Prizes in Global Priorities Research

For the past few years, the Global Priorities Institute and the Forethought Foundation have awarded prizes for the best work on global priorities research in philosophy and economics.

Eligible for the prize are any papers or working papers published the year before as well as papers specifically written for the purpose of this prize. Submissions need to be in English and of reasonable length. We reserve the right not to judge excessively long submissions**.

*For papers published in journals, the relevant date is when the paper was first published online (rather than a potential later ‘in-print’ date). **For papers not published in a journal, the guide for this is more than 45 pages in economics or more than 10,000 words in philosophy.

Authors can submit their own work, but we are also looking for nominations of work by others. We are looking for submissions from people of a wide range of academic seniority and will be awarding prizes for students in a separate category.

Global priorities research

There are many problems in the world. Because our resources are scarce, it is impossible to solve them all. An actor seeking to improve the world as much as possible therefore needs to prioritise, both among the problems themselves and (relatedly) among means for tackling them. This requires careful analysis. Some opportunities to do good are vastly more cost-effective than others, but identifying which are the better opportunities requires grappling with a host of complex questions - questions about how to evaluate different outcomes, how to predict the effects of our actions, how to act in the face of uncertainty, how to identify more practically usable proxies for the criteria we ultimately care about, and many other topics.

We call academic research attempting to answer these questions global priorities research and papers submitted or nominated for one of the prizes should fall within this scope - addressing questions of crucial practical importance for agents trying to set priorities in a way that is suitably informed by concern for what will best promote the impartial good. For further details, please see GPI's research agenda. Note, however, that entries need not address questions from this agenda where candidates believe there are other questions of crucial importance for global priorities research.

The prize was not run in 2021.