Benjamin Todd

What are the world's biggest and most neglected 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 by over 100 times, which would make it the most important driver of your impact.

Here, we give a summary of what we've learned.

Read on to hear why ending diarrhea might save as many lives as world peace, why artificial intelligence might be an even bigger deal, and what to do in your own career to make the most urgent changes happen.

In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them.

As we explained in the previous chapter, 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.

If you just want to see what we think the answer is, go to Appendix 9, where you can also see summaries of our problem profiles.

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 5% 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 together receive around 40% of graduates, and mainly involve helping people in the US.

There are some 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.