Chapter 354 - The World’s Biggest Problems And Why They’re Not What First Comes To Mind[1] (1/2)
We've spent much of the last eight years trying to answer a simple question: what are the world's biggest and most urgent problems?
We wanted to have a positive impact with our careers, and so we set out to discover where our efforts would be most effective.
Our analysis suggests that choosing the right problem could increase your impact over 100 times, and so be the most important decision you ever make.
In trying to answer this question, we've had to tear up everything we thought we knew, and then again more than once.
Here, we give a summary of what we've learned. Read on to hear why ending diarrhoea might save as many lives as world peace, why artificial intelligence might be even more important, and what to do in your own career to make the most urgent changes happen.
In short, the most urgent problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them. As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they're not the problems that first come to mind.
Reading time: 30 minutes. If you just want to see our current views on the world's most urgent problems, skip ahead.
Why issues facing rich countries aren't always the most important—and why charity shouldn't always begin at home.
Most people who want to do good focus on issues in their home country. In rich countries, this often means issues like homelessness, inner city education and unemployment. But are these the most urgent issues?
In the US, only 4% of charitable donations are spent on international causes. The most popular careers for talented graduates who want to do good are teaching and health, which receive about 18% of graduates, and mainly involve helping people in the US.
There are good reasons to focus on helping your own country – you know more about the issues, and you might feel you have special obligations to it. However, back in 2009, we encountered the following series of facts. They led us to think that the most urgent problems are not local, but rather poverty in the world's poorest countries, especially efforts within health, such as fighting malaria and parasitic worms.
Why do we say that? Well, here's a pretty staggering chart we came across in our research.
It's the distribution of world income that we saw in an earlier article.
Even someone living on the US poverty line of $11,000 per year is richer than about 85% of the world's population, and about 20 times wealthier than the world's poorest 1.2 billion, who mostly live in Africa and Asia on under $500 per year. These figures are already adjusted for the fact that money goes further in poor countries (purchasing power parity).
As we also saw earlier, the poorer you are, the bigger difference extra money makes to your welfare. Based on this research, because the poor in Africa are 20 times poorer, we'd expect resources to go about 20 times further in helping them.
There are also only about 47 million people living in relative poverty in the US, about 6% as many as the 800 million in extreme global poverty.
And there are far more resources dedicated to helping this smaller number of people. Total overseas development aid is only about $131bn per year, compared to $900bn spent on welfare in the US.
Finally, as we saw earlier, the majority of US social interventions probably don't work. This is because problems facing the poor in rich countries are complex and hard to solve. Moreover, even the most evidence-backed interventions are expensive and have modest effects.
The same comparison holds for other rich countries, such as the UK, Australia, Canada and the EU. (Though if you live in a developing country, then it may well be best to focus on issues there.)