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In China, until about 100 years ago people believed that if your husband died, no matter how young you were, you could not remarry. They thought that violating ‘chastity’ was obviously immoral – you didn’t have to justify this in terms of happiness! But I think this is very bad. Today many believe that it is only foolish, ancient people who think such silly things – modern people no longer do. For that particular idea, yes. But even now, right now, throughout the world we still hold many such traditional beliefs which are similarly detrimental to happiness!

Prof Yew-Kwang Ng

Will people who think carefully about how to maximize welfare eventually converge on the same views?

The effective altruism community has spent the past 10 years debating how best to increase happiness and reduce suffering, and gradually narrowed in on the world’s poorest people, all sentient animals, and future generations.

Yew-Kwang Ng, Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, worked totally independently on this exact question since the 70s. Many of his early conclusions are now conventional wisdom within effective altruism – though other views he holds remain controversial or little-known.

For instance, he thinks we ought to explore increasing pleasure via direct brain stimulation, and that genetic engineering may be an important tool for increasing happiness in the future.

His work has suggested that the welfare of most wild animals is on balance negative and he hopes that in the future this is a problem humanity will work to solve. Yet he thinks that greatly improved conditions for farm animals could eventually justify eating meat.

And he has spent most of his life forcefully advocating for the view that happiness, broadly construed, is the only intrinsically valuable thing.

If it’s true that careful researchers will converge as Prof Ng believes, these ideas may prove as prescient as his other, now widely accepted, opinions.

See below for our summary and appreciation of Kwang’s top publications and insights throughout a lifetime of research.

Born in Japanese-occupied Malaya during WW2, Kwang has led an exceptional life. While in high school he was drawn to physics, mathematics, and philosophy, yet he chose to study economics because of his dream: to establish communism in an independent Malaysia.

But events in the Soviet Union and the Chinese ‘cultural revolution’, in addition to his burgeoning knowledge and academic appreciation of economics, would change his views about the practicability of communism. He would soon complete his journey from young revolutionary to academic economist, and eventually become a columnist writing in support of Deng Xiaoping’s Chinese economic reforms in the 80s.

He got his PhD at Sydney University in 1971, and has since published over 250 peer-reviewed papers – covering economics, biology, politics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, with a particular focus on ‘welfare economics’.

In 2007, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia, the highest award the society bestows.

In this episode we discuss how he developed some of his most unusual ideas and his fascinating life story, including:

  • Why Kwang believes that ‘Happiness Is Absolute, Universal, Ultimate, Unidimensional, Cardinally Measurable and Interpersonally Comparable’
  • What are the most pressing questions in economics?
  • Did Kwang have to worry about censorship from the Chinese government when promoting market economics, or concern for animal welfare?
  • Welfare economics and where Kwang thinks it went wrong
  • The need to move towards a morality based on happiness
  • What are the key implications of Kwang’s views for how a government ought to set it’s priorities?
  • Could promoting these views accidentally give support to oppressive governments?
  • Why does Kwang think the economics profession as a whole doesn’t agree with him on many things?
  • Why he thinks we should spend much more to prevent climate change and whether other are economists convinced by his arguments
  • Kwang’s proposed field: welfare biology.
  • Does evolution tend to create happy or unhappy creatures?
  • Novel ways to substantially increase human happiness
  • What would Kwang say to listeners who might want to build on his research in the future?

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

The 80,000 Hours podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

When people’s income are low and at the survival, starvation level, then having enough to eat just to survive is very important. But once you are beyond the survival, and some level of comfort, then recent happiness studies show that further increase in consumption in income is not that important to increase your happiness. And hence in my view, the more important issue… would be environmental economics. Because we are facing an environmental problem, which could become a catastrophe for the world. It could cause global extinction. Then that means that helping the world to survive — to overcome say the climate change crisis — in my view this is the most important area in economics.

More than 60 years ago, I think 1956, scientists discovered by accident that there are pleasure centers [in the brain] … First in mice, and then eventually in humans as well. The stimulation of those – you find intense pleasure. And that pleasure does not diminish. Most pleasures have diminishing marginal utility, because we are built that way to protect us from say excessive eating, excessive anything.

But direct stimulation has never been done before. So we are not evolved to have diminishing marginal utility for direct stimulation. The pleasure from that, it’s constantly high intensity, high pleasure. So that is a way that you can increase our happiness a lot in my view. But not enough research has been done to invent something – it has been used for sickness or pain reduction – but it has not been used just to increase our positive pleasures. I think that can be done, but not yet done. I think that should be promoted. We need more research on that – to invent something that everyone can use to increase happiness. And that would help to decrease depression, decrease crime, decrease hard drugs. And solve a lot of social problems.

…my paper argues that most animals welfare are negative. It’s based on some axioms which may or may not be true. But if that is true then I think that we humans have an obligation to help our unfortunate, unlucky cousins to escape their miserable situations. But we cannot help them fully now. But in the future when we are more advance economically, scientifically and ethically, then I think we should help to decrease their suffering. But even now, I’m in favor of helping to decrease their suffering for those measures that does not cost us too much. Especially for those animals that we farmed for our food. Animal farming, including chicken farming. We should improve the conditions of say chicken farming, who are suffering, so that the chickens we farm enjoy positive instead of negative welfare. In my view, that can be done at negligible if not zero costs to human. I have a paper in animal sentient, 2016 on that.

…there’s a 2014 article in Science, showing that even crayfish – crayfish are invertebrates – crayfish are capable of feeling worried. Because when a person worries then our brains secrete a certain kind of chemical associated with worry for humans. And if you put a crayfish in a surrounding where it cannot escape then the crayfish will also secrete the same chemical. So if crayfish can worry, then it’s almost certain that all vertebrates should be able to worry and hence are capable of welfare.

In my view, ultimately, intrinsically, happiness is the only thing that is of value. Other things may have instrumental value. For example, we suffer now to achieve something, we study to pass the exam and we suffer during the process. But it help you to learn something or to get your degree and then you can do something better. So it contribute to future welfare. Which again is happiness. So something may be of instrumental value, but instrumental to achieve something else. Something else what is of value. Ultimately, only happiness is of value. And the fact that happiness is of value, everyone knows. Because everyone enjoy the nice feeling of being happy. … That’s my main moral philosophical stance.

Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show

How Kwang thinks about welfare, happiness and utilitarianism

More recent

Earlier papers on welfare economics

The case for ‘welfare biology’ and concern for wild animal suffering

Why we should be extremely cautious about existential risks

Other books and papers by Kwang mentioned in the episode

Articles mentioned in the episode of which Kwang is not the author

Evidence for the importance of relative prosperity even for people on low incomes:

Related episodes

About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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