The supply-demand index
What humanity needs,and nobody is working on.
Every problem, ranked by how far its share of the world's effort falls short of its share of the world's need. A ratio of 1× means research, money, and companies are pointed at it in proportion to how much it matters. Below 1× means the world is under-attacking it — and that gap is the opportunity.
It is 12.7% of measured demand and a fraction of that in research, money, and companies. At the other end, Energy abundance runs at 10×.
How it is computed
Shares, not raw ratios. For each problem we take its share of total demand and its share of each supply signal, then divide. The method is borrowed from OnDeck Capital, who divided monthly searches by the number of businesses to find the most under-supplied local business in America.
Why shares and not “people per researcher”. That is more legible but not comparable: each problem defines its affected population differently, and six of eleven claim roughly eight billion. Ranking on that rewards whichever problem describes itself most expansively. Shares remove the distortion.
Demand here is need, not the composite. The demand composite contains research and capital as signal classes, so using it would put the numerator inside the denominator. This uses quantity of humans × severity, gated by ability to pay — the same basis as the capital verdicts on the radar.
Supply is live and sourced. Research from OpenAlex, public money from USAspending, private money from SEC Form D filings, companies from the index, and attention from Wikipedia pageviews. The headline is a geometric mean across whichever signals exist, so a 0.1× and a 10× cancel to parity instead of averaging to 5×.
Attention counts as crowding, never as demand. A problem the world is already staring at is more contested for the same amount of need, so eyeballs belong on this side of the ratio. Google Trends was rejected for it: no free official API, and it returns relative values re-normalised per request, so two terms fetched separately cannot honestly be compared. Wikipedia pageviews are absolute, bot-filtered, and CC0.
Bands are deliberately blunt — under 0.5× is under-supplied, over 2× is over-supplied — so only real disproportion gets a label. A problem with no live supply signal is left out rather than scored as zero.
Found the gap? Now find the company.
One problem.One whitepaper. Every week.
Each week we ship a deep-dive whitepaper on a top-ranked humanity-scale problem — built in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha and the transformer paper. Problem + market size + before/after vision + a proposed solution + the investors who would back it. Humanity’s Requests for Startups, sourced and sorted quantitatively. No spam. No marketing.
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