You’ve probably heard the expression “money can’t buy happiness.” But take a look at the evidence, and you’ll discover an encouraging fact: Your money can buy happiness — for other people.
Not all efforts to improve people’s well-being are equally effective, though. The best charities out there create hundreds of times more happiness per dollar than others, according to new findings published this month by research center Happier Lives Institute in the 2025 World Happiness Report, which ranks countries by happiness each year.
That means that if you donate your money to the right charities, it can buy a lot of happiness for the world’s neediest people at a stunningly low cost. For example, just $25 can meaningfully boost somebody’s happiness for a year, if you give it to an effective organization like StrongMinds, which treats depression in African countries.
The Happier Lives Institute figured this out by comparing the impact of different charities using a single standardized metric: the well-being year, or Wellby. It’s pretty straightforward: Imagine that someone asked you, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, on a scale from 0 to 10?” Producing one Wellby for you would mean increasing your life satisfaction by one point for one year.
The Happier Lives Institute is UK-based, so, for comparison’s sake, it showed how some of the world’s most cost-effective charities stack up against a few charities in the UK (the last six in the chart). As you can see, money donated to the top charities in poorer countries can improve lives much more per dollar than money donated within a rich country, because a dollar goes further abroad.
To give you a sense of what a few of the “best buy” charities do:
- Pure Earth is the largest nonprofit working on reducing lead contamination globally. Millions of people die prematurely every year due to lead poisoning — it could be killing more people than HIV, malaria, and car accidents combined — so investment in this area can go a long way.
- Tamaika works on treating acute malnutrition. That’s the leading cause of childhood deaths internationally — but the good news is that it’s extremely treatable: a whopping 95 percent of the children in this program fully recover.
- Friendship Bench and StrongMinds both treat mental health issues like depression and anxiety in African countries. They use a community-based care model, where lightly trained laypeople — picture someone like your grandmother, not a doctor — conduct therapy sessions in homes or parks. This has turned out to be not only cheap to operate and easy to scale, but also incredibly effective, in part because locals find it culturally appropriate.
- Icddr,b teaches parents in low-income countries to play with their children in more enriching ways and to avoid maltreatment, with the end goal of improving childhood development and boosting well-being over the lifetime.
- NEPI (the Network for Empowerment & Progressive Initiative) is pioneering an effective way to reduce violence and criminality among young adults: It offers at-risk men behavioral therapy plus cash. The impacts on men in Liberia, for example, have been astounding.
The case for making people happier — not just wealthier or healthier
It’s only in the past few years that experts have started evaluating charities using WELLBYs as their metric. Since economists love things they can measure objectively, they’ve spent the past century focusing on measuring health and wealth. The best programs have long been considered to be the ones that saved the most lives or increased GDP by the widest margin.
But as it’s become clear that increasing wealth and health doesn’t always go hand in hand with increasing happiness, a growing chorus of experts has argued that helping people is ultimately about making them happier — not just wealthier or healthier — and the best way to find out how happy people are is to just ask them directly. In other words, we should focus more on subjective well-being: how satisfied people are with their lives based on what they say matters most to them. That revolution in thinking has gathered steam to the point that it’s now featured in well-known, mainstream publications like the World Happiness Report.
Some experts remain a bit skeptical about focusing on subjective well-being because it is, well, subjective.
“I don’t really know what it means for someone to say ‘I’m a 6 out of 10’ in the way that I know what it means for someone to not have a broken arm,” Elie Hassenfeld, the co-founder and CEO of the charity evaluator GiveWell, told me a couple years ago. He also questioned whether a measure of subjective well-being gets at the things we really care about, things that make life worthwhile, like meaning.
It’s a fair question. But, according to the Happier Lives Institute’s Michael Plant, it shouldn’t stop us from using Wellbys. “Part of the virtue of the subjective approach is that people can bring whatever matters to them into their assessments” of how happy they are, he told me. “So, how much meaning you have in your life could be an input into that.”
Plant also notes that although he’s trying to highlight the organizations that give you the most bang for your charitable buck, that doesn’t necessarily mean that other charities aren’t doing good work or aren’t worth funding at all. We don’t have to turn ourselves into mere optimizing machines — we can care about a diverse set of priorities and split our donations among a range of different charities.
The point, then, is not that you should ignore needy people in your local community, but that you may also want to look beyond that once you realize that you can make a much bigger difference to those living abroad.
“If a friend told you they gave $200,000 to a charity, you’d probably be extremely impressed — that could be their life savings!” Plant and his colleagues write in the World Happiness Report. “However, 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 $200,000 to a randomly selected one.”
The post How to buy a year of happiness, explained in one chart appeared first on Vox.
