What are the most pressing world problems?

A key consideration is how society is currently allocating resources. If a lot of people are already working on an issue, the best opportunities will have probably already been taken, which makes it harder for additional people to have an impact.

At the same time, you only have one career, so if you want to fulfil your potential to do good, you need to prioritise which issues you focus on.

One way to think about this is in terms of a ‘world portfolio’: What would the ideal allocation of resources be for all social issues? And which are farthest from that ideal allocation?

As an individual, the best you can do is pick one of these that you’re well placed to focus on.

This is why our list looks a bit surprising: we purposefully want to highlight problems that we think are furthest from getting the attention they need — such as reducing the risk of AI-enabled power grabs, which is a completely new field with only a handful of people working on it. Or take preventing engineered pandemics, which currently gets $1–2 billion of funding per year. That is only 1/500th of what a more widely recognised problem like climate change gets (which also needs more resources).

By their very nature, these issues will tend to be unusual — if working on them was common sense, they’d already have more attention, and we’d need to derank them!

If everyone followed our advice, our list would need to be totally different (but unfortunately, this will probably never happen).

Another factor that makes our list unusual is that we strive to value the interests of all sentient beings more equally — regardless of where they live, when they live, or even what species they are. We even consider digital beings to potentially be worthy of moral consideration.

Many people believe ‘charity begins at home,’ but we believe charity begins where you can help the most. This typically means looking for the groups who are most neglected by the current system, and this often means focusing on the world’s poorest people, animals, future generations, or maybe digital minds — rather than other citizens of the world’s richest countries.

To learn more about why we prioritise more neglected problems, see our article on comparing global problems in terms of scale, neglectedness, and solvability, and our foundation series.