Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg Beyond saving lives: happiness and doing good (with Michael Plant)
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Sep 17, 2025 In this engaging discussion, Michael Plant, Founder of the Happier Lives Institute and post-doctoral researcher at Oxford, dives into the realms of happiness and charity evaluation. He examines the balance between moment-to-moment happiness and life satisfaction when guiding philanthropic efforts. Michael critiques traditional metrics like QALYs/DALYs and reveals gaps in charity effectiveness focused on wellbeing. He also delves into the moral complexities of prioritizing interventions, such as treating depression versus providing clean water, urging donors to consider happiness-based strategies.
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Happiness As The Central Metric
- Michael Plant founded the Happier Lives Institute to measure charities by how much happiness they produce rather than only health metrics.
- He argues self-reported well-being captures lived experience better than imagined health-weighted measures.
Experience Utility vs. Decision Utility
- QALYs/DALYs use imagined or decision utility while subjective well-being measures capture experience utility.
- Plant highlights forecasting errors like immune neglect that make imagined harms unreliable.
Forecasting Biases Skew Priorities
- People systematically mispredict intensity and duration of emotional responses, so policies based on forecasts can misprioritize.
- Plant uses Kahneman's findings (focusing illusion, immune neglect) to motivate measuring actual well-being data.