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List of "Mediumtermist" Cause Areas
4 min readJul 31
In this post, I compile a list of “mediumtermist” cause areas, where mediumtermism means trying to make the world 75 years from now as good as possible. This list is not meant to be a definitive list or a suggestion for what people should work on, but I thought it would be helpful to share for others who are thinking about this.
For context, I focus on this time horizon because I think that our ability to predict the effects of our actions steeply diminishes as we go forwards in time. I’m not very confident about what time horizon to choose, but this feels roughly accurate.
Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are low-probability risks of massive harm on a global scale. These tend to be neglected by policy makers because they’re usually incentivized to focus on likely outcomes and on the near-term so that they can stay in office.
Biological risks are GCRs from biology. The most discussed biological risks are pandemics, but they can also come from other sources such as mirror bacteria. Biological risks are particularly tractable, since we have lots of concrete ideas for how to reduce them. They are also particularly neglected, since many important interventions are not fully funded.
Nuclear risks are risks that any two major powers engage in nuclear war. Such a war could kill hundreds of millions or even billions of people depending on how many nuclear weapons are used.
Climate change is the environment become less livable for humans as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.
It seems like AI could be a highly transformative technology. Given this, influencing how the world responds to and makes use of AI could be particularly important. Some domains we should expect AI to influence include the economy, our culture, and our politics. This is probably difficult to work on since it seems really difficult to predict how this technology will develop and how it will integrate into our society. At the same time, it seems like there are probably lots of broad interventions that will be helpful long-term.
Broad improvements to society are those that make life better for most people and have compounding effects. Helping to extend the life of a dying elderly person would not constitute a broad improvement to society, since the effects of such an action are unlikely to persist for long. On the other hand, making it easier for people to afford college would have persistent compounding effects since it would lead to economic growth.
Many of the world’s most important institutions are designed in broken ways that prevent them from serving the public good as effectively as possible. Some examples include the way in which the NIH’s funding policies discourage innovation, how democracies fail to represent the people’s will, and how corporate power has excessive influence over American politics. The abundance movement is one way to work on institutional reform in the US right now.
Economic growth means increasing the amount of goods that a society produces. This increases how resources people have, which increases their quality of life. It also causes more money to go into research, both as funded by states and by companies, which allows for broad improvements to society.
People normally think about the economic growth of the country they live in, but it's important to remember that the benefit of economic growth is much higher in the world’s poorest countries than it is in the richest ones.
Economic growth can usually be caused by making the world better in other ways such as by funding research, increasing immigration, or redistributing wealth.
Research improves society by identifying problems and finding solutions to them. Notably, these solutions tend to be highly persistent and to compound on one another.
Immigration improves society by bringing labor to where it’s demanded most, which produces economic growth.
Wealth redistribution improves society by distributing resources to people who will use them to benefit society. For instance, if a poor individual gains more wealth, they may use it for more education, whereas a wealthy person may merely use it to afford another vacation.
Society has seen continuous economic growth over the past 12,000 years, but society hasn’t continuously gotten better. In fact, sometimes economic growth has made society actively worse. For instance, in the 1800s, the invention of the cotton gin caused the demand for slavery to increase rather than decrease. And, more recently, the rise of wages worldwide has enabled more people to regularly eat meat than ever before, which has led to the extreme confinement and torture of hundreds of billions of farm animals.
As such, merely protecting humanity and improving the economy is not enough. We also need to ensure that humanity is driven and motivated by the correct social values.
Although society has seen the rise and fall and rise and fall of many different social values since the rise of agriculture, over the past couple hundred years, social values have generally drifted in the right direction. Slavery has been banned, women have gained suffrage, and gays have gotten the right to marry.
Given this, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that the social values we promote today will lead to positive change long-term.
Generally, I like to split these social values into two categories:
Right now, there’s a lot of important social issues in the Overton window. Some of these include transgender rights, housing reform, and prison reform. Some benefits of focusing on these issues are that you’re likely to see positive changes within the next decade and people will generally think you’re normal for caring about them.
Right now, there’s also, of course, a lot of important social issues that are outside of the Overton window. Even though they’re important and they need solving now, most people rarely ever think about them. Some examples of these include farm animal welfare, wild animal welfare, and teen rights. It can be valuable to discuss these issues to bring them into the discourse, but a major disadvantage of discussing them is that people will think you’re really weird!
Ending patents or promoting free currency will top every one of your items by far.
For instance forced course currency is the greatest generator of waste with 10x more impact than any of the items you listed.