Can we make the world a happier place?
The role of research and philanthropy in increasing happiness and wellbeing for all
This week, the English Republic of Letters marks the International Day of Happiness (20 March) by taking a deep dive into the science of well-being and happiness.
To do this, I caught up with Dr Lily Yu, a former colleague from the British Council.
Lily is a co-founder and fund manager of the Bloom Wellbeing Fund, a philanthropic pooled fund aimed at supporting evidence-informed solutions to improve global wellbeing and mental health. She is also the Development and Operations Manager at the Happier Lives Institute.
For the last decade, Lily has worked at the intersection of philanthropy, international development, research, and innovation. During this time, she was a Senior Advisor and Programme Manager for the SPF Asia Women Impact Fund, supporting women’s entrepreneurship, inclusive economic development, and social innovation across the Asia-Pacific region. Before that, she was a Research Partnerships Manager at the British Council Japan and a postdoctoral research fellow at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute.
Lily is British Chinese and currently lives in Tokyo with her husband. Her earliest childhood memories are of eating hot meals in the cold kitchen of her family's takeaway. She says that these days, tracking down good comfort food, going for long bike rides, and connecting with family and friends are the things that make her happy.
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1) JS: First of all, can you explain what the Happier Lives Institute (HLI) is?
LY: The HLI was founded in 2019 by Oxford University philosopher Dr Michael Plant. It’s a not-for-profit research institute and think tank that connects philanthropists, researchers, and policymakers with the most cost-effective opportunities to increase global wellbeing. Michael now leads a team of four researchers at HLI to identify new evidence-based interventions, charities, and policies that can improve lives at scale.
Our focus is on subjective wellbeing—how an individual thinks and feels about their life, such as how happy they are—as a key goal of philanthropy and policy.
Why do we do this? We know that health and income are important, but they are instrumentally good. In other words, they’re a means to an end, not an end in themselves. What is ultimately good? We think it’s the pursuit of wellbeing and happiness.
Happiness is one approach to subjective wellbeing where the ultimate good for people’s lives is the sum of their positive and negative feelings. This places individuals and how they feel as the sole authority on the value of their lives.
And while we know research is critical to stimulating innovation, just doing research without communicating it or sharing it with others won’t result in change. Advising donors and policymakers and pointing them to our evidence-based recommendations and research will.
My fund manager colleague Peter Brietbart and I help philanthropists, private foundations, and family offices utilise research insights to maximise their funds and resources. This could involve analysing grant opportunities from a cost-effectiveness perspective to show funders what outcomes different funding levels can produce. We look for areas where charitable financing can promote wellbeing more “competitively” than other capital.
Most recently, we launched the Bloom Wellbeing Fund, an innovative pooled philanthropic fund that allows donors to support scalable, tractable, and neglected high-impact charities and research in a streamlined and tax-efficient way. Bloom aims to provide positive counterfactual impact while maximising philanthropic returns.
“Using a common metric allows for apples-to-apples comparisons to be made on where to most effectively allocate resources.”
2) How do you measure subjective wellbeing or happiness?
You can measure wellbeing by simply asking people to report their wellbeing, for example, by asking, “How happy are you?” on a scale of 0-10.
We use WELLBYs as our metric of choice. WELLBY is an acronym for wellbeing-adjusted life year, where a WELLBY is a one-point change in life satisfaction on a 0-10 point scale for one person over one year.1 Essentially, it is the wellbeing equivalent of the DALY (disability-adjusted life year) or QALY (quality-adjusted life-year), which are traditional measures of health outcomes.
WELLBYs are becoming a common metric to measure wellbeing in academia and government. Indeed, in 2021, the UK Treasury released guidance on how to measure WELLBYs. Crucially, DALYs and QALYs are only a measure of health and are based on people's hypothetical choices, not their experience of life. They tend to underestimate the impact of mental health issues on people’s wellbeing. So, if we want to know what really affects people and compare health to other causes, like poverty, the WELLBY allows us to do that. Using a common metric allows for apples-to-apples comparisons to be made on where to most effectively allocate resources.
3) Some people might be sceptical about measuring happiness. What would you say to them?
There is a large body of research on this topic, which has found that, broadly, measures of happiness are valid (they accurately capture the experience of happiness) and reliable (they provide consistent results).
While the field of wellbeing measurement is still in its infancy, rapid progress is being made. Many fields (psychology, economics, and policy) care about wellbeing; hence, there is a growing interest in the measurement of it. The number of academic papers is growing, international bodies such as the OECD and UN see that wellbeing measurement deserves more attention and collaboration, and funders see the benefit in measuring wellbeing and giving resources accordingly.
The OECD have published extensive guidelines for member states as to how to measure wellbeing, which are being updated (most recent version). We’re playing our part by developing a survey about the comparability of people’s responses to these scales.
4) What has HLI achieved so far?
In just five years, HLI has become one of the leading organisations researching evidence-based approaches where resources can have an outsized impact, especially in low and middle-income countries. We have identified psychotherapy and anti-malarial bed nets as highly cost-effective interventions to improve wellbeing, and we have identified chronic pain and lead exposure elimination as promising but under-researched areas to improve wellbeing. We have also advised other international development organisations and think tanks (including the OECD) on wellbeing measurements and attracted attention from government agencies.
While the ecosystem is nascent, we are encouraged by the recent interest in evidence-based interventions to improve wellbeing, especially since the Covid pandemic, when a much greater focus has been placed on mental health as an important yet chronically underfunded global priority. Mental health has a profound impact on our lives, our relationships with loved ones, and our work. Thus, aiding a larger number of people in improving their mental health can have a transformative and multiplying effect.
In terms of philanthropy, HLI’s work is estimated to have mobilised over 1 million USD in private donations towards charities delivering psychotherapy in Africa and advised a growing community of philanthropists, family offices, and private foundations. The Bloom Wellbeing Fund aims to disburse at least 2.5 million USD over the next two years to non-profit organisations and research projects to improve global wellbeing.
“Psychotherapy can be around four times more cost-effective than cash transfers.”
5) Tell us more about the importance of focusing on mental health within the field of wellbeing and happiness.
In 2021, we reviewed the landscape of mental health and wellbeing. Mental health problems have one of the largest impacts on people’s wellbeing. Despite mental health disorders representing 12% of total disability-adjusted life years (DALY—and this is probably an underestimate),2 the median spending from governments is just 2.4% of their healthcare budget. There is even less spending in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where very few people receive adequate treatment.
So we investigated if funding charities that provide psychotherapy could be a cost-effective way of improving wellbeing in LMICs. In our in-depth report, where we conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of psychotherapy in LMICs, we conclude that psychotherapy can strongly improve the wellbeing of people suffering from depression or anxiety. There are charities that provide psychotherapy to people in need, such as StrongMinds in Uganda. The research team estimates that donating $1,000 could treat 16 people with depression through group psychotherapy, with a cost-effectiveness of $33 per WELLBY.
In comparison, the cost-effectiveness of GiveDirectly, a non-profit that provides cash transfers to people living in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, yields a cost-effectiveness of $122 per WELLBY. This indicates that psychotherapy can be around four times more cost-effective than cash transfers and shows that how we target financial resources can make a substantial difference to the number of lives that can be improved.
Overall, this means that individuals could improve their happiness by taking care of their mental health. But it also suggests that those who can afford to should consider donating to charities that improve the mental health and wellbeing of people in LMICs.
And governments should do more to provide care and support for people’s mental health and also consider how their aid budget could be used in a similar way for other countries.
6) What motivated you to work in this area?
In my previous roles working at various philanthropic and international development organisations, the focus has largely been on supporting initiatives to stimulate innovation, economic opportunity, and financial inclusion. While I believe these remain important goals, the link between income and happiness isn’t straightforward.
The work of Richard Easterlin piqued my interest because he discovered a paradox whereby, although there is a positive correlation between income and wellbeing, that wellbeing does not rise with a country's economic standing. Not having enough money can bring on stress and misery, and cash transfers can improve the wellbeing of individuals in poverty. However, it takes more and more money to produce the same increase in happiness, and the rate at which money improves happiness slows for the least happy amongst us.3 This suggests wealth is instrumental to, but insufficient for, happiness. All this made me wonder whether happiness could, and should, be the end goal of philanthropic ventures. Ultimately, this is one of the reasons why I joined HLI—to find out if this hypothesis is true.
7) What, for you, are the keys to a happier life?
I’m constantly updating my thinking and views on this as my experiences, work, and life change over time. Overall, I tend to agree with Adam Grant when he says, “Happiness is not about reaching your goals. It’s about aligning your goals with your values.” I’m inspired to find purpose in my work and balance it out with having downtime to think, reflect, learn, and find pleasure in the little things in life.
“We think the most significant breakthroughs may come when governments focus on wellbeing as the ultimate goal of public policy.”
8) Should governments, which often struggle in basic areas like healthcare or security, be putting their limited resources into trying to increase the happiness of their citizens?
A quote from Thomas Jefferson says it all: “The care of human life and happiness is the only legitimate object of good government.” We think many democratic governments and politicians would accept that they do want to improve the happiness of their citizens. However, a greater focus on measuring the impact of policies in terms of wellbeing will enable them to know what is - and what’s not - improving happiness.
Of course, healthcare and security are important areas that require attention in their own right, but they are also important contributors to wellbeing. We think the most significant breakthroughs may come when governments focus on wellbeing as the ultimate goal of public policy and work out what factors are instrumental. In other words, what are the inputs, such as implementing mental health care provisions, that are key to generating happiness (the outcome)?
The World Happiness Report and academic researchers including Lord Richard Layard, Professor Jan Emmanuel De Neve, and Professor Paul Dolan have been doing interesting research into the correlates of happiness that could be highly informative to government policy.
9) What are your hopes following the UN International Day of Happiness (March 20) this year?
We are particularly excited to see more funders, policymakers, and international development agencies considering wellbeing evidence for decision-making in philanthropy and public policy. We hope awareness and action will continue to gain momentum beyond the International Day of Happiness, including during the 7th OECD World Forum on Wellbeing, which is organised alongside the G7 Presidency in Italy.
We also hope more funders will embrace philanthropy as a critically important tool to seek evidence-informed, high-reward initiatives to improve the lives and wellbeing of millions around the world.
10) What plans does the HLI have for future research or funding?
The research team has some interesting work in the pipeline, including investigating other mental health treatments, pain relief, the impact of digital mental health apps, childhood interventions, and interventions to reduce violence against women and girls. The aim is to find new, cost-effective ways to improve global wellbeing.
In addition to assisting key charities in delivering field projects, the Bloom Wellbeing Fund is interested in funding research and organisations with the potential to drive policy and system change to promote global wellbeing. We look forward to collaborating with more philanthropists, foundations, and family offices to increase global happiness and wellbeing.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you in the comments section.
See the work of Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers, 2023, for the latest on this issue.
Thank you, Emma! I'm impressed by the attitude of your minister. In the UK, it's not as clear that government is really interested in helping people with mental health issues: https://www.bigissue.com/news/politics/mel-stride-dwp-mental-health-culture-backlash/
Thank you for reading and for your comment, Mary. There certainly seems to be something about the way our societies work that funnels us away from the kind of happiness you describe.