The four-axis ranking
We rank humanity’s most important problems on four quantifiable dimensions — quantity of humans affected, severity per capita, current solution quality, and addressable market size — and package each as a proposal in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha. This document is the proposal for extreme poverty. Every number below is sourced and tagged with confidence. Every ranking is a conjecture, open to refutation.
Quantity · humans affected
700.0M
highSeverity · WTP / wealth
90%
medWhat we are trying to solve
Extreme poverty is the canonical proof that humanity can solve its biggest problems: the share of people living below the international poverty line fell from ~38% in 1990 to under 9% before the pandemic, the fastest decline in human history. The unfinished work is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile states, where economic growth, direct cash transfers, and proven public-health interventions still have enormous, measurable returns.
The gap between the world and the world that is physically possible
Who is already working on this
No companies have yet been tagged to this problem in the dataset. If you know one, open a PR.
If we solve this, here is the world we get
Section in progress
The success vision and technical proposal for this problem are still being drafted. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
What the market can pay
Section in progress
Addressable-market sizing for this problem is not yet in the dataset. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
What could go wrong, and how we know we are not wrong
Section in progress
Failure modes, ethical considerations, and the conditions under which this whitepaper would be falsified are being authored as the weekly cadence ships. The Deutschian commitment: every claim above is a conjecture; we publish the conditions under which we would update. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Who would back this
Section in progress
No capital allocators have yet been tagged to this problem in the dataset. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Where this is wrong, tell us
Every number on this page carries a source and a confidence tag. Every section open to refutation. If a citation is wrong, a number is stale, or a conjecture is unfounded — file a correction.
corrections → use the feedback widget in the nav · open issue at github.com/adamtpang/optimism.fun