Chapter 357 - The World’s Biggest Problems And Why They’re Not What First Comes To Mind[4] (1/2)

Broad interventions, such as improved politics

The second strategy is to work on problems that will help us solve lots of other problems. We call these ”broad interventions”.

For instance, if we had a more enlightened government, that would help us solve lots of other problems facing future generations. The US government in particular will play a pivotal role in issues like climate policy, AI policy, biosecurity, and new challenges we don't even know about yet. So US governance is highly important (if maybe not neglected or tractable).

This consideration brings us full circle. Earlier, we argued that rich country issues like education were less urgent than helping the global poor. However, now we can see that from the perspective of future generations, some rich country issues might be more important, due to their long-term effects.

For instance, a more educated population might lead to better governance; or political action in your local community might have an effect on decision-makers in Washington. We did an analysis of the simplest kind of political action – voting – and found that it could be really valuable.

On the other hand, issues like US education and governance already receive a huge amount of attention, which makes them hard to improve. Read more about the case against working on US education.

We favour more neglected issues with more targeted effects on future generations. For instance, fascinating new research by Philip Tetlock shows that some teams and methods are far better at predicting geopolitical events than others. If the decision-makers in society were informed by much more accurate predictions, it would help them navigate future crises, whatever those turn out to be.

However, the category of ”broad interventions” is one of the areas we're most uncertain about, so we're keen to see more research.

Capacity building and promoting effective altruism

If you're uncertain which problems will be most pressing in the future, a third strategy is to simply save money or invest in your career capital, so you're in a better position to do good when you have more information.

However, rather than make personal investments, we think it's even better to invest in a community of people working to do good.

Our sister charity, Giving What We Can, is building a community of people who donate 10% of their income to whichever charities are most cost-effective. Every $1 invested in growing GWWC has led to $6 already donated to their top recommended charities, and a total of almost one billion dollars pledged.

By building a community, they've been able to raise more money than their founders could have donated individually – they've achieved a multiplier on their impact.

But what's more, the members donate to whichever charities are most effective at the time. If the situation changes, then (at least to some extent) the donations will change too.

This flexibility makes the impact over time much higher.

Giving What We Can is one example of several projects in the effective altruism community, a community of people who aim to identify the best ways to help others and take action.

80,000 Hours itself is another example.

Better career advice doesn't sound like one of the most pressing problems imaginable. But many of the world's most talented young people want to do good with their lives, and lack good advice on how to do so. This means that every year, thousands of them have far less impact than they could have.