Global priorities research (GPR) is research into issues that can help decide how to allocate finite resources most cost-effectively.[1] GPR can include finding and prioritising between different causes as well as macrostrategy or “foundational” research that would inform cause prioritization in a less direct way (e.g., research into the Fermi paradox or the hinge of history hypothesis).
Evaluation
80,000 Hours rates GPR a “highest priority area”: a problem at the top of their ranking of global issues assessed by importance, tractability and neglectedness.[2]
Further reading
Duda, Roman (2016) Global priorities research, 80,000 Hours, April (updated July 2018).
O’Keeffe-O’Donovan, Rossa (2020) An introduction to global priorities research, Effective Altruism Student Summit 2020, October 25.
An introduction to global priorities research, including a discussion of how it differs from cause prioritization research.
Related entries
cause candidates | cause prioritization | Cause X | Global Priorities Institute | less-discussed causes | local priorities research | macrostrategy
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Global Priorities Institute (2019) About us, Global Priorities Institute.
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80,000 Hours (2021) Our current list of the most important world problems, 80,000 Hours.
Max Daniel proposed a tag for GPR and a tag for macrostrategy (or maybe he meant one tag to capture both?), and said:
I think this makes sense, and it aligns with Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan’s conceptualisation of GPR vs cause prioritization research in this talk. But I think probably just a tag for GPR or just a tag for macrostrategy is sufficient, rather than having a separate tag for each.
So I’ve made this tag.
I went with GPR rather than macrostrategy partly because I think the term macrostrategy is mostly used in longtermism, and perhaps this tag should be applicable across causes. But if people think it’d have been better to have the tag be Macrostrategy, let me know—we could probably just change the name and description and keep the same posts tagged.
One rationale for using Macrostrategy instead is that GPR is arguably a superset of cause prioritization, which we already have a tag for, while macrostrategy arguably sort-of lines up with the parts of GPR that aren’t cause prioritization. So maybe the better way to cover the space of GPR is to have a tag for ~its two components, rather than one for the whole thing and one for a big part of the thing.