.
rather than the least cost effective ones because there are really big gaps in how much good a charity can do with your money.
JD (04:09)
That's awesome. No, I am familiar with this concept of like 10,000 X differential and effective altruism. talk a lot about that difference. think oftentimes it's talked about in the context of costs to save a life, Like, or disability adjusted life years, stopping people from getting life altering, you know, injuries to limb and in livelihood. But you look at this from a different direction.
or dimension rather, the dimension of wellbeing, right? So how does Happier Lives Institute think about wellbeing and happiness, make it like more granular
Samuel (04:47)
So yeah, there two things that often people discuss like, how better are some charities than others? And usually people seem to believe like the best charities just 1.5 or two times better than the average charity. Experts and ineffective altruism, people talk a lot about a hundred times better. Actually, no one has done this sort of analysis of charities and how much better they are compared to others. There's some analysis with...
interventions in health and things like that. But like this is the first time this is about charities and their cost effectiveness. And there's an interesting sample of charities in our report and their analysis by other people. The second thing that's interesting about this analysis, as you mentioned, is that we're not looking at health or number of lives saved. We're looking at wellbeing. So wellbeing is, we consider this to be what ultimately matters. So you often have people look at
health measures or how much income a charity or an intervention has done. And these things are great things. Like it's great that people have money and people have health, but they are not the ultimate thing. They're instrumental things. For example, why is it good that I have money? Well, with that money, I can buy food and shelter and these things. And why is it good that I have these things? Well, if you continue that reasoning far enough, you get to the point where you're talking about what's ultimately good. And in philosophy, that's well-being. There's different theories of well-being.
JD (06:05)
Right.
Samuel (06:12)
Generally the idea is that things like how people think and feel about their lives is what ultimately matters. A little test for this is if you gave money to someone or to a charity and they did something and the people were just as miserable before and after, then that's not affecting the thing that matters.
JD (06:28)
Yeah, that's true. That's a really important concept. And it's also a theologically loaded concept too, right? Like what is actually best for us? What is good for me? And we can give that concept a placeholder term, wellbeing, right? But at happy lives Institute, you have a way to measure this thing and how do you go about measuring this thing?
Samuel (06:52)
Yeah, so this is not something the Appulizer Institute has invented. People have been measuring wellbeing and it's a field in academia that's been growing for a while. the measurement of wellbeing is quite easy. You just ask people to report it. So if I want to know how well your life is going, I could look at your bank account and your medical records and say, well, this is how good JD's life is. Or I could ask you, on a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life or how happy are you?
And these are easy questions that people can answer quite well. And this has been tested a lot. These are valid measurements. They measure what they intend to measure. They're reliable. They don't just change answers whenever you use them. And there's been a lot of work by big organizations like the OECD, for example, has a set of guidelines and member countries measure life satisfaction and other measures of wellbeing.
their citizens. So that's what we use, just like what academics use to measure wellbeing. The extra thing we do, and that's still not something we've invented, but something that we're the main users of, is that we use the wellbeing adjusted life year, where we just integrate the effect on wellbeing over time. So say one wellbeing is a one point increase in your life satisfaction on a zero to 10 scale over a year.
So if you go from a seven to an eight for a year, that's one well be. And that's the thing that we use. And then we divide the number of well-be's that a charity does by the cost. And that's how we get our cost effectiveness measure. How many well-be's does a charity produce per dollar?
JD (08:39)
Right. So let's, let's take an example real quick. let's say you ask somebody how they're doing and they tell you they're six out of 10. And let's say they receive some kind of charitable benefit or program, Maybe they get a cash transfer,
Maybe they go from six out of 10 to like 6.5 out of 10 for like a year. That would be half a well-being.
Samuel (09:08)
would be half a well-being, that's the idea behind it. For other examples, directly from the literature, being unemployed reduces well-being by about 0.5. I was looking earlier, the top kind of ranking countries, like the Nordic countries, compared to the US and the UK, they're about like a point difference.
So that's the magnitudes of these things. And then in our analysis, we go like a step further by, we make sure that this effect is actually something that would have happened, would only happen because of the intervention. We look at how long the effect lasts. We consider things like how it affects other people around them. Like there's a lot that goes into the analysis. So yeah, that's the core idea. And then we build a lot of things on top of it.
JD (10:01)
Nice. Nice. So I was thinking about this even last night because I was catching up with an old friend and he was asking me how I was doing because I am a new father and I've been pretty sleep deprived lately, but I'm on the mend. I'm on the up and up. I remember thinking back then on the rough days, like, man, my wellbeing is like a three out of 10.
And, but last night I told him my wellbeing is like a six out of 10.
Is this actually a reliable way to assess my own happiness? And I wonder, like, maybe there's also something to do with like, who's asking me the context in which I'm giving that answer, right? Like if, if, if I'm talking to someone who I know really well I'm comfortable giving like a very honest, rude answer
So is this like connected to biases about, you know, social pressure? Anyways, you know, I'm going with this, but how does this relate to some of the things you're finding in the research?
Samuel (10:56)
Yeah.
What you describe about maybe I won't tell people exactly how I feel or think about my life. Yes. So social desirability is if I was like, it would look better for me if I said I was a bit higher.
JD (11:05)
Social desirability bias, right? Isn't that the term? Yeah.
Samuel (11:17)
risks are like demand characteristics. So if someone asks me something, like, I'm gonna answer in a way that gets them or me something. That is always a fear and a risk in asking people to self-report things. One good thing is that we use large samples.
like studies use larger samples. if there's like some random error, things like that, that will dissipate. There are control groups. the control group, people who don't receive the intervention are also asked about their wellbeing and we compare the difference between the two. But ultimately it is still an interesting question and something we'd want more answers about. Where would be a big problem is if people answered very differently.
depending on intervention. But whether you're using a cash transfer or a psychotherapy intervention or something like that, you're using self-report. So hopefully if there's a bias, it's the same across all the interventions.
JD (12:28)
Right. Right.
Like people aren't being uniquely biased by wanting to impress others when asked about cash or when asked about, you know, a health intervention and not about all the other interventions, right? There's like a unique, there's a bias, it's kind of universal.
sometimes, right? So sometimes it's a ladder and you ask people to rank where on a scale of one to 10, the steps of the ladder where the top is the best and the bottom is the lowest where they put themselves. Yeah, what are some of other ways that.
Samuel (12:56)
So that ladder is actually what's used in the World Happiness Report for the rankings. Gallup collects that across every country. Other measures would just be asking from 0 to 10. And you could also have a line with the numbers and ask people to point if they're less able to, like, their numeracy is lower and they're less able to answer these questions.
person might have a tablet where you can tap the answer in. So there's a bit of variance around this.
And an advantage of the wellbeing measures is that it's a measure that has had a lot of interest, like economists, psychologists, development people, policy people, they're all interested in this. So that is probably one of the subjective measures that has been like the most
JD (13:45)
Nice. And you gave some examples before like doubling somebody's income for a year increases their, if yeah, increases their wellbeing by what was it? 0.2, 0.5.
Samuel (13:57)
Yeah,
that might depend a little bit from the studies, but that's about it. Being unemployed reduces your well-being by 0.5 for the year.
So if you receive an intervention that improves your wellbeing, it's likely gonna improve the wellbeing of other people around you. So for example,
Strong Minds delivers group psychotherapy in Uganda, which is a place where people otherwise don't really have access to psychotherapy, have little knowledge about depression and wellbeing and psychology. And that we've calculated overall, including the spillovers and the effect over time, that improves wellbeing by about 1.8 well-being. So it's the equivalent of...
a 1.8 increase over a year, but it's actually a smaller increase over a longer period of time. So 1.8 for this, a big cash transfer is much bigger, it's closer to 10 Wellbys, but it costs a lot more to send $1,000 as a cash transfer than to fund Psychotherapy for someone. So it costs between 15 and $50 to give
group psychotherapy to someone in low income country, it costs over a thousand dollars to send a thousand dollars to someone in low income country.
JD (15:18)
How much is the psychotherapy?
Samuel (15:20)
Between 15 and $50. Yeah.
JD (15:23)
Oh, wow. That's so low. Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, so side by side, both are going up by about a point. Cash transfers maybe for a little bit longer, but it both have spillovers, but the cash transfer costs like a thousand dollars and the strong mind psychotherapy costs like $50. So there's a 20 X cost difference. Even though, you know, the cash transfer might help a bit longer on balance. looks like the talk therapy is maybe 10 X more effective or something. Yeah.
Samuel (15:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
The effect of
cash transfer is much bigger, but is also, as you say, way more expensive. that's where, and I want to be clear here, this is usually where I always get questioned about this. I'm not saying randomly take someone in extreme poverty and either give them psychotherapy or give them cash transfer. The people who receive psychotherapy, they have a specific need for it. They're depressed and they don't have access.
JD (16:00)
Right, dollar for, yeah, yeah.
Samuel (16:21)
to psychotherapy. You can't just go out and buy psychotherapy in Uganda. It's not the same thing as here. And you are enabling them to then participate in society and work.
Thankfully these charities like Strong Minds or Friendship Branch, they're working with the governments in these places to also help out and increase the reach of people.
JD (16:45)
Yeah. And if listeners, if you're interested in this, I recommend our podcast with Joy Bittner, where she talks about Vida Plana and doing like a strong minds approach, providing for vulnerable Ecuadorians, including refugees, providing a similar kind of talk therapy there. that was a beautiful episode. and Joy used to work alongside you at HLI. Yeah.
Samuel (17:03)
Yeah.
Joy
was an HLI employee, yes, so we really like what Joy does. I also recommend that episode.
JD (17:14)
Yeah, that's awesome. Speaking of other episodes, I'm kind of curious, right? Because we had Paul Niehaus on talking about cash transfers. We've had Katie Fantaguzzi on talking about deworming.
How does the lens of like all the effective charities change once you put on these WellBe goggles instead of like, we're just trying to double income or we're just trying to save lives.
Samuel (17:40)
Yeah, that's a big question and this is a lot of what we do. The core of it is that we're measuring what really matters, that is well-being. And there's a lot of advantages to that, just that we're measuring the right thing, but also that it makes it much easier to be able to compare the very different interventions when we're using the same outcome.
So how do I know how much good does deworming pills and the cash transfer and psychotherapy do? the core here is all of these things.
whatever they impact is that that is going to affect people's wellbeing. So we're able to compare them in a measure that encompasses all of these. If you don't do that, you can't necessarily compare some of these to each other, or you rely on things like moral weight. So evaluators, this is what GiveWell uses, for example, evaluators, they will say saving a life is worth
this much good, doubling income is worth this much good, and this is what we used to compare chatty. So we don't do that, we go directly to the measure that counts, we go to wellbeing, and there's two advantages to this. One is that it doesn't depend on us making a guess about what is good and how these things trade off. Humans are particularly bad at predicting what will be good for their wellbeing, there's a whole literature on effective forecasting.
This is also why the well-being is much better than DALYs or QALYs. So DALYs and QALYs are health measures for health economics. they ask often people to say, so basically they ask people to guess because they're asking people, how many years of your life would you be willing to trade off not to live with this or that disease? And that person doesn't have that disease. They're just asked to make a trade-off in their mind. And some studies have shown that actually,
people undervalue how bad mental health can be. So in the trade-offs, they're like, well, mental health, having a mild mental health problem is just as bad as having a small mobility problem. When you actually ask people their wellbeing, when they have a mental health problem or a mobility problem, mental health is like 10 times worse. So we're not very good at guessing. The second advantage here is that if your moral weight,
JD (20:03)
Mm.
Samuel (20:13)
only include certain things and your intervention does other stuff, you're not including that. So I like to use this example of like if your intervention is trying to target loneliness and your moral rates is just income and you're not using a moral weight for like social connection, then you're missing out on like the core pathway to well-being that your intervention is working on. So
By looking at well-being directly, we're saying that we're allowing people to integrate all the things that affect them in their life and go directly to the answer.
JD (20:49)
I read these estimates often when people are trying to quantify the impact or the importance of these qualitative states. They always compare it to money, right? Is that kind of what you're challenging?
Samuel (20:59)
Yes, that is what we're trying to do.
JD (21:01)
any, any examples come to mind about how people are just really bad at.
predicting what will make you happy. you know, people are chasing, especially people who don't know Jesus are chasing all the wrong things about their lives. And maybe this is a nice segue, maybe speak to this first and then we can segue into talking about like, what really will make people happy and what, really is wellbeing.
Samuel (21:18)
Mental health is one that's often not weighted correctly, And then maybe to help us segue into the what's ultimately well-being and Christian angle to it.
say that ultimately, or we all...
need a renewed relationship with their creator that God allows because God the son became incarnate, died on a cross for us since and came back to life. so death, big end on wellbeing. Resurrection and new creation, big bonus for wellbeing. But I think this is where for...
JD (22:00)
Yes.
Samuel (22:05)
Christians, it gets interesting. I say like, well-being is what ultimately matters. But I think as Christians, we want to take the definitions of well-being and put them in a certain context. There's different definitions of well-being. For example, one is just kind hedonio happiness, so the sum of positive and negative things. Or another is desire theories that links quite well to life satisfaction, like having my desires fulfilled.
and that there are others, but for each of these.
JD (22:34)
And objective
list theories, right? There's this concept that some things we objectively need, whether or not we say it or recognize it. Yeah.
Samuel (22:37)
Yeah.
Yes,
objective lists, hybrid lists as well, they include some subjective features. Eudaimonia, how meaningful my life is. I think I might be a desire theorist, but I'll give you the Christian version of desire. Exactly. I want to design what God desires.
JD (22:55)
Do you have a pet theory?
Yes. Right. Rightly order desires. Yes.
Samuel (23:13)
And so that's how we as Christians should understand our well-being. I say all of this. I'm not a philosopher, not a theologian. I'm just a researcher in the middle of these things as a Christian who's like, okay, this is the main thing I do every day. How do I think about it? And I think as Christians, as long as we agree that this should be put in the context of God and our relationship with God.
You can have your own definition of well-being. can have disagreements about this. I'm not advocating for a God-ordered desire theory. And I think what we also have to accept is that there will only be perfect well-being in the new creation. It's only going to be imperfect and temporary here, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work really, really hard to love and care for our neighbors to improve their well-being.
where I think where Christianity has this little thing that makes it that you're not fully a of a welfare, you don't just think that well-being is necessarily the most important thing, is that Jesus said that we will suffer and I think that if someone becomes a Christian in a place that's persecuted, interestingly by the way the places where Christians are persecuted they're also very far down
the list of happiness in terms of countries. If someone becomes a Christian and is persecuted and that lowers their life satisfaction, I still think that's better for their life, that they have a renewed relationship with their creator. I, ultimately, I don't think this just breaks everything. I still think it's incrementally better for us to, as governments and policy and charities and interventions to...
JD (24:54)
Mm.
Samuel (25:09)
focus on on well-being rather than GDP and income and moral rights. But this is the kind of constraint for Christians.
JD (25:19)
Yeah, it raises this uncomfortable question, is related to should we...
treat the poor and the suffering differently on account that their suffering might give them a greater opportunity to know God, right? We know people who live in poverty and suffering are nearer to God, at least in how they report it. They report being more dependent on God, being more religious, but it seems like a horrible thing to say that we shouldn't help people who are desperate because their despondency.
is increasing their reliance on God, right? That's like a very brutal form of tough love. But what I hear you saying is...
Samuel (26:00)
Yeah.
JD (26:02)
Increasing well be is not the end all be all. We shouldn't do it at all costs. Right.
Samuel (26:07)
We, yes, yeah, the example I was giving is there are situations where wellbeing might not go up or might even go down, but I think it's better what you describe of like, should we leave people in suffering so that they come closer to Christ? The big no-no.
JD (26:27)
I mean, the way I hear it
framed
is should we focus on lifting people out of poverty or lifting people's wellbeing if they're really low, if it's just going to make them richer or higher wellbeing, but more godless, right?
Samuel (26:44)
Bye.
JD (26:45)
I'm
uncomfortable with the insinuation that we shouldn't help people who are desperate because it might make them more independent and secular. I'm, yeah, I'm curious if you have thoughts on that.
Samuel (26:58)
I'm sorry. was jumping at the bit to say I'm also very uncomfortable with this. think so. Jesus tells us to make disciples and Jesus tells us to love our neighbor and he never says, he never says like, wait, don't help people if that may bring different temptations and different struggles.
JD (27:01)
Yes.
Samuel (27:27)
I'll give another example of this is you go into some strange places if you're like, let's just kill the Christians and they'll go to heaven and it's fine. I'm like, no, this is not how it works. And I think ultimately because
We have some constraints, some things that are good things to do that God has instructed us to do, to love our neighbors and do this for them. And it's the job of the church and everyone to do that. And it's also the job of the church to then work on the issues that might come with that. The church has to work with the culture and the situation it's in and address these things.
When in Revelation there's letters to different churches, Jesus doesn't say to them like, actually go back to a lower level of well-being so that you'll be a better Christian. He's just saying, be better Christians. I also, just so much misery in the world. Like I don't think we're necessarily reaching the point. We're like just making Americas everywhere.
So I might believe that to die for Christ is gain, but that doesn't mean I don't have a very keen to save lives.
attitude of how I'm going to use resources or encourage people to organize resources. Actually, the church is very keen on life and these things. So there's a difference between the things we do for our relationship with God and the things we impose to others. where there's a risk is that we've decided that it's all spiritual, it's all detached, it's all about
my personal relationship with God and I'm like, I'm never encouraged to give to the poor or to consider people far away or to do something material. I think we embody people. think when Christ came back to life, he was in an actual body that the disciples could touch.
JD (29:35)
I do hear Christians talk and this, I guess to be more specific within the ascetic traditions, there are examples of Christians who glorified suffering and who saw their suffering as an opportunity to physically complete what was lacking in Christ's sufferings, which is sort of like themselves bearing
the marks of Christ scars, right? this, can become a very, you know, self mortifying, brutal, pietism. And I'm very, I'm very keen to challenge myself to endure discomfort, to willingly take on sacrifices, carry my cross in big ways and small to serve others for the good of the world, for the glory of God.
I don't do that as well as I should, but I see that as a biblical call. What I don't see as a biblical call is like to endure suffering.
suffering sake or because God wants me to suffer or something like that. I think Paul sometimes talks about suffering like it is an important means for sanctification, right? Through suffering we produce endurance and through endurance hope. I guess the corollary is it doesn't seem like intrinsically good if people all else equal have a lower well-being. That seems like inherently a bad thing. But
But it might be the right choice to make a choice where you willingly accept a lower well-being for yourself in order to provide for others. Like maybe you take a more demanding job or maybe you donate money that you could have spent on a vacation for yourself, but you donate that for people living on the edge of subsistence or.
or for funding missionaries to share the love and hope of the gospel, right, or to become a missionary yourself, right, and suffer persecution, for the sake of the gospel, right. These are examples of lower well-beings that are, you know, upping maybe eternal well-beings or, right, like for the greater good of the world and for God's kingdom.
Samuel (31:35)
I, yes, I agree with Ian on both points. And what's reassuring here is many of the decreases we can take to our wellbeing. And of course we don't want to get to the point where we can't help or we get depressed and you know, we get to points where actually we are less helpful, but many of the decreases we can take in wellbeing are much lower than the increases we create otherwise. So,
JD (31:55)
Hmm.
Samuel (32:03)
Ryan Dwyer.
JD (32:03)
Give an example,
Samuel (32:04)
Ryan Dwyer wrote a paper where they got money from really rich individuals and sent it to different individuals across the world and that the well-being gains of the people who received the money which are much lower down the the income bracket were bigger than the well-being losses from from the top of the bracket and so that's I think you can see that at a small
level here for most of us is we can forego some little pleasures that we can get in the West and send money to fund charities that will do way more with that money. And as I plug back to the WellHappiness report, I said, the top charities there, they're like 100 or a thousand times more cost effective than the typical charities.
So you don't even need to sacrifice something for yourself. You can just give to poor, cost-effective charities and you will be doing more good in the world.
JD (33:09)
Hmm.
Yeah. You can go from like a seven out of 10 to like a 6.9, but you can make somebody else's three go to a five, like a thousand times over, you know, it's kind of the vibe I'm getting. Yeah. But you know, you might even go from like a seven to like an eight because isn't, is there research showing that giving increases subjective wellbeing?
Samuel (33:19)
Exactly.
There's research showing that that can can improve your your happiness and your well being to do good and give money. This is
JD (33:40)
Maybe it's not that high
because it doesn't like match roughly like increases like earning more money. like I've heard it said that you can like effectively double, like if you're earning like 70 grand a year, you can get an equivalent happiness to earning double by just donating like 10 % of your money. Right. So maybe you could go from like a seven to like a seven. Five, whether you or seven, two, if you like double your income or if you give away a few grand a year.
Samuel (33:58)
Bye.
I don't remember the, the, the, the, and maybe this says something about, I think this is a good, good marketing argument. And I don't say this negatively. I'm like, yeah, give money. It might actually make you feel better about yourself and your life, but actually give money because it will make someone else's life much better.
JD (34:09)
I'm getting granular, yeah, maybe this isn't super important, but.
Yes.
Samuel (34:27)
Here, once you've reached a certain point, it's just improving your wellbeing just by earning more money is not gonna be very efficient.
JD (34:36)
Yeah. Yeah. maybe we could just talk about, some, some, yeah, exciting opportunities for charities to give to
in any career advice we have for young Christians who want to tackle the world's most pressing problems, including in this vein. but yeah, starting out with charities, we talked about Strong Minds, we mentioned Vita Plana, Joy, Bitnars Charity. We talked about Give Directly and Unconditional Cash Transfers. What are some other charities that are doing great work by WellBe Metrics?
Samuel (35:05)
So if you want to the whole list and all the detail, you can go to the Happier Lives Institute website and go, we have a tab with charities, our charities and how we compare charities. Or in the WellHappiness report, you can see this lovely graph of all the different charities that have been evaluated and how much better some are compared to others. The most cost effective charity we've evaluated is Pure Earth. They do work...
informing influencing governments to reduce the prevalence of lead in different products across the world. This thing, there's lead in so many different things. And I didn't know about this before starting my job and look at these things. There's lead in spices in India, there's lead in ceramics, there's lead in batteries, there's lead in paint.
We specifically evaluated a program where they're looking to influence the government in Ghana to help them reduce lead in cosmetics, especially eyeliner, like it's called chillo or coal in different places. So this affects children because this eyeliner is put onto very young infants and both male and female. there's evidence that just lead is a toxic. It's like
It's not good and it can severely impair development and outcomes in life and therefore people's wellbeing. And so this is, this is a really good, good way of improving the world is just removing this effect of lead exposure in different places. This is also something that you can't necessarily just do by, you can't just give people money and be like, okay, go coordinate now and, and figure out where the lead is. You, you, get.
JD (36:30)
Mm, yeah.
Yeah. Aren't
these like lobbying projects to convince the governments to make better standards?
Samuel (37:03)
Exactly.
Lobbying project, but also information projects. So governments might not know or not want to do anything unless they're being told, look, we've measured the blood levels of the population here and they're way too high. They're way too high compared to what the UN said you should have. And also helping, there's always this investigative work of finding out where in the supply chain this is coming from and how to address that and helping address that. So that is one.
JD (37:32)
So how
many, how many Welbys is that for X number dollars? What's that like?
Samuel (37:37)
We present our results in terms of if you give a thousand pounds to this charity, you'd get 108 wellbies. In comparison, cash transfers is a little bit less than eight.
JD (37:46)
Wow, okay.
Okay. So over 10, yeah, over 10 X. Okay. Um, although the evidence base is different between these, right? They're not apples to apples comparisons in some sense, at least the, the T if I look correctly, the time, I think I'm saying that correctly, the malnutrition charity that you highlight does have a stronger evidence, but at least there are some RCTs that suggest this might be, um, more reliable at improving well-being, but it's not as high magnitude as, as pure earth.
Samuel (38:02)
Yes, exactly.
This is a really good point. And this is something we do in our recommendations. We not only do a high level split, we have top recommended charities. So that's Friendship Bench and Strong Minds, which are psychotherapy in low income countries. That's because we've done the biggest analysis possible. There's a lot of data. We've taken into account lots of concerns and they do good. And then we have promising charities that
like pure earth are more cost effective, but they might not have the same evidence base. for pure earth, we're relying on like, we could point across the chain of our analysis. Same for time marker, but it's a bit different and same for others. But also we...
JD (39:04)
So which
do you think have the strongest evidence based on that list? maybe I could be so bold to ask you, like, which of these do you give to yourself as well? I don't know how risk averse you are, but.
Samuel (39:16)
so
as a, as a charity value to, I don't know if I should answer the question of which one I give to you. but, if, if you, if you are happy with some risk and say the top ones like pure F just go for them. If you like, you want a lot less risk, go for the top recommendations. and then if you, if you just.
JD (39:21)
Okay, sure.
Samuel (39:42)
Like I want to no risk at all. I don't want to think beyond just giving people money and you can give to cash transfers, that is, you know, if you look at a list of our evaluations, that is at the bottom of our list. That is though still much more cost effective than giving to a charity in the UK or the US that tries to help someone in the UK or the US. And this is, this is something that's
JD (40:04)
Yeah.
Samuel (40:09)
important to communicate and we we do it well in our reports is that not all evidence is equal. And we try and communicate that there's no like easy answer of like, this is how you should deal with uncertain evidence. We get into problems we have to be quite creative to solve.
So that's why there's still like an incentive to like study these things even if they're recommendations and when the information comes in we update, we update our recommendations, our numbers etc.
JD (40:44)
Yeah. More studies definitely really important. I remember Paul Niehaus said something like this. If you think there's a 10 % chance that your charity or intervention has no impact, that it'd be worth in principle, if you could find out whether it has an impact through doing a study, it'd be worth spending up to 10 % of your charity into &E, into research. So if you're doing a hundred million dollars a year for the charity,
And you're 90 % sure it works, right? Just 90 % sure. But your 10 % sure it doesn't work. And you could figure that out with an RCT or with something else. You should spend $10 million a year figuring that out.
I mean, think like very few charities are like 90, extremely few charities are like 90 % plus. Sure. Having the impact they claim. Um, so it just speaks to the importance of the work that the people like you are doing. Um, yeah.
Samuel (41:38)
I think so. that all this work of like evaluating charities and looking evidence of the interventions we're doing is quite recent. Even more so in terms of wellbeing, these analyses, they're all kind of five, six years old for the oldest ones. So yes, donate to the best charities and you can do a hundred times or a thousand times more goods. If you're uncertain about different things, you could
split your donations between some if you if you're listening to this and you're thinking gosh i really like guide dogs or this charity at home like give a portion to that because you care about this but i encourage you to think about can i increase my giving or take a portion of my giving and give it to something that does a lot of good even if it's far away even if i don't necessarily feel connected to it i yeah i don't
This is maybe my, why I didn't, mentally I don't care as much as the benefit of giving. don't think Christ says like, help the poor and you will feel good about yourself. But I also think that there's something positive about knowing that we're doing, having an effect.
JD (42:48)
Mm, mm.
Well, this is a great plug. If you're listening to this and you haven't made a pledge to give 10 % or more of your lifetime income to the world's most effective charities, we strongly recommend doing that. You don't have to tell us you did it. You can take the pledge anonymously. I will tell you that I've done it. very grateful to have done it. I'm not giving as much as I should have, but I actually do think it makes me a, a person with more wellbeing. Like I do rejoice at seeing the good that it brings about in the lives of others, but.
I want to ask you like a Rapid fire round of questions with some criticisms or challenges of HLI. Is that okay? Or do you have to run? It'd be a very convenient time, but.
Samuel (43:35)
No, no, I
have the time and I also haven't mentioned other things people could do in terms of careers. I'm happy to talk about those. Good.
JD (43:42)
yes, so that will be our closing bit.
Okay. Cool. There are some challenges of HLI and part of these are HLI specific perhaps, but others are just maybe more about measuring subjective wellbeing. and forgive me listeners who are like very advanced in these research methods or our economists who,
Yeah, I know the ins and outs of some of the technicalities of these things better than I do, but there's this question about like, whether it's reliable to ask people scale one out of 10 when it seems like some cultures just like answer these questions differently than others, right? Like aren't some Caribbean cultures like famously really, really high in how they answer these questions. Like I think it's people in Costa Rica or like super high in how they answer them.
But that might just like generally reflect a positive disposition among the average person, right? Maybe this doesn't explain why people in Germany or Scandinavia still answer very high. I guess the stereotype is generally not a positive disposition in some of these colder, gloomier places. yeah, and related to that, what about this idea of like, know, people with a kind of mania who like might actually be psychotic.
And this, know, this is low percentage of the population and I've there's no shame for people who are, who are troubled with this, but like, can imagine somebody who experiences some kind of, disorder by polarism who someday would answer 10 out of 10, but other days would answer like, you know, one out of 10. So, all this to say, what do you think about like the difficulties of measuring subjective wellbeing universally and across different kinds of, of diverse diverse peoples?
Samuel (45:28)
Yeah, this is a question about comparability in a sense of like, is your six hours 10 the same as my six hour 10? And that's a really good question to have on the mind when thinking about these things. We do some of that work, some of that research. You can find a paper called, can we address subjective well-being measures on our website? So if you want to go into more detail, the question to ask, and you got them in your question is,
Is this a bias in how I use the measurement? Or is this just a true thing about my wellbeing? Like, cultural dispositions might be something that's true about my wellbeing. Maybe because I have a better attitude to the world, I have higher wellbeing. That's just true wellbeing. If it's, I answer scales in a specific way that affects things that is more problematic.
The assumption we go for now and the research we see for now is that these things are okay or hold in most cases, or that they won't completely reverse results. We hope there's more research in this area. We still think this means wellbeing is the way to go. Yeah, and if you look at a map of the world,
you see what you kind of expect. You don't have all of Africa being super duper happy. They're quite low on the scale. And that's what you expect because that's where there's the most disease and poverty and all of these needs. So I've kind of face value. It seems to be doing what you need to do. The example of mania is maybe a more complicated one way.
Maybe the answer to here is not just, I don't care about wellbeing, but I have to have a sophisticated model about it and how I analyze this thing. Sometimes the answer isn't, we should stop using this measure and go back to moral weights of income, which seems not the right decision for me. It's just, I need to add something in my modeling when I'm deciding this.
Our work is to take these measures and then do the important modeling. That's why you include spillovers. The spillovers are not just going to magically happen in the measurement. You need to ask the household member their well-being and add this to the thing. So often this can be answered further than just a measurement question.
JD (48:04)
So I have a challenge about the spillovers. I know GiveWell did an analysis of HLI's spillovers, and I can put a link to that in the description, including all the things we've been talking about. There'll be links to these in the description, wherever you're listening or watching this. But yeah, how did you receive that criticism from GiveWell? I think they found that the size of your spillovers were, at least I think it was,
Perhaps this was James Snowden in Open Philanthropy, but the size of the spillovers, he found a different magnitude.
Samuel (48:36)
There
were two things, there's James Snowden pointing out an issue with our spillovers. And this is, I take full responsibility for this. I made a coding mistake in one of these and we're very happy to have this pointed out. We updated this. Givewell also made a reanalysis of strong minds using ARM methods, but they're modeling. And we have a reply to that that goes into details. Please do list that as well.
JD (48:51)
Awesome.
Nice. Yeah. I love it.
I love that you list those. Yeah.
Samuel (49:08)
And in, in both of these, so we, we came up with truth. care about knowledge. So when new information is brought up, if it's relevant, we take into account and to tell you how relevant is this is we, we have like, we have different editions of our evaluations of psychotherapy and strong minds. This was around the time of like version two. And we're on version four now that came out last year. So.
If you want to know what the state of things are, and our spillover's numbers now are even more conservative than what Givewell suggested, so if you want to know what the state of it is, that big report is where to go. In detail, Givewell had other things in their reply. Briefly, I'd say
maybe a difference in our methodology here is that we're like, there these things we're uncertain about? And we're going to put a discount. So for people who don't know the internal, basically you get a number from the study and you're like, there's something about this that doesn't necessarily correspond to reality. And I want to adjust for this. A very valid thing is like, well, I have a study about the intervention in one situation.
JD (50:08)
Just yeah, just go for it. Just yeah
Samuel (50:26)
But actually I'm evaluating a charity that's delivering it in another situation. It's maybe a different country or different format or different dosage. they give psychotherapy for six sessions, but my study is like 12 sessions. And so you want to make adjustments for these things. The way, very often the way give well do adjustments is just they have, they're very, very competent analysts put a number like, I think I should put 10 % discount.
JD (50:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. It's like, like
30 % less, right? It's just like, just haircut, right? The impact of this. Yeah.
Samuel (50:59)
Exactly. Whereas what we really strive to do is to have an empirical basis to answer the uncertainties and to build the discount. like, okay, we have a difference in dosage here, like the example had of 12 and six. I'm going to look at dosage in the literature, like how does it affect psychotherapy? I get a number from that.
JD (51:18)
Yeah, but I mean, isn't the
whole point that sometimes you, don't have good literature to base this on, like it's already based on literature, but there's not like a clean cut number. And so it kind of goes back to priors and how a lot of reasoning from a Bayesian perspective, it's just like starting with certain presuppositions, presuppositions, updating on new knowledge and new evidence, right.
Samuel (51:35)
Yes, yes. But I think even at the time and especially now, I think we could answer almost all of these discounts, give well proposed, but at least more evidence or more reasoning and some evidence and to show where the gap is and say, okay, based on this, we don't think we need that bigger discount or we need a bigger one.
I think at the Happy Lives Institute, we work really, really hard to be quite rigorous with adjustments. We don't, we tend not to just put like 20 % discount here. We, we at least have like a bunch of citations saying, well, we're basing this on this and
Maybe that's not the best thing, but it's the best we can do with what we have.
JD (52:17)
Nice. Another challenge, seems like HLI thinks about these things in terms of cardinal utility, where well be is like, you know, cardinal scales of utility where we can treat these numbers like they're equally weighted units, like in a math equation, and not like orders in a list.
And my, yeah, I guess that there are two challenges. several challenges here. Maybe two I'll raise. Like one is like, can we really think about utility in a cardinal way? When people make choices, they're making choices between trade-offs. I choose A over B or B over C, but that doesn't mean I can measure A with some denominator of B and C, right? But then the second related question is like,
can we really treat well-be's as equal for, as equally weighted for all people? Like maybe a well-being matters a lot more bringing somebody who's like just barely scraping by living at like a two out of 10, getting them from like two out of 10 to three out of 10, like providing that psychotherapy for somebody who's like really depressed, right? It seems like really important than like, maybe more important than like providing a cash transfer.
for someone who's already at like a seven out of 10 to go to like an eight out of 10, right? Even if they're living in the same country, right? But like they'd be measured kind of the same on the Welbys. So do you have like a kind of prioritarianism that you bake in with your own like view of this or, yeah, sorry, those are two questions in one, but yeah.
Samuel (53:54)
It's good
that they're both together because usually when I'm asked one of these questions, I need to bring the other one in. So I'm glad you brought both in one go. So the question here is kind of like, people, before we were answering the question, like, are people using the same stick for their, like, the same scale? Like, is your six and my six the same? And here's like, are all bits kind of equally distant? Is it like a line or?
are for example the middle bits quite linear but the ends are much thicker like is going from five to six a smaller gap than going from nine to ten for example. And here you can also look at can we trust well-being measures that's another question we look a little bit into. If you're interested in this wider in the well-being literature Caspar Kaiser has done some really good work with colleagues about
actually to reverse some of the findings in the literature you'd have to have people that use scales that are like impossible
JD (55:02)
So you're saying like it, like
it, you'd have to have like really big differences between the latter steps. not like a two X difference between some steps, but like 10 X or more between the.
Samuel (55:07)
Yeah.
you'd
have to have really warped scales for it to have that effect. So overall, we go on the assumption that things are linear, that the scales are linear, but then you have this.
JD (55:23)
not because you
think it's literally linear, but you think that's a close approximation to how, okay.
Samuel (55:28)
Yes. And then you have this extra question at any point, is it more important to bring someone from T to 3 than from 7 to 8? And so if the scale is the same, so if it's actually the same difference of one point, then the question is a of a distribution of well-being, a kind of moral question of, do I want to prioritize people that are at the bottom of scale?
All things, like if everything else is equal, that the intervention has the same cost, the same effect, the same potential effects in the future, et cetera, then it is a moral question of do you prioritize people at the bottom of the scale? I think you can make a pretty good case for Christians to care about the least of these, to care about the poor, to care about the people that are at the bottom of the scale. But that's something I leave to individuals.
JD (56:18)
No, it's fascinating because,
right? Like in Luke, we have not blessed are the poor or actually, right? There's two versions of this big attitude, right? I'm not sure which is which, but in Luke or Matthew, in one you have blessed are the poor and the other you have blessed are the poor in spirit, right? One's measuring income, the other's measuring well-being, right? So, but they're quite related in some sense. Yeah. I don't know if you ever thought about that, but.
Samuel (56:41)
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the Beatitudes are really interesting because I'm sure Pete someone will correct me on this, but this is about Mary Gattos. This is about happy hour or the good life belongs to the poor, the poor in spirit, actually. So it's very like when I hear I'm like, this is like Jesus making a statement about what the good life that these people will have the good life because
JD (57:07)
Hmm, there's a longer conversation.
actually, maybe we should go into it real briefly. What do you think Jesus is saying? But you don't think Jesus is saying that like, it is better to be low income and like low well-being because you reap eternal rewards.
Samuel (57:24)
No, I don't think he's saying that. think an answer to that is complicated. think these are one of these passages where we have to be comfortable with like, he's spinning something on its head and we have to meditate through this and take some time. The Bible Project has a few like episodes related to this concept or the Beatitudes. They did the whole series on the Sermon on the Mount.
I that's quite helpful. I think this is a statement about the priorities of the kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount is like the kingdom's manifesto. This is what Jesus' kingdom looks like. And about giving value to these people who are not giving value otherwise.
JD (57:55)
Mm. Mm. Mm.
Then yeah, final, final challenge.
Does this give us weird situations where like, it might actually be a lot more valuable to save a life of somebody who's high well-being than the life of somebody who's low well-being. So for instance, we might weigh it as like three times as good to save somebody who's like.
my wellbeing, like six out of 10 right now is presuming I have that well-being for the rest of my life and presuming I'm like a siloed unit. I don't have any spillovers from like how I act on those around me. Then it's three times as good to save my life. Then a stranger who is going to live two out of 10 wellbeing for their whole lives and has no spillovers, right? That seems like what I have to say. If I'm saying these are cardinal units and they're, you know, I can do math on these units.
It's kind of odd to make that sort of claim. Of course, we don't know what people's well-being in the future will be like, right? So in a sense, we should respect, yeah, we should have respect for the dignity of people's futures. But.
Maybe we do know like in some cases where people are just severely rehabilitated in a way that on average really, really does make for a worse life. What are your thoughts on this?
Samuel (59:24)
This is a good question and a really complicated one. This is where the philosophy comes in. So if you want to hear more about the philosophy, the elephant in the bed net is our rapport about this. There's a whole thing that goes behind like comparing how bad a life, including the badness of death and your philosophy of the badness of death so that you can compare how good is it to save a life, improve a life. And some charities,
do more of the saving lives and some charities do more of the improving lives. All of the charities I've mentioned focus on the improving lives. But we have this report and you can click, there's a LinkedIn app where you can compare the different philosophies if you've gone through the stuff there. What you're pointing out is like a further question. But first I want to say, this is not just a problem for well-being. This is a problem for...
JD (1:00:17)
Mm, yeah.
Samuel (1:00:19)
And these are not just questions for the Harper and Institute. Therefore, any evaluator, any decision maker has to battle with philosophy here. Often what happens is that people do it implicitly.
JD (1:00:31)
Yes.
Well, I think you have to make trade-offs really. You have to, this is why I think well-bees kind of boil down to some version of moral weights. It's just a more universal form of moral weights
Samuel (1:00:43)
to get to that, but just to make it super clear, like your healthcare system has to make decisions about this. Yeah, this is not just some weird niche thing. they implicitly or explicitly, they have a value for like deaf and improvement of quality of life. And that has changed over time, but these were quickfire questions. I'll get into it. The difficult bit here is,
JD (1:00:53)
sure. Okay, yeah.
Yes.
Samuel (1:01:10)
Okay, if everything was equal, and I think this will rarely, rarely be the case, if you take this kind of total view of well-being, what counts as the total well-being in the world, and if it cost you a thousand pounds to save either lives, it would be best to save the life of a person. I have a special need to...
JD (1:01:30)
you're going to save me, right? Like you have to save me because you have a special duty because you're a guest on the podcast. Why do you think I invite
people to this podcast? So they, form these sacred side constraints with me.
Samuel (1:01:41)
Yeah, this is, so this is a, this is a, this is a specific view. I think two things. I think you can predict a lot of people's wellbeing over the time course. I think, but bear with me. I'm, there's a but at the end of all of this. I think that is very, it will be very rare that it costs the same to save a life in, in the, the UK or the U S compared to in Kenya.
This is also why systems, government valuations of wellbeing, they're not the same as exactly what we do, we look at wellbeing, we don't look at the value of a well-being, we look at wellbeing. But if you are uncomfortable with this idea and this framework, and this is where the philosophers might not be happy, I think you...
there constraints we can put on this. And this is why, a Christian, I was saying earlier, not necessarily all about wellbeing. I might have constraints on this. As like, if someone's relationship with God is renewed, I think that's better for them, even if it decreases their wellbeing for some reason, because they're persecuted, for example. So this is out there. This is something I've been thinking about. was like, okay, so one thing is that I can say that
saving a life is always positive. can say even if maybe people have negative wellbeing, I'm not gonna let that influence my decision making. I can say, pardon.
JD (1:03:14)
is that like,
it goes negative too? The Welbys?
Samuel (1:03:17)
You so
this scale doesn't necessarily go negative is the question of like, are people who are saying that they're two out of 10 is that
JD (1:03:24)
Like what's
the net neutral point on the scale? Is it actually zero or is it actually two? Right? Yeah.
Samuel (1:03:28)
The neutral point. Yeah. Exactly. And
you could say, okay, because I'm a Christian, I think there's this really long standing tradition of really valuing life in the church. I'd say, okay, I'm going to just say valuing life is always positive. So a lot of people will probably disagree with me on this. I'm just saying like, here are some constraints you could put in. And then the second thing you could say is actually the value of saving a life, I'm not going to use the...
their wellbeing of the individual. I'm going to use the average wellbeing in the world because then every individual has the same value and I still have a commitment to improving the quality of life because I want to improve the average across the world. Now these are slightly weird things I'm proposing and probably some constraints. don't directly translate into the actual wellbeing in the world. I do think that the ultimate
perceiver of all this well-being in the world is God and maybe one can make the case that like God wants to put these constraints on it. I don't know. I think the church has a really a tradition of really valuing life and maybe this is where this comes in. If you
JD (1:04:46)
Yeah. That makes sense to me.
Samuel (1:04:49)
about saving lives. So this would be
JD (1:04:52)
Now, real, real quick, going over to careers and career advice for Christians who want to have the greatest impact on pressing global problems, your background, studied psychology, math. What's your educational background?
Samuel (1:05:06)
I have a master's in cognitive science and decision making. So that's a kind of mix of these things. I think I'm fortunate to have the job I have. I don't think that many jobs like these, don't say, so I can't necessarily promise like you can do this and get
JD (1:05:22)
Would you
recommend your career path, people re-engineer it? Or if somebody came to you today and was like, I want to research the things you're researching, how should they get involved?
Samuel (1:05:32)
so whatever programming you go for, a focus on like these, these quantitative skills, would be really helpful. So I think that that's been beneficial to me. So when I was choosing projects, I wasn't necessarily thinking like, this would be a great project for this topic, but it like, I'm going to learn a lot from this. And some people will have opportunities to do something that does both. And that's great. there's a, there's a masters at LSE that's about
wellbeing and policymaking. but Ben Stewart, one of our research analysts, he went through that and that's really good. That is a good option. If it involves some kind of scientific background and quantitative skills, that's great. I won't tell people like necessarily do economics or something. This is
This is something I found kind of frustrating. So there was no questions for impact guides when I was making these decisions. And everything seemed to be do AI, do econ or do philosophy. I was like, great, but I'm not doing any of these. So even if you're not necessarily doing these things or going directly towards these cause areas, you can think in a kind of effectiveness mindset within the stuff like, okay, I care about this thing.
JD (1:06:50)
Do you wish you
had studied economics? Sorry, you're glad you didn't study economics. that part of the gist here? Yes.
Samuel (1:06:55)
I think people made me think I wish I hadn't studied
economics. I'm happy with the choices I've made. And even within choices that are not necessarily the ones people recommend, you can think as someone who wants to do the most good. Okay, what's the core skills I need to get out of it?
JD (1:07:15)
Right, but generally
scientific quantitative for this kinds of research. Yeah.
Samuel (1:07:18)
Yeah. Yeah.
That is a path. If you're already studying these things, we can provide some ideas of theses to do. There's always more research to do, both on the practical kind of evaluating things, on the theoretical about wellbeing. Another way you can influence is not just producing this sort of research, but using it.
So if you go into policymaking or governance or these sorts of places, just getting more people to use wellbeing as the metric of interest, as the way you think about things. Like the UK have guidelines about using the wellbeing. New Zealand have a framework as well. So just getting that sort of thing in so that people will value the right things at the right level. That's very important.
The OCD They have a group related to that. So that's an area that would be really useful.
JD (1:08:23)
any in the US
that you know about?
Samuel (1:08:25)
I'm not sure for the US. Yeah, sorry. I think, yeah, I think the UK and New Zealand are, whilst we're not maybe the happiest, we are good at using happiness.
Yeah. And then, you know, if you're, if you're earning money and you want to give it away, say, look at our recommendations, donate to the most cost effective things. Wellbeing works. It's an empirical founded measure.
JD (1:08:58)
Yeah. Any general career advice you've received that was really helpful?
Samuel (1:09:02)
Just a lot of people will tell you and others like, this is what you should go for in a career. Like often it's like get a good job and live a simple life and get lots of money. And it's just like the willingness to challenge that and to think deeper about how your faith relates to your career choice and how that relates to how much good you can do. Just that.
basic thing of challenging that and making an effort to think about these things. I think that's at the core of it. And then not to do the plug for you, but you guys have all sorts of guides across all sorts of areas of problems from nuclear safety to diseases. And you have people who are willing to meet with people to come out this, did I do an okay job?
JD (1:09:41)
Yes, please do the flag for me. Yes.
Yeah, that's a good plug. And should you follow your passion or what's the role of hearing God's voice in a supernatural way in career discernment? you think most people have like a burning bush moment? how do you think about like the role of prayerful hearing in career discernment?
Samuel (1:10:18)
Hmm. This is the Christian version of should you follow your passion? Except we know that the heart is deceitful. And as I mentioned before, desire theory with the desires ordered by God. So I think some people have a strong calling and that's good. I think there's a role for that. I think that if people do go into job that they just...
really don't want to do that. They're gonna, they're not necessarily going to be the best people there. And not everyone's called to be a AI safety person or a charity evaluator. Like just, are many things out there and you can be very good in that area. I think now, the best piece of advice I've had as a Christian about career advice is a native and pastor told me in the garden, there was one tree nutty of
and many, trees to enjoy. And I think that whilst we know about the narrow gate, I don't think God has ever really constrained, like if you don't pick this course or this job, you're going to go against God's will. No, no, I think he has a rewind. Like I've given you, I've told you what is good and bad. I've instructed you here are the important things within that serve me.
and go indeatifully be an image bearer of me and do things. So don't worry about picking exactly the right thing. don't think that's how God thinks about it, how we think about it.
JD (1:11:56)
that's really good. So thank you so much, Samuel. And is there any way we can support and encourage you or any resources you'd like to plug right now as we wrap up?
Samuel (1:12:07)
So you can, I think you can support me specifically in like just prayer that I keep thinking about what's the best thing I can do You mentioned like giving less than what you, you committed to give. I think that's the,
to risk for all of us in some way, specifically. Yeah.
JD (1:12:28)
I meant my pledge, I should
be giving more than my specific goals. I'm not living up to that. Yeah. yeah.
Samuel (1:12:34)
Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I used you as an example, in
this case, was, it's my own feelings that I have in my mind. And then more generally for the Happier Lives Institute, we are a small team. We're very efficient, but also we, yeah, we don't have a lot of money. So if you like this kind of meta research, please donate to the Happier Lives Institute.
We all have to live to do this. And you can see that this sort of information, there's not a lot of it, but we can provide it.
JD (1:13:10)
That's very important. Thank you for the work you do. Yes. And, yeah, I hope some wealthy donors listening to this podcast who will, shine a bright light on this meta project. So, thank you everyone for listening and, yeah, if you enjoy this episode, you can sign up for free one-on-one advising for your next career steps. We'd love to pair you with people like Samuel, who can give you tailored advice for how you can make a greater impact with your career.
And yeah, for episodes like this, you can listen to Joy Bittner. you can listen to Paul Niehaus on Give directly in the cash transfers. and awesome. thanks again, Sam so much.
Samuel (1:13:51)
Thank you so much.
