14 min listen
"Does economic growth meaningfully improve well-being? An optimistic re-analysis of Easterlin’s research: Founders Pledge" by Vadim Albinsky
"Does economic growth meaningfully improve well-being? An optimistic re-analysis of Easterlin’s research: Founders Pledge" by Vadim Albinsky
ratings:
Length:
28 minutes
Released:
Nov 26, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Understanding the relationship between wellbeing and economic growth is a topic that is of key importance to Effective Altruism (e.g. see Hillebrandt and Hallstead, Clare and Goth). In particular, a key disagreement regards the Easterlin Paradox; the finding that happiness varies with income across countries and between individuals, but does not seem to vary significantly with a country’s income as it changes over time. Michael Plant recently wrote an excellent post summarizing this research. He ends up mostly agreeing with Richard Easterlin’s latest paper arguing that the Easterlin Paradox still holds; suggesting that we should look to approaches other than economic growth to boost happiness. I agree with Michael Plant that life satisfaction is a valid and reliable measure, that it should be a key goal of policy and philanthropy, and that boosting income does not increase it as much as we might naively expect. In fact, we at Founders Pledge highly value and regularly use Michael Plant’s and Happier Lives Institute’s (HLI) research; and we believe income is only a small part of what interventions should aim at. However, my interpretation of the practical implications of Easterlin’s research differ from Easterlin’s in three ways which I argue in this post.Original article:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/coryFCkmcMKdJb7Pz/does-economic-growth-meaningfully-improve-well-being-anNarrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
Released:
Nov 26, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
"Case for emergency response teams" by Gavin, Jan_Kulveit by EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)