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> Skills | > Estimating Wellbeing |
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> Skills | > Estimating Wellbeing |
There is a motto posted on this website to "spread happiness." This is consistent with the golden rule, to treat others the way you wish to be treated yourself. If everyone does that, it produces mutual happiness.
In order to spread happiness, it would be helpful to know what options are available to do it. Because there may not be sufficient time and money to do all of them at once, it is useful to pick the most effective ones. Therefore, it is necessary to estimate which will bring the most satisfaction across all those who would be affected.
This satisfaction is their collective happiness, or to say it another way, it is their wellbeing. Estimating wellbeing is an essential part of a rational decision-making process.
If we are going to estimate it, that means we will quantify it, and then evaluate how much wellbeing is produced by each option.
The ability to estimate wellbeing is a useful skill for any group making a decision. This applies to policy decisions that national leaders make, as it affects the wellbeing of their citizens and potentially of people outside their nation as well. It is also relevant to decisions made by leaders at lower government levels (in cities or provinces), as well as by non-government organizations such as charities or clubs. Even in a very small group, such as a family, these concepts can be applied, although typically a less formal approach would be used.
Let's step back a moment to consider what happiness (wellbeing) is made of. This is covered on this web site under the topic Happiness, and more specifically in the chapter on Components of Happiness.
In that model, happiness arises from the fulfilment of motivators in 8 categories. Further, a rough estimate of satisfaction on each motivator can be scored as described in the topic Pursuing Happiness.
If we can score satisfaction on the components of happiness, likewise we can assess the level of happiness of a person, and we can collect information from group members to determine the happiness of the group overall.
Each person gains happiness not only from the fulfilment of personal desires, but also through vicarious satisfaction that arises from helping other people. Each of us has an influence within a widening circle, as illustrated here:
Within each ring and across rings, there are organizations that cooperate, for the betterment of their members or customers. To you as an individual, some are local, while others have wider participation. Each of them may contribute to wellbeing in different ways.
The following table lists the 8 categories of motivators that were identified in the topic Pursuing Happiness. Along the top are some common kinds of organizations. Each organization serves a purpose that appeals to motivators in particular categories. The "X"s in the grid show the typical categories where each organization provides some satisfaction:
| Individual | Family | Sport club | School | Charity | Government | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical | X | X | X | X | X | |
| Social | X | X | X | X | ||
| Security | X | X | X | |||
| Intellectual | X | X | X | X | X | |
| Artistic | X | X | X | X | ||
| Empathic | X | X | X | |||
| Spiritual | X | X |
In general, families and small organizations closer to the centre of the rings can do a more thorough assessment of how happy their members are, because they have close contact with them. In some cases the local organizations may focus on specific satisfiers, like physical fitness or sociability. At the wider circles, the organizations aim to ensure their populations have safety, education, health, and the necessities of life like food, shelter, and clothing.
An individual can estimate wellbeing for himself (or herself). Also, parents often have a pretty good idea about the wellbeing of their dependent children. The individual and family can also plan alternatives aimed at improving their wellbeing, estimate the satisfaction that may arise from each, and then pick those that fall within their capacity (time and money).
An organization can undertake a similar process, to determine the best way to satisfy its members or customers, within its mandate for the kinds of satisfaction it is to deliver, and within its capacity.
There is no single organization to help each person everywhere to satisfy every one of their motivators. In each organization, there will be some people who are outside of their reach.
Moreover, many people are in need of help that they never receive, as there is much poverty still in this world, wars, and other problems. Our world is not as well organized as it might be, as there is no democratic government for the whole world to seek the welfare of every citizen wherever they may be. So, it is left to exiting organizations to try to cover the gaps as much as they can.
So, although this topic explains how to measure wellbeing, it is a limited measure, because it doesn't include all people across all time. Each organization can measure success according to how well it serves the population it covers. There will inevitably be people outside that, so beyond its current reach, each organization beyond the family has an opportunity for outreach.
Some of the organization's resources should be dedicated to outreach and improvement. There is no formula to determine how much this should be, except that if there is to be progress, it must be more than nothing.
Also, while serving its mission, the organization should take care to avoid doing anything to make things worse for anyone, including people within its membership and without. That external population is unlimited in size so the organization may not be able to assess its welfare, but it can at least ensure that it doesn't violate anyone's rights.
Further, there are interactions between individuals, families, and the organizations they participate in, with contractual arrangements and obligations between them.
As explained above, optimizing wellbeing of its self or its members is only a part of an assessment process that a person, family, or organization would go through in order to determine what is the best course of action. That's because there are opportunities to make improvements outside that scope, as well as a need to protect rights and fulfil obligations for external people or groups.
To show how "optimizing" fits within the overall decision process, the steps are summarized below. The steps in red are the ones where "estimating wellbeing" of the group is employed:
Before we move along to the steps for "estimating wellbeing," a slight digression is worthwhile to comment a bit more about the need for outreach and improvement. In particular, we need to consider serious problems that need to be addressed in the world, like poverty. We also need to understand the role that rights play in moral decisions. So, we'll deal with that briefly before moving on....
In past times, the extent of worldwide poverty was so extreme that wealthy people would be hesitant to use their resources to solve it. They viewed it as an infinitesimal contribution to an infinite need.
If the need is truly infinite, you cannot calculate what is the need per person. That's because to divide the need by the number of people, you would have to divide by infinity. This interferes with calculating how the resources should be distributed.
Further, if the need is practically infinite, a strategy of that sort would bring all the people of wealthy nations down to a state of poverty as their wealth got redistributed, and worse yet, the problem may still not be solved. Even if it was solved, the world population could continue to grow and it would be unsustainable.
However, there is a means to address that. It's called The Expanding Wave of Generosity. In this solution, the nation with greater wealth does not bring its-self into a state of poverty in order to fund help to external nations in need. Rather, it uses its surplus.
The help it provides is not just money to rescue people elsewhere, but also it teaches people how to help themselves, and provides them tools to do it. Soon, those people who were helped are helping other people within their own nation. Like a pebble thrown into a pond that causes ripples to spread from it, the generosity spreads among those who were helped: they help other people too!
We have seen from experience that educated people will limit their own reproduction to what they can support. So, the solution to the problem spreads like a wave, and it is no longer an "infinitesimal solution to an infinite problem." It may be gradual, and it may not rescue everyone when they need it, but it does make progress.
And of course, the wealthy and powerful people and nations must take care to not cause harm to the people of the other nations. That would be counterproductive to the goal of spreading happiness and abiding by the golden rule.
Coming back to the matter of "satisfaction per person," we have another problem of counting the people: we can only count the people who are alive today. That's because the tally of people across future generations is potentially infinite!
The decisions we make today will affect the people of the future, so it is unwise to ignore them as we make decisions now! But we cannot do any calculation to optimize their happiness if there are an infinite number of them.
So for these people, we use a solution much like the expanding wave that benefits people in need today: we invest in progress for the future! This is done using science, to discover and invent new things, such as cures for diseases.
And further, we must make sure not to make things worse for them, by depleting natural resources they will need, polluting the environment, or disrupting the ecology with global warming.
There is much that can be written about rights, but a brief explanation may be useful at this stage. It helps it to become apparent how "protection of rights" and "optimization of happiness" both fit within an ethical decision-making process.
On the matter of human rights: These are things that we want protected for ourselves, and which we will likewise not deny to any other person.
This is consistent with a fundamental principle, the golden rule. When there are things we would not like done to us, likewise we won't do them to other people. Defining rights is a way to more specifically state those things that we want protected.
For rights of obligation, we set the rights at a level where we can be sure of being able to meet the obligations. Above that level, we can apply the technique of "optimizing" happiness with the remaining resources at our disposal.
On the matter of animal rights, many kinds of animals have traits similar to people, to such a point that we sometimes consider our pets to be people. They can't communicate with so many words as humans do, but they can learn many things, and mutual caring and love can develop between humans and pets.
For animal rights, we cannot commit to happiness of "all living things," even if we constrain it to a fixed geographical area in a limited time. All living things includes a hive of thousands of bees, or an ant-hill of many thousands of ants, or a practically infinite numbers of bacteria. People will not agree that the well-being of a wasp nest is more important that the person's own well being, nor that of his family or community, simply because there are more wasps than people.
Nevertheless, we also don't wish to create unnecessary suffering in animals. This is especially true for those animals who have a nervous system with the capability of feeling pain, as humans do. Many of those animals are in the natural world beyond our control, and they do suffer as they prey on each other. But also, many are under the care and control of humans, and for those we can take responsibility for their well being.
Now let's get back to the matter at hand, which is to estimate wellbeing, so that we can optimize wellbeing within a fixed size group in a fixed period of time.
In order to calculate the satisfaction of a group, it is necessary to calculate the satisfaction of each individual. The difficulty here is that the individual himself (or herself) may not have a clear preference of which alternative is best. Each alternative may have multiple advantages and disadvantages, and it can be problematic to weigh them. This is especially true if the initiative is complex and if the advantages are spread out over time.
Therefore, we'll first address how to evaluate overall satisfaction in one individual, and then satisfaction in a group.
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