Learn more about the key ideas and guiding principles that define our approach to helping others

Our philosophy at the Happier Lives Institute can be broken into five simple ideas:

1. Doing good is good
2. Doing more good is better
3. Happiness matters
4. We can measure happiness.
5. We should look for – and support – the BEST ways to increase happiness.

The thread that ties these together is that we should take happiness seriously.

Idea 1: Doing good is good

The classic argument for doing good, even when it costs you something, comes from the philosopher Peter Singer (1972). He asks us to imagine we are walking past a shallow pond, when we suddenly see that a child is drowning. We can jump in and save that child, but this will ruin our brand new suit. Are we morally required to save the child at some cost to ourselves?

The reaction most people have is that we must wade in. The principle that appears to explain this reaction is that, as Singer (1972, p. 231) puts it:

“if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable importance, we ought, morally, to do it”.

If Peter Singer provides the “bad cop” case for benevolence, we can also articulate a more inspiring aspect of altruism: it enriches both the giver and the receiver. Imagine you’re at a coffee shop with a friend. You’re about to leave for a date when they open up to you about their struggle with depression – so you risk being late in order to listen. A year later you get a message from the friend saying the conversation changed the direction of their life. What would it mean to hear something like that?

These dilemmas are not merely theoretical. There are people suffering, and whose lives could flourish instead, all around the world.

Even if we can’t help them directly, we could give some share¹How much? Perhaps 1% for middle earners in rich countries and higher amounts for even wealthier people. of our income to charities that can. This may not feel the same as doing it ourselves when the person is right in front of us. But the outcome may be identical: a large benefit to them at a small cost to ourselves. It seems that, if we have a moral duty to rescue the child, we have a moral duty to give something to charity.²Singer’s thought experiment of whether we ought to save a drowning child from a shallow pond has since generated a huge literature in philosophy, one we cannot hope to summarise here. Interested readers can find articles on this by going to https://philpapers.org/ (a philosophy database) and searching for “shallow pond” and/or “drowning child”. And if we imagine that our lives would feel fuller from helping a friend tame their suffering, then we should realise it’s well within our power to have that sort of impact to the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people, simply by donating a small share of our lifetime income – even if we never get to meet the people we help.

You may not feel wealthy enough to give, but you can probably do more than you expect with what you can contribute (See idea 5). And you may be wealthier than you think. If you earn the median US salary of $43k ($117 a day), you’d be in the top 2% of the global income distribution³The median individual income figure of $42,220 comes from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (2023), based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The income percentile this falls into comes from Gapminder’s (2023) data on global income distribution after converting the yearly income to $115 dollars a day. Extreme poverty is living off of $2 a day or less and is experienced by around 10% of the global population.. By $56k ($155 a day) you’re in the top 1% globally.

Source: Gapminder

While there’s a strong ethical case for giving, that’s not the only reason to do so: altruism is also its own reward. Research shows that charitable giving increases the giver’s happiness, especially when the person has a choice on how to give and they understand its impact⁴See Aknin et al. (2020) and Aknin et al. (2022) for pre-registered reports tackling this the topic of the personal wellbeing benefits of beneficence.. Many people are proud to give because it’s part of who they are: they want to be someone that cares for and helps others.

If you are not sure if giving will make you happier, why not try it and find out?

Idea 2: Doing more good is better

AKA: Buy goodness when it’s cheap

If you earn a salary of $56k and donate 1% a year, for 10 years, you’d give $5,600. What could this do? Based on current data, that $5,600 could do any one of these:

• Double the household income of 5 families living in extreme poverty for one year.
• Treat around 150 people for depression via group psychotherapy in Uganda at around $50 a person.
• In expectation, prevent 1 child from dying by providing around 1,200 anti-malaria bed nets at $5 a net.
• Pay less than 1% of the cost to help someone in danger at sea via a rescue mission from the UK’s Royal National Lifeboat Institute.
• Pay for less than 5% the cost of providing a guide dog in the UK.

But which one should you choose?

We don’t think the main purpose of giving to charity is to make ourselves happier. Rather, the main purpose is to make a difference to others. So, we should try and make the biggest difference we can, or, at least, a bigger difference.  In other words, we think you should be an ‘effective giver’. This may seem common sense. Indeed, in one survey 87% of respondents said they’d reallocate donations to a highly effective charity away from what they previously gave to.

But only a small fraction of people are effective givers. Being an effective giver means donating with heart and head: it means thinking about where your money will make the most difference, not just what you’re passionate about. However, out of the 53% of Americans who reported giving to charity last year, less than 2% donated using a charity evaluator, and only 0.04% used one that focused on effective giving (such as the Happier Lives Institute or GiveWell). So what gives?

Research has found that the most common barriers to effective giving are that people:

• Don’t know how to give effectively or whether it matters (information)
• Prefer to support causes they are attached to, even if this would have less impact (motivation).

Information about impact

According to recent research, donors predict that, among the charities helping the global poor, the best charities are only 1.5 times better than the average ones. Of course, if you believe that charities don’t differ much by cost-effectiveness, it doesn’t make sense to invest time looking for a slightly better option. But this is incorrect. As we argue later, charities vary enormously in how good they are compared to each other.

Motivation

It’s understandable that people want to support projects close to their hearts. This is especially if you think we can’t compare charities’ impact, or they’re all about as good.

While we think we should give where it goes furthest, you don’t have to choose between giving to what you’re connected to and what creates the most good.

There’s a simple solution: you can split your donations. Perhaps you give 90% of your yearly donation to effective causes, and put aside 10% for things close to your heart. But certainly,we think some of our giving should be going to the charities that create the most happiness with our money.

And if you’re worried about looking weird – don’t worry. Research finds that donors who gave both to their favorite charity and a highly impactful one are viewed as the most competent and warm.

Idea 3: Happiness matters

So you want to do the most good. Great, but what is ‘goodness’ made out of?

Given that we’re the Happier Lives Institute, you may be shocked to hear that we think happiness is what, in the end, matters. We seek it for ourselves. Parents say it’s all they really want for their children. The US constitution goes so far as to say the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. People value it in most cases more than anything else (Adler et al., 2017; Benjamin et al., 2012). So, given all that, we think charitable giving should focus on increasing happiness.

A conventional approach, when thinking about impact for charities (or policies) is to focus on poverty or health. However, we don’t believe that improving poverty or health are the ultimate goals. We think health and wealth are important, but as the means to an end,  the end being happiness.

Here’s one way to bring this out. If you ask someone, “why do you want to be richer?” they might point to what that money will allow them to do – buy food, a house, go on holiday – or even just say it will make them happier. But if you ask someone, “why do you want to be happier?” you can expect a confused look: happiness is what ultimately matters, so no further justification is needed or possible.

What do we mean by ‘happiness’ though?

We are using the word ‘happiness’ in the same way people understand it in normal life. Happiness, simply, is feeling good overall: when you experience more joy than suffering.

We use ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ interchangeably here (for details on terminology, see footnote).⁵We use ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ as synonyms here and throughout. This is, admittedly, an abuse of terminology, though not one we expect readers to mind. In philosophy, ‘wellbeing’ refers to what makes life ultimately good for us. Philosophers have three accounts of wellbeing. The first is hedonism, on which wellbeing consists in happiness (a positive balance of enjoyment over suffering). The second are desire theories, on which wellbeing consists in having one’s desires satisfied. The third is the objective list, which claims there can be things that make a person’s life go better which are neither pleasurable to nor desired by them. Classic items for the objective list include success, friendship, knowledge, and virtuous behaviour. Hence, wellbeing refers to happiness only on one of these accounts. That said, the debate amongst philosophers is generally about whether happiness is the only thing that matters for our wellbeing. Those holding desire theory of objective lists accounts will tend to say that happiness matters for wellbeing somehow, either because we desire happiness, or because it is one of the goods that matter intrinsically. A view of wellbeing that held that our experiences, including suffering, did not matter in any way would be a peculiar, implausible view of wellbeing. We direct readers to Crisp (2021) for the best introduction to the topic; it is open access.

Idea 4: We can measure happiness

How do we measure happiness?

Some people find the idea of measuring happiness confusing (“But isn’t it subjective? Doesn’t it mean different things to different people?”). So, how do we measure it?

It’s surprisingly easy. You simply ask people how they feel. They can then say how good or bad they, subjectively, are feeling. The question of how good or bad you feel is different from what’s causing those good or bad feelings.

Okay, there is a bit more to it. To get comparable results, you have to ask the questions carefully, in a standardised way. And you have to realise there are quite a few different types of questions you can ask.

The science of asking people about their quality of life is known as subjective wellbeing. The most common types of questions are about:

• (1) How you feel during your life (experience)
• (2) How you assess life as a whole (evaluative)
• (3) A wider set of things that make life go well such as meaning, purpose or worthwhileness (eudaimonic)⁶These measures intend to capture a wider set of things that make life go well. By the nature of their greater breadth they aren’t as easily summarised. A representative measure is the Flourishing index. In addition to asking about sense of satisfaction and feelings of happiness it also inquires about meaning, virtue, close relationships and mental and physical health. Eudaimonic wellbeing which naturally corresponds to objective list theories of wellbeing..

They’re typically framed on a 0 to 10 scale, bounded by the extremes of the state in question. As an example, see the image below from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS). The ONS asks various questions to about  300,000 people each year. Note that even though it asks three different questions, the pattern of responses is still very similar!

People seem to find these questions easy to answer, suggesting they find these questions intuitive and unproblematic. The median response time for subjective wellbeing questions is less than 30 seconds (ONS, 2011). And SWB questions have low non-response rates (Rässler and Riphahn, 2006), and in three of the largest SWB datasets we see a 10 to 100 times higher response rate for wellbeing than income questions (OECD, 2013). In other words, people find it very easy to say how happy they are. This shouldn’t be a surprise: we spend lots of time thinking and feeling about how are lives are going.

Who cares about happiness, anyway?

The study of happiness and subjective wellbeing data is relatively new: the first large, nationally representative surveys started in the 1970s. However, academic interest has boomed in recent years as this graph shows. The field has grown from a curiosity to a maturing field with its own journals and conferences.

Note. Number of publication hits for searches on Pubmed. We combined ‘subjective wellbeing’ with ‘subjective well-being’.

One prominent annual piece of research is the World Happiness Report, which compares and ranks countries by their self-reported happiness – Finland has been on top since 2017. Everyone ‘knows’ the Nordics are happiest countries, but the World Happiness Report only began in 2012.

Beyond the Ivory Tower

Both the UK and New Zealand Treasuries have guidelines on using happiness data in principle, to assess whether different policies are good value for money. Academics, like the LSE value for money group, have also used this data, in practice, to evaluate specific policies.

In the past two decades, at least 24 countries have started measuring the subjective wellbeing of their citizens.

Source: What works wellbeing. Outline of the OECD countries that developed national frameworks, development plans or surveys with a wellbeing focus.

Idea 5: It’s time to find the best ways to increase wellbeing

Let’s pull these ideas together. Doing good is good. One way we can do good is by giving to charity. Doing more good is better. Happiness matters and we can measure it.

So, the natural conclusion is that we should donate something to the charities that create the most happiness with our money. But what are those charities? Well, the Happier Lives Institute was set up in 2019 to find out. We’re the first and only organisation that looks for the most cost-effective, evidence-based ways globally to improve happiness, and we’ve been beavering away at the area ever since we started.

What we’ve found is this. Some charities are enormously more impactful than others in how much happiness they create with your money. It turns out that we can make a much bigger difference to others, without a significant extra cost to ourselves. This opportunity isn’t merely hypothetical.

Research to work out how to spend money to get the most happiness is new. Evaluations of policy and charity cost-effectiveness in terms of happiness only started in the last few years. The first ones we know of were in Plant (2019), followed by the work published in 2021 by Frijters and Krekel, State of Life, and here at the Happier Lives Institute.

Happiness per dollar: putting the WELLBY to work

We and others like the LSE value for money group, Pro Bono Economics, and State of Life quantify impact in ‘wellbeing adjusted life-years’, aka WELLBYs⁷See Brazier and Tsuchiya (2015), Layard and Oparina (2021)..

One WELLBY is equivalent to a 1-point increase on a 0-10 self-reported wellbeing scale (typically life satisfaction) for 1 person for 1 year. If your wellbeing went from 5/10 to 6/10 for 2 years, that would be an increase of 2 WELLBY.

At its simplest, a charity evaluation might look at the total amount an organisation spends to provide a service, how many people it provides that service to, and then estimate the average benefit per person reached. So, if a charity spent $1 million, reached 50,000 people, and they each got a 1 WELLBY benefit, that’s 50,000 WELLBYs for $1 million, a cost-effectiveness of $1 million /50,000 = $20 per WELLBY.

As with many things, it’s easier said than done. In practice we try to incorporate all relevant high quality evidence ranging from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of the intervention a charity delivers to highly relevant data collected about the charity programme as it is delivered in practice.

Learn more: See our post explaining WELLBYs or our page on charity evaluation methodology.

Some things create way more happiness per dollar

In our Chapter in the World Happiness Report (published March 2025), we undertook the first ever global comparison of how much happiness different charities produce with your money. We brought together all the pre-existing work (by ourselves and others) and tried to fill some obvious gaps.

What we found is that  some charities are considerably more impactful than others – hundreds or even thousands of times more impactful. To make life easier for you, we curate a list of recommended charities, where you can find more information and analysis on them.

There are huge differences in cost-effectiveness for creating happiness with your money, whether we’re thinking about private resources or public ones.

So, by picking carefully (whether charities or policies), we can have vastly more impact on happiness for the same monetary cost. We must emphasise how extraordinary the differences in cost-effectiveness are.

Here’s one way to bring this home. If a friend told you they gave $150,000 to a charity, you’d probably be extremely impressed – that could be their life’s savings. Our conclusion is it’s possible to have that sort of impact for a fraction of the cost: giving $1,000 to the best charities may do just as much good as $150,000 to a randomly selected one.

Another way is to think about buying things for ourselves: we are typically delighted when there’s a sale and we discover we can get 20% more for our money. But when it comes to buying happiness for other people, we can potentially get 100x, or more, for our money by going with the best options. It would be like a store running a secret campaign where if you spend $10 on a phone charger you get given a complementary $1,000 MacBook.

The difference you can make to people’s happiness globally is perhaps far greater than you ever thought – if you follow the evidence and support the best charities.

We often want to do something to help other people and make the world better, but feel like there’s nothing we can do. We hope we’ve shown that’s not true. We can do a great deal. It’s up to each of us to decide whether we take action.

So, you want to contribute to a happier world: what can you do?

If you share our philosophy and want to make a difference, there are several ways you can contribute.

1. Keep up-to-date

The easiest first step you can take is to sign up to our newsletter. We will bring new research, recommendations, and opportunities to directly contribute to global wellbeing right into your inbox.

2. Donate to the charities that create the most happiness – and encourage others to do the same

There are many organisations doing a tremendous amount of good to improve wellbeing in the world. As we’ve shown, some are hundreds of times better than others. You can make an exceptional difference to the lives of others by donating thoughtfully to the most cost-effective and evidence-based charities we have found so far.

We’d also encourage you, if you feel moved to give, to share your motivation and our research with others. Think about it this way: if you encourage one friend to give as much as you do, you’ve doubled your impact.

3. Support HLI’s research and outreach

You can also give directly to HLI to help us continue our work. Efforts to investigate WELLBY cost-effectiveness are in their early days for both policies and charities, and we’re the only organisation searching for the best ways globally to increase happiness. With your help, we can expand the frontier of happiness and find even better ways to improve global happiness.

IPA’s Right-Fit Evidence Unit performed an independent evaluation of our cost-effectiveness. They estimated that our cost-effectiveness puts us above our top charities⁸They estimated we can produce a WELLBY for $3 (or ~320 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated). This compares favourably to our most cost-effective charity whose analogous figures are $9 or 108 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated. We note there is some circularity here: lots of HLI’s impact comes from encouraging people to give better by supporting our recommended charities. If all the donors focused on maximising world happiness only gave to us, we wouldn’t have much impact – and would instead redirect them to support the charities. We encourage donors to support our charities and empower us to keep doing research and outreach. If you have questions about donating to us and/or our charities, get in touch!.

Our past records also suggest that our work has a leverage effect. For every $1 donated to HLI, a further $2-5 is donated to our recommended charities as a result.

Learn more: read our latest advice for donors.

3. Do our work for us (for researchers)

There are many potentially valuable research directions. We’re deeply engaged with the new field of wellbeing science and committed to seeing it grow and mature as discipline. We are always open to collaborating with researchers to try and expand work done on topics critical to improving global wellbeing.

Learn more: read our research agenda for the most pressing questions that need to be answered

4. Bring us on to consult for you

We have recently launched a consultancy arm for HLI, aimed at bringing our expertise to interested groups such as:

• Foundations who want to optimise grant-making decisions with cutting-edge research.
• Charities and NGOs who want help measuring wellbeing, analysing wellbeing data, and identifying ways to increase its cost-effectiveness.
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Teams who want to align charitable investments with measurable well-being outcomes.
• Think Tanks and Charity Evaluators who want our wellbeing and cost-effectiveness expertise.
• High-Net-Worth Individuals aiming to maximise the happiness their philanthropy creates.

Checkout our consultancy page for more information.

5. Get in touch

If you have any other ideas of how you can help us reach out to us at

[email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!