Broad Societal Improvements: An Impact-Focused Overview

From pandemics and environmental crises to widespread extreme poverty, there’s no shortage of challenges facing the world. Addressing them requires broad societal improvements, a set of large-scale and often systemic changes that make us better at addressing a wide array of important problems and risks. 

Among other things, this cause area includes changes to governance, institutional practices, and cultural norms, all important elements in how societies tackle major problems.

Because of the scale of these improvements, successful work in this area can lead to huge positive impact. However, we also expect most of these improvements to be very difficult to implement, and often not very neglected. Because of this, we expect this cause area to be less tractable than most, at least on average.

Read on to find out how we reached this conclusion.

What are broad societal improvements?

Broad societal improvements are a class of various causes focused on making large-scale changes to the way the world functions. This can involve structural changes to important systems and institutions, shifts in cultural values, and much more.

Together, these improvements encompass quite a few seemingly disparate areas. However, they’re unified by one common and important thread: they make us more equipped to realize what the important problems are, and more able to solve them effectively. 

There are a lot of possible broad societal improvements we could cover, but here we’ll talk about four: public institutions, scientific research, misinformation and disinformation, and societal values. 

Improvements to each of these could lead to large benefits for people across the world.

However, this is far from an exhaustive list, and we’re uncertain about what the biggest priorities in this area really are. Because of this, we’ll point to some other promising examples of broad societal improvement at the end of the article.

The potential impact of broad societal improvements

Before we address specific examples of broad societal improvement, let’s address why we think this could be an impactful area to focus on. The fundamental case for broad societal improvements is related to their scale, which underlies two positive implications for how promising this cause area is. 

The first is that, because this cause area concerns such large issues, even small improvements can make a big difference. For example:

• The wealthiest countries in the world command budgets in the trillions of dollars per year. For a national budget of $1 trillion, providing just a 0.1% boost in public spending efficiency would provide the equivalent of $1 billion in value. 
• Researchers from the Center for Global Development estimate that improving the value of scientific publishing by just 1% could yield as much as $1 trillion in benefits over ten years.
• According to influential research, getting just 3.5% of the population to participate in an advocacy movement is enough to drive big political change. Examples include the People Power movement in the Philippines and the Georgian Rose Revolution, both of which led to political change through nonviolent means. 

The second reason why scale might make work in this area particularly promising is that large positive reforms are often valuable to pursue, even if they’re likely to fail. Because work in this area could affect so many people positively, small chances of success may still be worth taking.

This is an important consideration because the largest reservation we might have about broad societal improvements is its tractability. In short, making broad societal improvements as an individual is no easy task. For instance, governments and large institutions typically have between tens of thousands to millions of employees—implementing positive change in organizations and industries of this size is no small feat.

Furthermore, this work often involves competing with others pursuing similar, though less impact-focused, goals. For example, many think tanks, advocacy groups, and corporate lobbyists work to influence both the public and important decision-makers, making it difficult for the best ideas to cut through the noise.

For these reasons, we’d consider this to be among the most difficult cause areas to make meaningful progress in. Because of this, broad societal improvements may be most suited to people who are comfortable with running the risk of their efforts failing. Though, as with all cause areas, this will still vary widely depending on the specific problem you’re focusing on and the approach you take.

With these general considerations in mind, let’s dive deeper into some promising avenues within broad societal improvements.

Public institutions

Public institutions are responsible for making many of the most important decisions. Local and national governments, intergovernmental institutions like the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the UN, and regulatory bodies in areas like healthcare and finance all have tremendous power over how the world works.

Together, these institutions determine the laws we live under, decide when to wage war, influence the production of goods and services, coordinate responses to emergencies, construct infrastructure, decide what is and isn’t safe for the public, fund and manage public services like education, transport, and healthcare, control dangerous technologies like nuclear weapons, and much more.

However, as is true of many organizations, the institutions tasked with these responsibilities are often far from perfect. For example, widespread inefficient spending—governments waste as much as $1 trillion per year on procurement alone, according to the World Bank—means resources don’t go as far as they could, leading important services to suffer as a result. 

Likewise, governments and multinational institutions provide insufficient resources toward large-scale problems, such as climate change, pandemics, or unsafe AI. 

One significant cause for this is the prevalence of short-term incentives for these institutions, meaning short-term benefits are often prioritized over decisions that would be best over the long term. 

An example is short electoral cycles that encourage governments to make decisions that increase their electoral popularity, often at the expense of investment in important services with long-term benefits, or in preparing for various risks and crises.

Large institutions are also subject to common flaws and biases in decision-making. The availability heuristic, for example, means we tend to rely on memories and examples that come to mind quickly rather than those that best reflect our situation. 

Among other things, this means we’re likely to pay disproportionate attention to recent problems, even if they’re not the most pressing—like being more scared of shark attacks after watching Jaws. This may partly explain why institutions tend to underestimate important risks until it’s too late.

Scope insensitivity, a common bias that means we fail to appreciate the relative importance of different problems, may also lead to worse decisions. For instance, one study asked participants how much they’d pay to save the lives of birds. Surprisingly, they found that participants would pay less to save 20,000 birds than to save 2,000 birds, suggesting that we don’t always recognize the importance of bigger problems.

In the context of policy decisions, researchers have suggested that this kind of scope insensitivity could put lives at risk when governments are deciding where to invest important resources such as humanitarian aid.

The result of all of this is that public institutions, though charged with many of the world’s most critical responsibilities, have lots of room for improvement. Making incentives align better with the public good and improving decision-making processes could help make humanity more resilient to large risks, and help improve the lives of everyone in the world.

Scientific research

Science is responsible for many of the most beneficial parts of humanity’s collective knowledge. Advances in the science behind medicine, technology, agriculture, and other domains have led to enormous improvements to the quality of life for the vast majority of the world.

For example, due to advancements in cancer diagnosis and treatment, death rates from cancer have fallen by as much as one-third since 1990. Research into solar power has led to its price plummeting to a small fraction of what it was just a few decades ago, making us more able to transition to clean energy. Advances in agricultural efficiency have made us more able to feed the world’s population, meaning hundreds of millions of lives have likely been saved from starvation.

Reflecting science’s capacity for important progress, the scale of scientific research today is enormous. There are close to 9 million scientific researchers across the world, and several million scientific articles are published each year. There’s a huge amount of money driving this work: around $1 trillion of public funds are spent on research annually.

However, as practiced today, there are issues that reduce the reliability of scientific output, meaning it doesn’t provide as much value as it’s capable of providing. But what exactly could be improved?

The first area of improvement we’ll cover is academic publication practices, the most common of which substantially limit the reach and value of scientific research.

The main problem is that a large share of scientific publications (around half) are locked behind expensive paywalls. The cost to access these journals is high; subscriptions to journals often cost thousands of dollars per year, a high price for organizations without significant resources.

These paywalls mean that valuable information is inaccessible for large parts of the global population, particularly for those in low-and-middle-income countries who can’t afford these fees. The result of this is that many researchers as well as professionals (doctors, for instance) often can’t access information that’s important to their work.

This means that regions that may stand to benefit the most from innovative research, particularly in the development field, are the least able to access it. 

And though research in most journals can be published via Open Access, removing these paywalls for readers, this costs thousands of dollars for the research’s authors. Because of this, only a minority of articles are published this way.

Increasing access to published research looks like one way of significantly increasing the value provided by science. A couple of suggested ways to do this may be to reduce barriers to publishing via Open Access or make wider use of preprints and postprints, where authors publicly upload open versions of their papers.

Science is also impacted by vulnerability to bad actors, who publish fraudulent research for personal gain, often by fabricating data or performing other misleading practices to get their work published. Though the extent of fraud is limited (but more common than we might hope), the negative impact of fraud can be significant.

In one notable case, fraudulent Alzheimer’s research led to decades of wasted effort and resources that could have been spent on more promising approaches. Similar fraudulent activities have also been uncovered in influential cancer research and stem cell research.

Other questionable research practices are also unfortunately common. These are practices that don’t always constitute fraud, but can still reduce the reliability of scientific output. One example is p-hacking, a practice where researchers manipulate data or statistical analyses, sometimes unintentionally, to achieve statistically significant results.

This relates to a further problem: publication bias. This means that the research that gets published doesn’t always accurately represent the true results originally found by researchers.

The main form of publication bias is that studies are much more likely to be published if they demonstrate positive results than studies that find null results. This means we’re more likely to see research that seemingly reveals interesting new findings and effects, but we’re less likely to see research that contradicts it, even if the quality of the research is the same. This skews our perception of scientific results.

The bias towards positive results can also create an incentive to report positive findings, likely driving some of the questionable research practices discussed above.

Overall, science is an incredibly valuable tool for solving the world’s most important problems. Ensuring that it remains a reliable source of innovation, and limiting some of its current issues, could unlock even more valuable progress in the future. 
In fact, there’s a burgeoning field of study, known as metascience, that focuses on increasing the reliability and efficacy of scientific research—for instance through replication projects that help to identify which factors make studies more trustworthy. This may be a promising avenue of research for those interested in improving scientific practices.

Misinformation and disinformation

Another problem is the spread of false and misleading information that can bring harmful consequences. Misinformation is false or misleading information that’s produced without the intent to mislead, while disinformation is misleading information that’s deliberately spread. 

Widespread misinformation and disinformation, especially when adopted by decision-makers, can lead to poor decisions and significant problems. At its worst, it can undermine public safety, political stability, and scientific progress. 

The debate around vaccines is a perfect case study for this. Baseless claims about the risks of vaccines for deadly diseases like measles and COVID-19 have led to lower vaccination rates and higher consequent death tolls. 

Some of this was genuine misinformation—people making innocent but harmful errors in judgment. But disinformation also contributed to the harm, much as it has many other times.

For instance, the tobacco industry spent decades spreading disinformation to discredit warnings against smoking. Smoking now kills over 8 million people per year. Similar tactics have been used by fossil fuel companies to delay the transition to cleaner energy sources or massage their reputations. Because of these practices, many have already been harmed, and many may continue to be harmed.

There are also worries that misinformation and disinformation may increase in the future as AI becomes more capable of generating targeted content at scale. Though some are skeptical of the extent of AI’s potential impact, it’s worth considering its possible role in increasing false and misleading information.

Societal values

Society’s values play a huge role in shaping which behaviors and practices are tolerated, as well as the kinds of outcomes we prioritize. Unfortunately, prevalent societal values have meant many condemnable practices have been commonplace throughout history and still continue today. These have been enabled and encouraged by societal attitudes that have failed to recognize they’re wrong.

For instance, the global slave trade, which involved the forced labor and detainment of over 12 million people in Africa, was justified at the time through widespread racist beliefs. Similarly, up until the 20th century, sexist attitudes motivated a denial of basic rights to most women across the world, such as the right to vote in elections or receive an education. As well as this, social norms meant very few women could pursue their own careers and were dependent on men for income.

A lot has changed. And even though there’s significant variance across the world, recognition of the basic equality of people, regardless of factors like their gender or race, is much more common than it used to be. This has led to some big victories: the global slave trade was abolished and women’s formal rights in many countries are now much more substantial. 

Nonetheless, there are still enormous disparities in the treatment of groups across the world.

For example, LGBT rights remain minimal or absent in much of the world. Same-sex sexual acts are still prohibited in dozens of countries and are severely punished in some (including the use of the death penalty). Only 38 countries currently permit same-sex marriage.

Women’s rights are also very disparate across the world. Around 40% of the world’s women live in countries with restrictive reproductive rights, and many countries lack laws on gender pay equity, offering little-to-no paid maternity leave. Even more extreme, in several countries, women are legally obliged to obey their husbands.

Even in places where there are strong equality laws, harassment, abuse, and violence are still commonplace, leading enormous numbers of people to suffer harm as a result.

In the UK, for example, over one-third of people from minority groups report having experienced racist abuse, despite laws prohibiting this. As of 2023, close to 50% of black people in the European Union claimed to have experienced racial discrimination in the previous five years.

Similarly, nearly one-third of women and girls over 15—around 600 million people—have experienced physical or sexual violence, mostly from domestic partners. This is despite the fact that domestic violence is outlawed for the vast majority of the global population. 

There are two takeaways from this. The first is that there is a long way to go in securing equal legal rights for people across the world. The second is that legal rights aren’t the whole story; even when discriminatory and violent behaviors are outlawed, they can continue at alarming rates, enabled by social attitudes.

A society that strongly values the protection of vulnerable demographics is one that’s likely to have more robust legal protections, as well as less abuse, harassment, and violence toward these groups. Implemented globally, this could improve the welfare of billions of people.

Expanding our moral circle

Expanding our moral circle involves broadening the scope of beings to whom we extend moral consideration and empathy, taking into account their interests and wellbeing when we make important decisions.

As we’ve seen, in most places, humanity’s moral circle has expanded, starting to value the rights and wellbeing of historically ignored groups. Though there’s much more to do, this has resulted in some much-needed improvements to the lives of many.

This raises the question: are there more cases where expanding our moral circle could be important? 

The answer is likely yes, although substantial uncertainty and disagreement exist regarding how to expand our moral circle and what level of consideration to grant. Several suggestions have included:

• Factory-farmed animals. Billions of animals live on factory farms, where they are subjected to a host of inhumane and painful practices. Though many people agree that factory farming is bad, this problem is rarely focused on. The strength of their place in our moral circle is often weak. This lack of public pressure means that laws concerning the welfare of farmed animals are rare, often insufficient even when they are present, and dubiously enforced. Some argue our concern should also extend to farmed insects, trillions of whom are killed each year and may experience pain.
• Wild animals. Nature is often seen as the best place for an animal to live, but some have questioned this, pointing out that wild animals are subject to sources of intense suffering such as predation, disease, and starvation. For example, around a billion animals die in extreme pain each year from flesh-eating screwworm maggots—a truly huge amount of suffering. Nonetheless, very little attention is paid to how we might help wild animals at scale. 
• Future people. The future could contain an enormous number of people. What’s more, our actions today can have a big influence on the kind of world they exist in. For instance, failing to address climate change today will mean a world with greater hardship and fewer natural resources for those to come. Because of this, some argue that we ought to expand our moral circle to care more about those who will live in the future. Those who make this argument say that future people will be just as valuable as those alive today, but unlike us, are unable to advocate for their wellbeing. 
• Digital beings. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has raised the prospect that future artificial beings could be conscious, possessing the capacity to experience happiness and pain. This may seem a little far-fetched, but it’s something that is taken seriously by numerous experts in AI and consciousness. Though there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty around this question, it’s one that will almost inevitably become important in the coming years.

Some of these suggestions might raise an eyebrow. After all, these are groups that most of us don’t think about often, or don’t even exist yet. Additionally, the way we ought to treat these groups hinges on several contestable moral and empirical questions. Nonetheless, thinking about where society’s moral blind spots might be could lead to important moral progress, just as it has in the past.

Other broad societal improvements

We’ve focused on only a few aspects of broad societal improvement that we think are both potentially very important and illustrative of this cause area as a whole. Here, we’ll give a few more ideas of possible areas where big changes could be made, potentially for great positive impact:

• Economic growth. Economic growth makes people much better off on average. In 1820, around 75% of the global population lived in what we’d now deem extreme poverty. Today, that number has shrunk to 8.5%. This growth means that people today can better afford important goods and services. Further growth could bring even greater benefits, especially to the world’s poorest.
• Alternative economic and political systems. Sweeping changes to economic and political structures are also something that many advocate for. For instance, many countries are not run democratically, restricting freedoms for their citizens. Similarly, capitalism plays an important role in economic growth but can incentivize harmful behavior, like practices that exacerbate climate change.
• Elections. Even in countries with strong democracies, common election methods (most notably first past the post) are often criticized for producing unrepresentative results. Because of this, some advocate for alternative voting systems.
• Prison reforms. There are around 11 million prisoners in the world. Some have argued that prison sentences are often needlessly punitive and ineffective, and that penal systems could be both more humane and better at reducing crime.
• Private institutions. We covered improving public institutions in this article, but private institutions also hold lots of power and could also be a promising target for improvement. This may be particularly important in the context of AI, a crucial area where private companies have outsized power.