A research agenda for the Global Priorities Institute

Abstract

The central focus of GPI is what we call ‘global priorities research’: research into issues that arise in response to the question, ‘What should we do with a given amount of limited resources if our aim is to do the most good?’ This question naturally draws upon central themes in the fields of economics and philosophy.Thus defined, global priorities research is in principle a broad umbrella. Within that umbrella, this research agenda sets out the research themes that GPI is particularly interested in at the present time. We stress that in all cases, what we list here are indeed relatively broad research themes, rather than the more specific research questions that would naturally correspond to individual research papers. Within each such theme, the first step is to do significant further work identifying and articulating the fruitful research questions.