Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years
WALY
A common metric for measuring
how decisions shape human wellbeing.
What is WALY, and how is it measured?
By measuring how much wellbeing is lost or gained, WALY translates the impact of diseases, climate impact, poverty, loneliness and policy choices into a single comparable unit: one year of life lived in full wellbeing.
Just as financial returns can be measured across industries, WALY provides a common currency for measuring societal impact beyond monetary gain alone. This enables decision-makers to evaluate returns on investment across otherwise incomparable domains, from healthcare and agriculture to loneliness and economic policy, on a single, meaningful scale.
1
WALY
=
1 year
lived
in full
wellbeing
Calculator & Library Tool
Our WALY Calculator & Library features a freely available collection of WALY values, spanning impact areas related to disease, climate, social conditions, and more.
Head to the calculator to model and compare your own scenario, or browse the reference library for a quick overview of different values.
A glimpse into the tool's insights:
01
Impact scale & severity
may not point the same way.
One disease can inflict enormous suffering on each person it affects, yet touch relatively few lives. Another may be mild in its individual burden, but it affects tens of millions.
Use the tool to reveal where suffering is deepest, as well as where it is most widespread. What conditions are both severe and common?
02
Duration matters:
how long do people suffer?
Measuring the impact of living with a condition for one year versus a lifetime can lead to two vastly different pictures. Lifetime vs. annual durations may be more or less applicable to certain conditions.
Pay attention to the specified duration for each scenario - this may change which problems look large, and which look small.
03
Money can buy happiness...
but how much?
The wellbeing generated from income depends heavily on the initial salary. Further, each additional dollar earned generates fewer WALYs than the last.
Use our calculator to compare how returns on wellbeing change according to monthly salary increases. Does a $200 raise generate twice the WALYs of a $100 raise? What happens when the starting salary is lower, or higher?
