Interview
#38 - Prof Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world
- The second Effective Altruism Global Conference is scheduled for October 26th to 28th at University College London, with an expectation of significant guest participation and attendee satisfaction.
- A forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press and an English version of a Chinese-language manuscript on happiness are imminent, alongside a claim that the EA movement has made significant progress in nine years and will expand influence, particularly in Eastern countries like China.
- The "new welfare economics" movement, emerging in the 1930s, is viewed as failing to guide policy due to its rejection of interpersonal comparisons, which were adopted to enhance mathematical rigor rather than utility.
- A revival of happiness studies began in 1997 with three pivotal papers, proposing "just perceptible increment of happiness" as a cardinal, unidimensional metric where equal moral significance applies across individuals to derive a social welfare function maximizing the sum of utilities.
- Brain stimulation technologies are predicted to increase happiness without diminishing marginal utility, potentially solving social problems like depression and crime if availability is restricted to 7–10 p.m., whereas genetic engineering remains a very long-term solution requiring high caution due to reversibility risks.
- Animal welfare is expected to improve significantly, with conditions for farm chickens potentially reaching positive net welfare at negligible cost, supported by the view that insects have uncertain welfare capacity while fish and crayfish are capable of suffering.
- Environmental risks include a potential global tipping point in year 70 if a "business as usual" path continues for 50–60 years, creating a 10% probability of extinction that is deemed unacceptable and requires immediate action to avoid an uninhabitable world.
- Future welfare is projected to become infinite or expand to other worlds if extinction is avoided over the next one or two centuries, with the risk of extinction from increased climate spending considered trivial.
- Economic policy expectations include the view that "conspicuous consumption" and relative income effects outweigh absolute income effects on happiness, that taxes on "diamond goods" impose no burden, and that immigration generally benefits local economies.
- Population projections for Singapore assume a 1.38% compound annual growth rate will reach 5.6 to 6 million by 2030, while the "Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index" (2008) is presented as a superior metric to GDP.
- The "just perceptible increment" of happiness is expected to serve as the foundational axiom for justifying a vast array of policies aimed at reducing inequality, poverty, pollution, and suffering, as well as increasing education, research, and animal welfare.
- Most economists are expected to agree that equality and poverty elimination are paramount after survival, with the majority of people trustable to treat animals well given competent legislation and government enforcement.
- Optimism is attributed to biological factors and learned practices of reducing worry, with the expectation that writing Chinese press articles may influence public views even without direct policy changes.
- Happiness studies in economics aim to move beyond the inability of the "new welfare economics" to determine policy desirability by using measurable increments of utility to guide social welfare maximization.