Do you feel like baseline happiness makes a difference? If not, imagine starting with 3^^^3+1 people each being tortured for 50 years. You can get one of them out of torture, at the expense of a pain increase equivalent to a speck of dust in the eye for each of the others. If you do this for everyone, each one will have a 3^^^3 speck of dust equivalent, an amount of pain far surpassing 50 years of torture.