New Podcast Release: Michael Plant

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to Michael Plant, founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to Michael Plant, founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute, about the science of wellbeing, how we measure happiness, and what truly makes life better for people around the world.

Michael shares insights from his research on effective altruism and how we can use rigorous data to identify the most impactful ways to improve global wellbeing. We discuss the difference between happiness and life satisfaction, why some charities are hundreds of times more effective than other well-known charities, whether you should give to homeless people, and whether money really can buy happiness.

Michael also reflects on his own life, his upcoming marriage, and the practical steps we can take to increase happiness—both for ourselves and for others.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

What is Happiness?

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: Michael, today is World Happiness Day. So, it’s obvious my first question is, what is happiness? We know there are a few different definitions. Is any one of them better than the others?

MICHAEL PLANT: Hello, and thanks for having me here on Lives Well Lived, despite not having lived as much of my life as some of your other guests. What is happiness? It's an experience. It's feeling good overall. It's the experience of having more enjoyment than suffering. That's a standard, common language usage of how we think about happiness, and that's how I understand it.

How Did the Happier Lives Institute Begin?

PETER SINGER: You are the founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute. Prior to that, you were a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. You founded the Happier Lives Institute and became director of it in less time than it takes most newly graduated PhDs to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship. How did you manage that?

MICHAEL PLANT: Of course the thing you missed out from all that, the highlight was of course, being your PhD student, Peter, some years ago. You want me to tell you the story of the Happy Lives Institute?

PETER SINGER: Yes, please do.

MICHAEL PLANT: It came out of my PhD research. I got gripped by philosophy early in life, studying ethics, and I thought of this idea that we should try and bring about as much happiness as possible. That seems like it's really capturing something pretty fundamental about ethics. I've been interested in these kinds of philosophical ideas of what we ought to do, thinking that utilitarianism is pretty close to the truth. But of course, there’s this question of, if you think you should be trying to maximize happiness, wellbeing, well, how do you do it?

And I realized there was this whole science of wellbeing, these sort of surveys people use, lurking in the background. I thought it seemed natural to try and combine these things and see where this takes us. So that was a question I was looking into during my PhD. And I could see this world of effective altruism, which the two of you know a little about. There was also an effort to look for the most cost-effective charities. And that seemed like a good idea. What seemed missing from this was that no one seemed to take happiness seriously. In principle, it’s something that we care about. But where was the research to try and find out, to kind of harness the science of wellbeing, to work out what, in practice, are the best ways to increase it? This seemed like a good thing to do. And as my PhD was coming towards the end, I thought, okay, this will be the next thing to try and do.

Wellbeing vs. Life Satisfaction

PETER SINGER: In the introduction to your chapter, you write, "There are many worthy problems in the world. Our resources are limited, and we don’t want to waste our money. So how can you get real change for your dollar? More specifically, how can you make the biggest difference to world happiness with what you have to spare?" And in order to answer that question, you develop a method of comparing how much you improve wellbeing by, for example, helping the homeless in your own city, giving acutely malnourished children the nutrients they need, or providing psychotherapy for people with mental health issues. Many people might think we just can’t really make those comparisons. Let’s discuss that. I’ll start by asking you what do you mean by wellbeing? Is that a synonym for happiness for you?

MICHAEL PLANT: It’s not a technical synonym. I take the meaning to be the same. But wellbeing refers to what makes your life go well for you. And I think the three of us here are unusual in sharing a very similar concept of wellbeing. We think it’s happiness—it’s how you feel.

There is a difference between that and how happiness researchers think about wellbeing. There are different sorts of self-reported questions, and the mainstay question—the one that’s typically used, and indeed the World Happiness Report uses—is life satisfaction. The typical framing of the question is: “On a scale of zero to ten, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” Zero is not at all, ten is completely satisfied. And so, yeah, this is what the World Happiness Report ranking uses.

So you might say if you were pernickety —which I’m sure none of us here are—it’s the World Life Satisfaction Report, which is different from actually how happy you are day by day. Or if you were being cheeky, you’d call it the World Smugness Report. It’s picking up this different concept from day-to-day experiences. You also get these measures of experiential wellbeing or kind of happiness—how you feel moment by moment. But they’re not used so much, which I think is a shame. And I sometimes complain about this to my wellbeing colleagues because you need quite granular data on how people feel moment by moment to do these, and so most of the wellbeing measures are really life satisfaction measures, which is a bit different from moment-by-moment wellbeing.

Does Marriage Make You Happier?

PETER SINGER: There are other general things out there that research has shown, and in fact, as you mentioned, that you’re getting married, you can expect an increase in your wellbeing level from being married. I understand the research shows this. Is that correct?

MICHAEL PLANT: Yes, it’s going to be about (if I’m average, which of course I’ve always hoped to be) a 0.3 increase on a zero-to-ten scale around the time of the wedding. Weddings are different from partnerships. So, getting married, there’s a small increase and then it goes down after about two years. Men actually get a bigger impact from getting married than women do. It’s about twice the effect if you look at the time series of the area under the line. But getting married is just the least cost-effective party you ever throw, which is different from being in a relationship. If you look at following people over time, the effect of being in a relationship is consistent and positive, and people don’t seem to adapt to that for the most part. Nevertheless, I’m getting married and having a very cost-ineffective party.

What Are the Most Cost-Effective Charities?

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: Let’s get back to chapter eight. If you could tell us something more about effective charities that you would vote to support.

MICHAEL PLANT: Yes, I’d be happy to do that. So, like I say, we’ve got this report coming out. At the time of this podcast, it will be out today. So, I hope all your listeners are very excited to go and pick it up.

We do the first-ever global comparison of charities in terms of how much wellbeing they produce per dollar. And we use the WELLBY measure, looking at changes in zero-to-ten life satisfaction. There is this idea in the ether, popularized by the effective altruism community, that the top charity is a hundred times more cost-effective than the average charity. And when we were looking at this, it turns out that no one’s really demonstrated this before...So, we're the first people to have, to have done this.

What we found is that, indeed, there are radical differences between charities in terms of cost-effectiveness. The best ones are hundreds of times better than the worst ones.

The Impact of Depression on Happiness

MICHAEL PLANT: I sometimes say, a bit flippantly, that my top one tip for living a happy life is: don’t get depressed. And I say that half as a joke because, of course, you don’t really choose to get depressed but also because it’s about one of the worst things that can happen to you…

If you think you are depressed, you probably are. If it persists, talk to a friend, go and see a doctor. And here’s the particular bit which I don’t think people know but I think they should: both antidepressants and talking therapies work. They don’t work for everyone. They’re not miracle cures, but they both kind of work on average. Then, the thing that you particularly want to look out for in your search for a therapist is someone that you get on with. It's the therapeutic relationship which is most predictive of the effect of therapy, not the particular flavor of therapy you use, whether it's cognitive behavioral therapy or cognitive analytic therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy.

So, you want to do a vibe check with your therapist if you think this person understands me, and you want to talk to them. that's a good sign. If you think the vibes are off, then find someone else. That's my very practical, how to be happier when things are going really wrong.