Chapter 355 - The World’s Biggest Problems And Why They’re Not What First Comes To Mind[2]

In contrast, in rich countries like the US, it usually costs over $1m to save another life with health spending. So if we compare health in the US to global health, there is a 130-fold difference.

It's hard for us to grasp such big differences in scale, but that would mean that one year of (equally skilled) effort towards the best treatments within global health could have as much impact as 130 years – three career's worth of time – working on typical rich country issues.

These discoveries caused us to start giving at least 10% of our income to effective global health charities. No matter which job we ended up in, these donations would enable us to make a significant difference. In fact, if the 100-fold figure is correct, a 10% donation would be equivalent to donating 1,000% of our income to charities focused on poverty in rich countries.

See more detail on how to contribute to global health in our full profile.

However, everything we learned about global health raised many more questions. If it's possible to have 10 or 100 times more impact with just a little research, maybe there are even better areas to discover?

We considered lots of avenues to help the global poor, like trade reform or promoting migration, or crop yield research, or biomedical research.

We also seriously considered working to end factory farming. For example, we helped to found Animal Charity Evaluators, which does research into how to most effectively improve animal welfare. We still think factory farming is an urgent problem, as we explain in our full profile. But in the end, we went in a different direction.

Why focusing on future generations can be even more effective than tackling global health

Which would you choose from these two options?

1. Prevent one person from suffering next year.2. Prevent 100 people from suffering (the same amount) 100 years from now.

Most people choose the second option. It's a crude example, but it suggests that they value future generations.

If people didn't want to leave a legacy to future generations, it would be hard to understand why we invest so much in science, create art, and preserve the wilderness.

We would certainly choose the second option. And if you value future generations, then there are powerful arguments that you should focus on helping them. We were first exposed to these by researchers at the University of Oxford's (modestly named) Future of Humanity Institute, with whom we affiliated in 2012.

So, what's the reasoning?

First, future generations matter, but they can't vote, they can't buy things, and they can't stand up for their interests. This means our system neglects them. You can see this in the global failure to come to an international agreement to tackle climate change that actually works.

Second, their plight is abstract. We're reminded of issues like global poverty and factory farming far more often. But we can't so easily visualise suffering that will happen in the future. Future generations rely on our goodwill, and even that is hard to muster.

Third, there will probably be many more people alive in the future than there are today. The Earth will remain habitable for at least hundreds of millions of years. We may die out long before that point, but if there's a chance of making it, then many more people will live in the future than are alive today.

If each generation lasts for 100 years, then over 100 million years there could be one million future generations.

This is such a big number that any problem that affects future generations potentially has a far greater scale than one that only affects the present – it could affect one million times more people, and all the art, science and culture that will entail. So problems that affect future generations are potentially the largest in scale and the most neglected.

What's more, because the future could be long and the universe is so vast, almost no matter what you value, there could be far more of what matters in the future.

This suggests that probably what most matters morally about our actions is their effect on the future. We call this the "long-term value thesis". We cover it in more depth in a separate article.

This said, can we actually help future generations, or improve the long-term? Perhaps the problems that affect the future are big and neglected, but not solvable?

How to preserve future generations – find the more neglected risks

In the summer of 2013, Barack Obama referred to climate change as "the global threat of our time." He's not alone in this opinion. When many people think of the biggest problems facing future generations, climate change is often the first to come to mind.

We think those people are, to some extent, on the right track. The most powerful way we can help future generations is, we think, to prevent a catastrophe that could end advanced civilization, or even prevent any future generations from existing. If civilisation survives, we'll have a chance to later solve problems like poverty and disease; while climate change poses an existential threat. (We argue for this in greater detail elsewhere.)

However, climate change is also widely acknowledged as a major problem (Donald Trump aside), and receives tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. You can read more in our full profile.

So, if you want to help future generations, we think it's likely higher-impact to focus on more neglected issues.

Biorisk: The threat from future disease

In 2006, The Guardian ordered segments of smallpox DNA via mail. If assembled into a complete strand and transmitted to 10 people, public health experts estimate it would have killed 10 million people.

In the future, we can imagine diseases even deadlier than smallpox evolving or being created through bioengineering.

The chance of a pandemic that kills over 100 million people over the next century seems similar to the risk of nuclear war or runaway climate change. So it poses a similar threat both to the present generation and future generations.

But risks from pandemics are more neglected. We estimate that about $300bn is spent annually on efforts to fight climate change, compared to $1-$10bn towards biosecurity – efforts to reduce the risk of natural and man-made pandemics.

At the same time, there's plenty that could be done to improve biosecurity, such as improving regulation of labs and developing cheap diagnostics to detect new diseases quickly. Overall, we think biosecurity is likely more urgent than climate change.

Read more about how to contribute to biosecurity in our full profile.

Similar arguments could also be made for nuclear security, though it's a bit less neglected and harder for individuals to work within.

But there are issues that might be even more important, and even more neglected.