#38 - Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world

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

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

Yew-Kwang Ng, Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, was independently working on this exact question since the 70s. Many of his conclusions have ended up foreshadowing what is 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 thinks that in the future this is a problem humanity might work to solve. Yet he thinks that greatly improved conditions for farm animals could eventually justify eating meat.

He has spent most of his life 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.

Link to our summary and appreciation of Kwang’s top publications and insights throughout a lifetime of research.

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 Malaya.

But events in the Soviet Union and China, 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 refereed papers - covering economics, biology, politics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

He's most well-known for his work in welfare economics, and proposed ‘welfare biology’ as a new field of study. In 2007, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia, the highest award that the society bestows.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

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

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: search for '80,000 Hours' in your podcasting app.

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