What do you think of OWID's dissolution of the Easterlin paradox? In short:

• OWID say Easterlin and other researchers relied on data from the US and Japan, but...
• In Japan, life satisfaction questions in the ‘Life in Nation surveys’ changed over time; within comparable survey periods, the correlation is positive (graphic below visualises this for ~50 years of data from 1958-2007, cf. your multidecade remark)
• In the US, growth has not benefitted the majority of people; income inequality has been rising in the last four decades, and the income and standard of living of the typical US citizen have not grown much in the last couple of decades

so there's no paradox to explain.

(I vaguely recall having asked you this before and you answering but may be confabulating; if that's happened and you feel annoyed I'm asking again, feel free to ignore)

self-reported happiness over a short period (like 1 day)

Not exactly what you meant, but you may be interested in Jeff Kaufman's notes on his year-long happiness logging self-experiment. My main takeaway was to be mildly more bearish of happiness logging than when I first came across the idea, based on his

Overall my experience with logging has made me put less trust in "how happy are you right now" surveys of happiness. Aside from the practical issues like logging unexpected night wake-time, I mostly don't feel like the numbers I'm recording are very meaningful. I would rather spend more time in situations I label higher than lower on average, so there is some signal there, but I don't actually have the introspection to accurately report to myself how I'm feeling.

Scattered quotes that made me go "huh":

When I first started rating my happiness on a 1-10 scale I didn't feel like I was very good at it. At the time I thought I might get better with practice, but I think I'm actually getting worse at it. Instead of really thinking "how do I feel right now?" it's really hard not to just think "in past situations like this I've put down '6' so I should put down '6' now".

Being honest to myself like this can also make me less happy. Normally if I'm negative about something I try not to dwell on it. I don't think about it, and soon I'm thinking about other things and not so negative. Logging that I'm unhappy makes me own up to being unhappy, which I think doesn't help. Though it's hard to know because any other sort of measurement would seem to have the same problem.

I checked out your website thinking I'd find something like this but couldn't. Did you have something different in mind re: league table?  

Tangent: when I was reengaging seriously with EA before eventually changing my career path, your story was among the ones in Strangers Drowning that powerfully resonated with me. So it was interesting for me to learn recently that you felt strangely about MacFarquhar’s coverage of you and Jeff in SD.

Nadia later worked with Jhourney to write the most extensive report yet (tweetstorm summary) on how jhanas improve the well-being of meditators, including claims like "2x more likely to report changes in lifestyle (84% vs. 41%), 1.5x more likely to report changes in thoughts + beliefs (92% vs. 59%), more kindness, awareness of pleasure, and reduced cravings". I find Nadia's claims somewhat more believable because, to quote her:

I am not a meditator. (Even after experiencing the jhanas, I still have no desire to develop a meditation practice.) Nor am I a “spiritual seeker” of the sort you might find at Burning Man or a Vipassana retreat. ... 

If you’re raising an eyebrow right now, I must once again stress that I, too, did not believe this was a thing. I arrived at the retreat feeling rather silly for being there. I left astonished, and perplexed, as to why barely anyone has studied the jhanas at all. ...

I am less interested in making the argument that everyone should try the jhanas. But it seems to me that if people can access these experiences with relatively little mental effort – and to do so legally, for free – more ought to know that such a thing exists. At the very least, shouldn’t there be more than three published studies about it?

(I'd caution against truly maximising.) 

Ben Todd's 80K article What is social impact? A definition is a pretty decent start:

If you just want a quick answer, here’s the simple version of our definition (a more philosophically precise one — and an argument for it — follows below):

Your social impact is given by the number of people¹ whose lives you improve and how much you improve them, over the long term.

This shows that you can increase your impact in two ways: by helping more people over time, or by helping the same number of people to a greater extent (pictured below).

And their more rigorous definition:

“Social impact” or “making a difference” is (tentatively) about promoting total expected wellbeing — considered impartially, over the long term.

We don’t think social impact is all that matters. Rather, we think people should aim to have a greater social impact within the constraints of not sacrificing other important values – in particular, while building good character, respecting rights and attending to other important personal values. We don’t endorse doing something that seems very wrong from a commonsense perspective in order to have a greater social impact.

In fact, we even think that paying attention to these other values is probably the best way to in fact have the most social impact anyway, even if that’s all you want to aim for.

The rest of the article elaborates on what they mean by all the terms in their rigorous definition.

80K also note that this doesn't just reduce to utilitarianism:

Is this just utilitarianism?

No. Utilitarianism claims that you’re morally obligated to take the action that does the most to increase wellbeing, as understood according to the hedonic view.

Our definition shares an emphasis on wellbeing and impartiality, but we depart from utilitarianism in that:

• We don’t make strong claims about what’s morally obligated. Mainly, we believe that helping more people is better than helping fewer. If we were to make a claim about what we ought to do, it would be that we should help others when we can benefit them a lot with little cost to ourselves. This is much weaker than utilitarianism, which says you ought to sacrifice an arbitrary amount so long as the benefits to others are greater.
• Our view is compatible with also putting weight on other notions of wellbeing, other moral values (e.g. autonomy), and other moral principles. In particular, we don’t endorse harming others for the greater good.
• We’re very uncertain about the correct moral theory and try to put weight on multiple views.

Read more about how effective altruism is different from utilitarianism.

(Couldn't click on your linked comment from mobile, so here it is in case it helps others. Oliver Yeung's backstory is striking, thanks for sharing the links to his main talk and Q&A)

The closest I know of is the Metaculus question How many chickens will be slaughtered for meat globally in the following years? from 2022, which forecasts 82.2 billion chickens slaughtered in 2032, declining afterwards to 64 billion in 2052 and 9.1 billion in 2122 (with increasingly wide prob dists), as part of the Forecasting Our World in Data: The Next 100 Years project. 

The 2023 forecast was a slight overprediction (78.5bn vs 76.25bn actual), which gives me a bit of hope that the rest of the curve will bend downwards faster than predicted.

Here's the distilled forecaster commentary for 2025 onwards:

2025: Forecasters generally expect that global chicken consumption will continue to grow in the next few years. Their expectations are based on extrapolation of the data from 2019, with the assumption that there will not be any major changes in consumer attitudes towards animal ethics, tastes, or disease outbreaks. Forecasters anticipate that meat alternatives, such as lab-grown or plant-based options, may start to have an impact on the industry by 2030, but are not expected to significantly change the data for 2025. Forecasters also acknowledge the potential for: (1) improved standards of welfare to decrease consumer preference for poultry and (2) genetic engineering to increase yields at lower cost. However, the feasibility, regulatory permissiveness, and consumer preferences for the latter trend remain uncertain.

2032: Overall, forecasters expect global chicken consumption to continue to grow over the next decade. While they do not expect a significant global cultural shift towards lower meat consumption on this timescale, they do anticipate a limited decrease in highly developed countries to be more than offset by significant increases in consumption in less wealthy countries, as the latter’s populations become wealthier. Forecasters expect the economic growth of the last decade to slow only slightly over the next, but some do expect annual global growth to stall at some point between 2032 and 2052. This would arguably lead to a stark reduction in chicken consumption.

2052: Forecasters expect that affluence and population increase will lead to a continuation of the trend of increasing chicken demand per capita and total chicken production. However, they also expect that cultured meat and other technological advances may have a material impact on meat consumption, particularly in highly developed countries. In fact, many predict that lab-grown or plant-based alternatives will dominate the market by this point. Beyond 2052, forecasters express much more uncertainty, but expect that meat alternatives and artificially grown meat will continue to replace the majority of chicken meat obtained by slaughtering chickens. They project that the rate of growth will slow as population growth slows, leading to a plateauing of chicken consumption while the cost of raising more chickens increases. Notably, they expect that ethical concerns will play only a minor role globally by this time.

2122: With a long-term horizon of 100 years, forecasters expect technological advances in meat alternatives to lead to a massive decrease in chicken consumption. They predict that, by 2122, global energy consumption will be pulled in two directions,  there will be: (1) both a demand for better energy efficiency and lower consumption overall and (2) cheaper and more abundant electricity as renewables continue to fall on the cost curve. Therefore, it is highly likely that cultured meat will have been cost-competitive with traditional meat for decades. There are some forecasters who expect the global chicken population to be around half of its peak and, given the availability of cheap, high-quality cultured meat, there’s a chance that the number of slaughtered poultry may fall close to zero.

In case it's helpful, you may want to speak with Max Ghenis, cofounder & CEO of PolicyEngine, a tech nonprofit that computes the impacts of public policy, which your project proposal reminded me of. Here you can (quoting their calculator) "build a tax-benefit reform by selecting parameters from the menu (organised by government department)" and then "click Calculate economic impact to see how your reform would affect the economy, or Enter my household to see how it would affect a specific household". They use microsimulation models based on tax and benefit calculations applied to representative survey data to calculate impact and have used AI since 2023 for policy analysis / explanations / insights. They have an X account too where you can check out what they're about.

The article is by Ben Todd, not Cody :) The fuller quote from Ben in the article is

If we were to expand this to also include non-measurable interventions, I would estimate the spread is somewhat larger, perhaps another 2–10 fold. This is mostly based on my impression of cost-effectiveness estimates that have been made of these interventions — it can’t (by definition) be based on actual data. So, it’s certainly possible that non-measurable interventions could vary by much more or much less.