Michael is a philosopher and global happiness researcher. He’s the Founder and Research Director of the Happier Lives Institute (HLI) as well as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

Michael set up HLI in 2019 because he saw there was a growing demand to know what the best charities are, but there wasn’t yet research that evaluated the impact charities have on what matters most: people’s happiness. HLI has focused primarily on the Global South, where money often goes further. It’s drawn on hundreds of academic studies and used data on subjective wellbeing to work out, for the first time, the cost-effectiveness of several promising ways of improving lives, including cash transfers, deworming, and treating depression. It quantifies the impact in Wellbeing Life-Years, aka ‘WELLBYs’, effectively the same method endorsed by the UK Treasury in 2021. The best charities we’ve found – so far – treat depression at scale in Sub-Saharan Africa. HLI’s work has been discussed in Vox and Devex, amongst other places.

Michael’s philosophical research interests are primarily on the nature and measurement of wellbeing, effective altruism, moral uncertainty, and population ethics. He’s currently working on book project, Taking Happiness Seriously, that aims to be a philosophically-revised and empirical-updated version of J S Mill’s Utilitarianism, which is now 145 old and still the canonical work on the importance of happiness. Michael has written articles for the New Statesman, Project Syndicate, the Huffington Post and The Conversation and featured in The Times, The Economist, BBC1 and BBC Radio 4.

Michael obtained his D. Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Peter Singer and Hilary Greaves. His thesis, entitled Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism, critiqued and developed various ‘standard’ views in the effective altruism social movement about how individuals can do the most good with their resources.

Michael originally studied philosophy at St Andrews, where he was awarded a first; he then went to the London School of Economics, where he was one mark short of a distinction – something he is definitely, absolutely, not still bitter about.

In between these two degrees, he worked as a Parliamentary Researcher for Sir Michael Fallon MP. He thinks he once wrote a speech on shipping policy with some really good puns. Unfortunately, the speech – and all the jokes within it – have since sunk without trace.

During the the first two years of the D. Phil. Michael tried to start a start-up to develop Hippo, happiness tracker/trainer app, which he grandly described as “the FitBit for the mind.” No one thought the app was any good and Michael eventually abandoned his dreams of becoming a tech billionaire to seek his fame and fortune in academic philosophy and philanthropy instead.

During the last two years of the D. Phil, Michael worked Peter Singer’s Research Assistant, helping with a book proposal and on Peter’s Project Syndicate columns, two of which – on mental health and on Notre-Dame – they co-wrote.

Michael lives in Bristol with his fiancée and finds writing in the third person odd. Almost as odd as how out-of-date the content on this website now seems…