Tl;dr: All EA cause areas and major orgs focus on reducing suffering, what are the most effective ways to or charities that focus in increasing positive happiness?
I was in a little pastry shop today for the first time in a long while. For once not focused at all on work, my grandma and I had a really joyful time with a pretty, really sophisticated, sweet pastry and the love we shared while being there. That was a moment of deep positive happiness. There is a lot of this in the world, and relieving people from suffering before thinking about these types of unneccessary luxuries is clearly a priority. However I think they don't conflict with each other; we want a world with less suffering and one with more happiness & love. A world isn't good just because there is an absence of bad.
Most of EA's understanding of altruism is reducing suffering & risks: This is very clearly the case for animal welfare & global health; and also at least for the reducing risks aspect in areas like biorisk, xrisks, AI etc. Some of those areas also contribute to more positive happiness via detours. E.g. xrisks may aim to avoid us to die and thus allow people to be happy. However in contrast to the reliefing suffering interventions in health, they are more indirect.
Now one might argue that most private consumer spending is doing exactly this, creating happiness and thus huge amounts of capital already allocated to this. However I do believe that this is very unevenly distributed and there may be places with the potential for more positive happiness where work or capital could help.
One example I can think of in EA is giveDirectly. However also there its at least a minor detour, because its giving money that maybe buys positive happiness. Another example I can think of is that in some (european) countries there's state/church funded social care workers that visit elderly people without families and do some actions of kindness to them, play cards with them etc. That's obviously not effective in an EA sense.
Hence my question: Which direct approaches can you think of and which orgs exist, that are particularly efficetive and work on increasing positive happiness/love/warmth/fun whatever definition of positive good they have? I suppose those orgs typically won't be EA orgs and are probably less effective but I would still imagine that there's more effective ones than others. I'd be happy about any input!
