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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
As the world faces increasingly complex problems – from pandemics to global poverty and climate change – how do we decide where to concentrate our efforts and resources to do the most good possible? Effective altruism offers a way to do just that, focusing on evidence and rational arguments to identify crucial issues and the most impactful ways of solving them.
In this new book, philosopher Jacob Bauer cuts through the uncritical hype and wholesale dismissal around effective altruism to offer a balanced overview of this movement’s core concepts and approaches to “doing good better.” With examples spanning malaria-preventing bed nets to the dangers of AI, he illuminates how effective altruism is addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems, all the while acknowledging its real limitations and showcasing its immense promise.
Whether you are a skeptic or a new adherent seeking to understand the philosophy and community of effective altruism, this book is the definitive guide.
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Seitenzahl: 331
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Boxes, Figures, and Tables
Boxes
Figures
Tables
Introduction: What is Effective Altruism?
Notes
1 The Urgency of Effective Altruism: Pandemics and Prioritization
1.1 Pandemics and the world in triage
1.2 Prioritizing global issues: The SNS framework
1.3 The world’s most pressing problems
1.4 Objections and limitations to the SNS framework
1.5 Solutions are possible: Preventing future pandemics
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Introducing and defining effective altruism
The SNS framework (also called ITN framework)
Global priorities research
Pandemic preparedness and biosecurity
Notes
2 Global Poverty: You CAN Make a Difference
2.1 Wealth: One of our superpowers
2.2 Origins of effective altruism: High-impact charities
2.3 Moral inspiration of effective altruism: Singer’s pond analogy
2.4 Earning to give
2.5 Objections: Does giving do more harm than good?
2.6 Objections: How much to give?
2.7 Objections: Near before far?
2.8 More than giving to the global poor
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Global extreme poverty and child mortality
High-impact charities
Peter Singer’s arguments on giving
Earning to give
Notes
3 Weighing Uncertainties: Should You Be Vegan?
3.1 Moral catastrophes
3.2 Is factory farming a moral catastrophe?
3.3 Moral uncertainty: Veganism and moral caution
3.4 Expected value: Does your diet make a difference?
3.5 Problems with expected value
3.6 How effective altruists combat factory farming
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Factory farming and animal welfare
Speciesism, sentiocentrism, and intrinsic value
Moral uncertainty
Expected value
Notes
4 Systemic Change and Moral Pitfalls: Combating Climate Change
4.1 Carbon offsets controversy
4.2 Giving Green and rethinking offsets
4.3 The need for systemic change
4.4 What about lifestyle changes? Focus on the big stuff
4.5 Moral licensing: The danger of sweating the small stuff
4.6 Signs for hope: Optimistic changemakers
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Effective altruism and climate change
Climate giving
Moral licensing
Understanding climate change science and data
Notes
5 Can Your Career Save the World? Nuclear Weapons and Existential Risk
5.1 Using your 80,000 hours
5.2 The doomsday machine: The ever-present danger of nuclear weapons
5.3 Existential risks
5.4 On the precipice: Anthropogenic risks
5.5 Reducing existential risk: Four approaches
5.6 Reducing nuclear risk: Five high-impact career paths
5.7 Objections to devoting your career to nuclear security
5.8 Objections to devoting your career to reducing existential risk
5.9 Conclusion
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Effective altruism and high-impact careers
Nuclear risk
Existential risk
Notes
6 High Risks and Rewards: AI and Longtermism
6.1 Risking our future: Technological risk and future generations
6.2 Longtermism
6.3 The power and promise of advanced AI
6.4 AI as an existential risk
6.5 Delay or accelerate?
6.6 Longtermism versus neartermism and AI
6.7 What can we do for our future?
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Longtermism
Ethics and advanced AI
Notes
7 Making a Difference through Effective Altruism
7.1 The importance of effective altruism
7.2 Harnessing your altruistic superpowers
7.3 Focusing on the big stuff: The SDAC framework
7.4 Applying effective altruism concepts to anything
7.5 Taking the next steps: Becoming more effective altruists
Questions for reflection
Helpful resources
Podcasts
Online courses
Books
Videos
Additional resources
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1: Peter Singer’s giving scale
Chapter 3
Table 3.1: Reduction of animal products by weight
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 0.1: Effective altruism symbol, Centre for Effective Altruism
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1: The death toll of the pandemic compared to terrorism
Figure 1.2: Average $ spent on pandemic prevention per year (USA)
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1: Daily preventable child deaths
Figure 2.2: Global income distribution
Figure 2.3: Average salary (USA)
Figure 2.4: Percentage of world population living in poverty
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1: Livestock slaughtered for meat each year
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1: The price of electricity from new power plants
Figure 4.2: Average annual greenhouse gas emissions per person (2021)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For my children, Sean and Claire, and for all children of the world, today and tomorrow.
May we provide you with fulfilling lives in the present and shape a better future for you to inherit.
Effective Altruism
An Introduction
Jacob Bauer
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Jacob Bauer 2025
The right of Jacob Bauer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6243-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6244-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024937090
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Boxes, Figures, and Tables
Boxes
3.1 Expected value in practice: Does a pescatarian diet do more harm than good?
6.1 Nick Bostrom’s urn of invention
6.2 Do future people matter? A time capsule thought experiment
Figures
0.1 Effective altruism symbol
1.1 The death toll of the pandemic compared to terrorism
1.2 Average $ spent on pandemic prevention per year (USA)
2.1 Daily preventable child deaths
2.2 Global income distribution
2.3 Average salary (USA)
2.4 Percentage of world population living in poverty
3.1 Livestock slaughtered for meat each year
4.1 The price of electricity from new power plants
4.2 Average annual greenhouse gas emissions per person (2021)
Tables
2.1Peter Singer’s giving scale
3.1 Reduction of animal products by weight
Introduction: What is Effective Altruism?
Every year, millions of children die from preventable and curable diseases. Natural disasters such as forest fires, droughts, and hurricanes increase in number and intensity due to climate change. Warfare is waged across the globe, contributing to a seemingly unending refugee crisis. Heightened tensions among world powers increase the risk of nuclear conflict. Countless forms of inequality and discrimination persist across the globe. The rapid development of artificial intelligence leaves our future on uncertain ground. These issues, among many others, are urgent. The world undoubtedly faces immense problems. Lives are at stake, now and in the future. The longer humanity takes to address global issues, the more lives will be lost.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless by the sheer number of challenges the world faces. It may seem impossible to make a meaningful difference in a world that is constantly in crisis. What can we do when the problems we face are so numerous and so large? Effective altruism is a movement that takes this question seriously. As the world faces increasingly complex problems, it is more important than ever to have frameworks for determining where to focus our efforts and resources. Effective altruism offers ways to do just that, using evidence and rational arguments to identify pressing issues and effective ways of solving them.
Effective altruism is a movement gaining traction in the global community, attracting a wide range of individuals, from young people who want to make a difference, to billionaire philanthropists. Though the movement is relatively young, effective altruism has mobilized thousands of individuals to work on pressing problems and has directed billions of dollars toward high-impact charitable giving. It is a diverse community composed of researchers, philanthropists, practitioners, and organizers. Effective altruists work together to find the best ways to address the world’s problems and put them into practice.1
The movement adopted a symbol, a lightbulb with a heart filament. The effective altruism logo represents the combination of altruistic feelings, the desire to help others, and the use of intelligence to act effectively on those feelings to make a difference. Effective altruists aim to use evidence and rational argumentation to discover and support the best ways to make a large positive impact on the world.
Figure 0.1:Effective altruism symbol, Centre for Effective Altruism
Source: This logo belongs to Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), a registered charity in England and Wales with charity registration number 1149828. Used with permission.
The name “effective altruism” was chosen in 2011 through a series of votes to describe an emerging movement of individuals devoted to improving the world as effectively as possible. Many of the movement’s early founders were students from the University of Oxford, including William MacAskill, Toby Ord, Michelle Hutchinson, Holly Morgan, Benjamin Todd, and many more.2 The movement started relatively small, with the founding of just a few nonprofits devoted to charity evaluation and high-impact career advice.3 In a short amount of time, the effective altruism community has grown significantly. Today, it includes more than 300 organizations that have collectively mobilized billions of dollars toward researching and implementing effective solutions to world problems.4
After more than a decade of research, movement building, and organizational funding, what lessons does the effective altruism community have for those who aspire to improve the world? This book aims to introduce readers to the key ideas of effective altruism by exploring a range of pressing global issues and the ways in which effective altruists address them. Along the way, we’ll survey important effective altruist concepts, common objections to them, and the ways effective altruists respond to those criticisms. This book is meant to help readers obtain a broad understanding of effective altruism as a movement and collection of ideas. Each chapter explores key ideas from the effective altruism movement through common cause areas that effective altruists tend to focus on. These cause areas include the following:
Pandemic prevention
: Preventing future pandemics and being better prepared for when they do occur could save millions to billions of lives. Modern life has raised the risk of global pandemics. In
Chapter 1
, we’ll use the recent memory of the COVID-19 pandemic to understand effective altruism’s emphasis on prioritization, and introduce the scale, neglectedness, and solvability (SNS) framework, which can help us assign our limited time and resources.
Health and development of the global poor
: Hundreds of millions of people live in extreme poverty, suffering from preventable diseases and ailments. There are many charities working to aid those in extreme poverty in a variety of ways, such as direct cash transfers, disease prevention, and curing blindness.
Chapter 2
will explore this cause area and introduce core effective altruist concepts such as high-impact giving, charity evaluation, and cost-effectiveness.
Animal welfare and factory farming
: The vast majority of meat consumed comes from factory farms, where billions of land animals live in horrendous conditions. However, there is significant disagreement concerning both how much we should care about animals and what we can do to help.
Chapter 3
explores this cause area as a way to introduce conceptual tools that effective altruists use to grapple with uncertainty, including expected value theory and moral uncertainty reasoning.
Climate change
: Climate change contributes to extreme weather events, famine, and ecosystem destruction. It has received substantial attention and resources, but many neglected interventions could use more support.
Chapter 4
will explore this cause area to introduce how some effective altruist organizations emphasize systemic change as the most effective path to solving world problems. Supporting organizations that innovate and expand effective and scalable green technologies, as well as organizations that have a successful track record advocating for better governmental policies, can make a huge difference.
Nuclear war prevention
: Even a relatively small nuclear weapons exchange could result in a nuclear winter threatening human civilization. Attention and resources dedicated to nuclear risk have decreased since the end of the Cold War.
Chapter 5
will explore this global problem as a way to introduce key effective altruist concepts related to high-impact careers and existential risk reduction. Although it is difficult to make progress in this problem area, in part due to the complexities of international relations, it can be made through various means, especially through career paths such as research, communications, building organizations, and governmental policy work.
Risks from artificial intelligence
: As the power of AI technology grows, so do the risks of societal harm due to misuse, unintended consequences, and weaponization. The rapid advancement of AI could have far-reaching consequences for all those alive today and for all future generations.
Chapter 6
will explore this topic alongside the effective altruist movement called “longtermism,” which emphasizes the importance of positively shaping our long-term future.
Improving decision-making
: This diverse problem area includes improving individual and institutional decision-making on significant issues such as resource prioritization, risk reduction, making a positive impact, and evidence assessment. Given the complexity of global problems, improvements in decision-making can lead to faster overall progress on a broad range of issues. While each chapter introduces conceptual tools meant to help improve decision-making,
Chapter 7
summarizes some of these ideas and frameworks from the effective altruism movement and gives practical tips on how to implement them in your life.
By exploring effective altruist concepts alongside the diverse cause areas they work on, this book aims to provide readers with a comprehensive introduction to the effective altruism movement and provide useful conceptual tools for making a positive impact on the world.
Solving the world’s biggest problems requires more than just hope and goodwill. Effective altruists look to reason and evidence to find where people can make the most substantial and enduring impact. Whether or not you are part of the effective altruism community, the frameworks, tools, and concepts that it develops could help you to better understand global problems and what can be done about them. The hope for this book is that by learning from the concepts, arguments, and frameworks of the effective altruism movement, as well as objections to them, readers will be better equipped with a diverse set of tools to build a better world. Through studying movements like effective altruism, we have the opportunity to work toward a future where the immense problems we face today become a distant memory.
Progress requires dedicated time and resources. Next, in Chapter 1, we will explore the problem of pandemics, drawing upon the example of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ethical challenges of medical triage to highlight the need to prioritize our limited time and resources. We will dig into its implications and how effective altruism offers insights and approaches to tackling the prioritization of our world problems.
Notes
1
For a very brief introduction to effective altruism, see Jacob Bauer, “What’s Effective Altruism? A Philosopher Explains,”
The Conversation
, January 26, 2023,
http://theconversation.com/whats-effective-altruism-a-philosopher-explains-197856
.
2
William MacAskill, “The Definition of Effective Altruism,” in Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer, eds.,
Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 12. William MacAskill, “The History of the Term ‘Effective Altruism,’” EA Forum, March 11, 2014,
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9a7xMXoSiQs3EYPA2/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism
.
3
See Centre for Effective Altruism, “History”:
https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/history
. These nonprofits include Giving What We Can in 2009, followed by 80,000 Hours, and an umbrella organization, The Centre for Effective Altruism, in 2011.
4
Michel Justen, “A Database of EA Organizations & Initiatives,” EA Forum, July 22, 2022,
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wLZExunpNhAnafJbg/a-database-of-ea-organizations-and-initiatives
. “EA&EA: Adjacent Organizations,” EA Opportunities, n.d.,
https://ea-internships.pory.app/orgs
. Benjamin Todd, “How Are Resources in Effective Altruism Allocated across Issues?” 80,000 Hours, August 9, 2021,
https://80000hours.org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/
.
1The Urgency of Effective Altruism: Pandemics and Prioritization
How can we make a difference in a world full of problems? With so many urgent issues across the globe, individuals cannot address everything. We only have a finite amount of time and money available. According to effective altruists, to have the greatest impact on the world, an important step is to identify the most pressing problems and determine how we can best utilize our limited time and resources to help solve them.
As we will see, effective altruists propose a conceptual tool to help with prioritization: the SNS framework, which evaluates problems based on their scale, neglectedness, and solvability. This is a core concept for the effective altruism movement. Understanding this framework is key to understanding effective altruism more broadly. In this chapter, we use our recent shared global experience of pandemics to explore effective altruism’s advice on how to prioritize the problems we face. First, we’ll explore how medical triage during the COVID-19 pandemic can help us understand the need to evaluate our options and focus our efforts on the best ways we can help others.
1.1 Pandemics and the world in triage
We all became acutely aware of the necessity of prioritization throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Early in the pandemic, the world looked on in horror as hospitals in Italy were overrun with patients. Rooms grew scarce, and essential medical equipment dwindled. Medical professionals faced gut-wrenching decisions on whom to admit to hospital beds, whom to prioritize, and whom to provide the limited available medical resources.1 One doctor described the harrowing process as “deciding who is eligible for intensive care, who to let go, and who to treat with intermediate devices.”2 To address this challenge, an Italian professional medical society published triage guidelines that prioritized “patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success,” considering factors such as age, health conditions, and chances of survival.3 Unfortunately, this traumatic scenario repeated across the globe as countless hospitals grappled with the same life-or-death decisions. As resources became increasingly scarce, difficult decisions had to be made on how to use those resources to help those in need.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and medical organizations issued special triage guidelines to manage the unprecedented stress on healthcare systems. Triage is not unique to pandemics; it is an everyday occurrence in hospitals and emergency rooms worldwide. Within healthcare systems, triage is a commonly used practice to assess patients based on the severity and treatability of their conditions, determining the order of priority for medical care. While various triage systems and guidelines exist, according to the National Library of Medicine, they share a universal goal “to supply effective and prioritized care to patients while optimizing resource usage and timing.”4 The simple reason triage was common practice throughout the pandemic, and an everyday occurrence throughout healthcare systems, is that it saves lives.
To help illustrate the need for prioritized care, consider the following simplified example. Suppose you are in charge of a hospital at the height of a pandemic. Your hospital has a maximum of 100 beds available, but due to a COVID outbreak in your community, 1,000 people are requesting to be admitted with a range of severe symptoms. Many of the patients will survive without your assistance, though the hospital could help them recover quicker. Some, unfortunately, are too far gone for any hospital treatment to save them, though it could keep them alive for a few more hours or days. Others, however, will survive only with the service your hospital can provide. Although they all could benefit from treatment, your hospital cannot help all of them. If you tried to admit everyone, your resources would be stretched too thin to be much help to anyone; you would also put your medical professionals at extreme risk of infection and burnout, making them less able to help those who come to the hospital in the future.
Perhaps you could admit people on a strictly first-come, first-served basis; whoever is at the front of the line gets a bed if available. However, this all but guarantees that many of the beds will be taken up by those you cannot save and those who would be okay without your help. As a result, many of the people who need treatment the most won’t get it.
What if you admit people based on severity alone? In this case, you risk only treating those who cannot be saved, while those you could help most are turned away. In order to save the most lives, healthcare professionals look for indicators that can help them prioritize patients based on factors such as severity, urgency, and treatability to determine who will be admitted first and who will have to wait or be turned away. Even for those who are treatable and have severe cases, further prioritization can help better allocate resources. Some people may need immediate attention; for others, treatment might be necessary, but they will be okay if they receive it later.
Triage systems involve some of the most difficult decisions individuals can face, and these systems are not perfect. Although medical professionals do their best to rely on evidence-backed indicators, there is no way to know for certain who is in the most need of care. Some of the people you turn away might die, and some of the people you treat may have survived without your help. Nonetheless, triage gives those with the most urgent, life-threatening, treatable conditions a far higher probability of receiving timely and efficient care. Without triage systems prioritizing care, far more people would die in hospitals every day and potentially millions more would have died during the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of assessing the urgency and nature of treatment for individuals in order to allocate limited resources effectively. Triage, in essence, involves prioritization to better utilize limited resources. The fundamental principles of triage were widely employed throughout the pandemic. Prioritization was crucial not only in hospitals but also in the distribution of personal protective equipment, such as N-95 masks, and the rollout of vaccines. Medical professionals and the most vulnerable populations were often given priority in receiving protective equipment, vaccines, and the newest medical treatments as they were developed.
At present, the world finds itself in a situation similar to overrun hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic – faced with many great needs but limited resources. There is only so much each of us can do. We, as individuals, have limited time, resources, and attention that we can dedicate. We can imagine our available time and resources, which we want to use to help the world, as beds in a hospital. Thousands of patients are at the door, each representing different problems to which we could devote our resources, but there are far too many for us to meaningfully help them all.
Triage provides a framework for approaching the innumerable global problems that humanity faces. Just as medical professionals employed imperfect triage methods throughout the pandemic to achieve better overall outcomes, effective altruism suggests adopting similar approaches to our efforts in addressing world problems.
With countless global issues competing for our attention, the effective altruism movement emphasizes the need to prioritize and allocate resources thoughtfully. Otherwise, we risk spreading our resources too thin or missing opportunities to prevent unnecessary suffering. While applying triage principles to global problems may be imperfect, akin to the imperfections of hospital triage, the hope is that embracing this mindset will lead to better prioritization of our time and resources, enabling us to make a more significant difference in the world. As we’ll explore next, just as hospitals prioritize patients with diverse ailments based on factors like severity, urgency, and treatability, effective altruists propose a similar framework to prioritize the problems we face to better focus our resources.
1.2 Prioritizing global issues: The SNS framework
Effective altruists use a shared general framework for prioritizing global problems. This framework comes in many variations sharing similar fundamental principles.5 The version we’ll explore is the scale, neglectedness, and solvability (SNS) framework:6
Scale
(also called importance): How big is the problem?
Neglectedness
(also called crowdedness): How much attention and resources are currently directed toward addressing the problem?
Solvability
(also called tractability): Will allocating additional resources likely lead to new solutions or expand existing ones?
These factors provide valuable insights for comparing and prioritizing world problems. They are meant as a starting point in exploring ways to improve the allocation of our limited resources. Let’s examine each of these three factors in more detail.
The first factor, scale, weighs the size of the problem, especially in comparison to other global issues. When considering the scale of a problem, some key questions to explore include:
Extent
: How many individuals are affected by the problem?
Intensity
: How significant is the problem for those affected?
Duration
: How long-lasting are the issues for those affected?
7
For instance, while stubbing one’s toe may happen to billions of individuals annually and cause intense pain, the duration is usually momentary. On the other hand, terrorism impacts far fewer people, but the intensity is far more severe, resulting in roughly 480,000 deaths since 1970.8 Needless to say, the duration of the effects of terrorism is far greater compared to stubbed toes. This is not to imply that we should disregard efforts to prevent stubbed toes or design products to minimize such suffering. Rather, it emphasizes that preventing terrorism is a much more substantial global problem.
While the scale of terrorism is significant, how does it compare to the scale of pandemics? In terms of impact on individuals, both terrorism and pandemics can result in death or lifelong disability, with comparable intensity and duration. Pandemics are much less frequent than acts of terrorism; however, pandemics affect a much larger number of people when they do occur. Terrorism has claimed around half a million lives over a span of fifty years, whereas the COVID-19 pandemic claimed more than 20 million lives in less than four years.9
Although the extent of pandemics far surpasses that of terrorism, the intensity and duration for those affected are similar in both. This does not imply that efforts to prevent terrorism should be disregarded – terrorism is unquestionably a significant issue. However, considering our limited time and resources, the SNS framework suggests that, all else being equal, preventing pandemics should receive greater overall resources than preventing terrorism, given their respective scales.
Figure 1.1:The death toll of the pandemic compared to terrorism
Sources: Author’s figure based on data from The Economist, “The Pandemic’s True Death Toll”; START, “Global Terrorism Database 1970–2020 [Data File].”
While scale is an important consideration, it is possible for a problem of large scale to already receive substantial funding and research. This leads us to the next factor in the SNS framework: neglectedness. Neglectedness examines whether an appropriate amount of resources is allocated to a problem in relation to its scale. In general, the more neglected an area is, the greater the potential impact of devoting resources to it. Assuming two problems are equally important, channeling more resources toward the more neglected problem is likely to yield a greater impact.
In the case of preventing pandemics versus counterterrorism, the United States, for example, spends an estimated $8 billion per year on the former compared to $280 billion per year on the latter.10 This suggests that pandemics are relatively neglected in terms of US spending compared to counterterrorism. It is an indicator that increasing spending on preventing pandemics would likely do more good than increasing spending on counterterrorism. While both problems are important, the SNS framework suggests that preventing pandemics should be given higher priority due to its larger scale and greater neglectedness.
Figure 1.2:Average $ spent on pandemic prevention per year (USA)
Source: Author’s figure based on estimates from the Centre for Effective Altruism, “What Is Effective Altruism?” (n.d.). The annual estimates were derived using data from C. Watson et al., “Federal Funding for Health Security in FY2019,” Health Security 16 (October 17, 2018); N. Crawford, “The U.S. Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars through FY2022” (2022), https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts.
Neglectedness is sometimes referred to as “crowdedness,” reflecting the idea that too many resources allocated to a particular area can diminish the benefits gained. This is a well-known concept within economics called the law of diminishing returns, which states that the benefits per resource often decrease as more resources are allocated to a project. As time, research, and resources are dedicated to a problem, the easiest approaches to address that problem are usually explored first. As more effort is invested, the readily available solutions become exhausted or already operate at full capacity. As a result, only the more challenging aspects remain, requiring significantly more time and resources to resolve. This does not imply that investing one’s time or money in a problem that already receives considerable attention will have no positive effects. However, as a general rule, such contributions are likely to have a relatively smaller impact compared to areas with fewer resources dedicated to them. It is also possible to search for neglected areas within a specific problem. Even if a particular problem is already crowded and well funded, there may be overlooked approaches to address the issue.
With neglectedness, the SNS framework suggests seeking out overlooked problems or underdeveloped approaches to problem-solving. This is sometimes referred to as “low-hanging fruit.” Fruit closer to the ground on a tree are easier to pick, but as those lower fruits are collected, what remains on the tree becomes increasingly difficult to harvest. Devoting resources to neglected problems, which still have low-hanging fruit, often results in a greater overall impact. Neglectedness is an indicator that low-hanging fruit remains; there could be easy solutions that just need more attention and resources to bring to fruition.
To help identify neglected problems, the following are some helpful questions to consider:
Is the problem widely known, or are people largely unaware of it?
Is the problem infrequent but large in scale when it occurs?
Are the individuals affected by the problem often overlooked?
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These questions serve as useful indicators of neglectedness. Issues that receive substantial press coverage often already have numerous resources devoted to them relative to the size of the problem. Some large problems go unnoticed due to their infrequency, despite their immense impact. For example, prior to COVID-19, experts had long warned about the world’s lack of preparedness for a large-scale pandemic. However, since pandemics occur infrequently, it is challenging to sustain attention and mobilize resources in advance. In the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, funding for pandemic prevention and preparedness by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decreased.12
Sometimes, large problems are overlooked because they affect individuals who are out of sight and out of mind. When new diseases start spreading in foreign countries, it can be difficult to mobilize a sufficient international response to help combat the threat until the pathogen starts affecting people closer to home. In 2019, the USA cut funding to PREDICT, a pandemic-prevention program aimed at detecting and monitoring viruses globally.13 However, emergency funding was issued to the program after COVID-19 began to impact the USA in 2020.14
A problem might be well known and receive substantial resources, yet, due to its scale, it can still be neglected. Although COVID-19 has drawn attention and resources to the issue of pandemics, many effective altruists still view pandemic preparedness and biosecurity as neglected problem areas because of the overall scale of suffering and death they can cause. Many claim that there is much more that we can do to prevent the next pandemic, which leads us to the third factor of the SNS framework: solvability.
Solvability, also referred to as tractability, emphasizes the notion that allocating the same amount of resources to two different problems may not result in the same level of progress, even if the problems are of equal scale and neglectedness. When evaluating world problems, effective altruists ask how feasible it is to make progress on each problem. Some problems are inherently more challenging to solve than others, requiring significantly more resources to achieve the same amount of progress.
One way to assess solvability is to think about the level of resources needed to make significant progress in addressing a problem. While this estimation can be challenging, asking the following questions can provide insights into solvability:
Are there existing solutions that can be expanded?
Are there promising avenues of research for developing solutions?
Is there a realistic chance of a breakthrough advancement with a massive impact?
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Some problems already have solutions; they just need additional resources to expand the delivery of them. For instance, low-cost surgery can cure individuals with blindness caused by cataracts, yet millions of people with vision impairments from cataracts lack access to this cure.16 In some cases, solutions or treatments might not exist yet, but there is high confidence that research efforts will eventually yield results. For example, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous vaccine development efforts received substantial funding with the expectation that at least some of them would result in effective and safe vaccines. Additionally, during the pandemic, significant advances were made in pathogen detection in community wastewater, which could be developed into an early detection tool in future pandemic prevention and mitigation. Some problems might be extremely difficult to solve, such as preventing future pandemics, but investing in promising research is still worthwhile given the potentially massive impact if a breakthrough is achieved.
Overall, applying the SNS framework to the cause area of pandemic prevention and preparedness could result in something like the following:
Scale
: Pandemics happen on an immense scale, with COVID-19 alone causing millions of deaths. Bioterrorism, bioweapons, and lab leaks of engineered pathogens pose immense risks as well. In worst-case scenarios, engineered pandemics could wipe out most or even all of humanity.
Neglectedness
: Much more attention and resources have been directed toward pandemic prevention and preparedness since the COVID-19 pandemic, but given the scale of the issue, it could still be considered relatively neglected. As memories of COVID-19 become more distant, it may be difficult to maintain or increase the level of resources needed.
Solvability
: There are existing and developing technologies that show promise in reducing risks in this problem area. Other avenues for progress include policy change, research, mitigation strategy, and advocacy to maintain and grow biosecurity.
This gives us a way to compare this cause area with others and puts us in a better position to explore how we can utilize our time and resources.
Some versions of the SNS framework include an additional factor: personal fit.17 When considering how to devote your time or career to benefiting the world, it makes sense to prioritize based on your personal talents, skills, opportunities, and passions. By carefully evaluating your personal fit alongside what is needed to help solve world problems, you can better direct your efforts to make a greater difference. In addition to scale, neglectedness, and solvability, personal fit requires reflecting on your unique set of characteristics to determine which problem you are best suited to help solve (more on this in Chapter 5).
Having gained an understanding of the SNS framework, let’s now explore what problems effective altruists tend to prioritize as the most pressing, given their scale, neglectedness, and solvability.
1.3 The world’s most pressing problems
Effective altruists tend to categorize the world’s most pressing problems into three main groups: global poverty, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks.18 Using the SNS framework, let’s explore why.
Global poverty is large in scale, relatively neglected, and extremely solvable. More than 600 million people live in extreme poverty, often lacking access to essential medical care, sanitation, and nutrition. The problems of those living in extreme poverty receive less attention compared to individuals in wealthier nations. As a result, thousands of people die each day from preventable causes. This highlights why many effective altruists work on problems related to global poverty. We already have developed cures for many of the problems faced by the global poor. Those cures just aren’t reaching those who need them most. By directing resources to organizations that work to make essential cures and treatments more accessible and affordable for the most impoverished communities, you can make a huge difference in the lives of others. (We’ll explore this topic more in Chapter 2.)
Effective altruists tend to see the problem of animal welfare, or animal suffering, as large in scale, extremely neglected, and highly solvable. This might be the most controversial cause area that effective altruists work on. Whether you view it as one of the most pressing world problems will depend on your views on whether animal suffering matters and by how much. (We’ll explore this topic more in Chapter 3.) However,
