How would you spend $500 billion? Every year governments, foundations and individuals spend over $500 billion on efforts to improve the world as a whole. They fund research on cures for cancer, rebuilding of areas devastated by natural disasters, and thousands of other projects.
$500 billion is a lot of money, but it’s not enough to solve all the world’s problems. This means that organizations and individuals have to prioritize and pick which global problems they work on. For example, if a foundation wants to improve others’ lives as much as possible, should it focus on immigration policy, international development, scientific research, or something else? Or if the government of India wants to spur economic development, should it focus on improving education, healthcare, microeconomic reform, or something else? How should it allocate resources between these options?
As we’ll see, there are vast differences between the effectiveness of working on different global problems. But of the $500 billion spent each year, only a miniscule fraction (less than 0.01%) is spent on global priorities research: efforts to work out which global problems are the most pressing to work on.
With a track record of already influencing hundreds of millions of dollars, future research into global priorities could lead to billions of dollars being spent many times more effectively. As a result, we believe this is one of the highest-impact fields you can work in.
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Global priorities research – article by 80,000 Hours
Examples of what global priorities research might involve, at the Global Priorities Institute and the Forethought Foundation.