Forethought Foundation
Global Priorities Research
The Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research aims to promote academic work that addresses the question of how to use our scarce resources to improve the world by as much as possible.
What problem is the Forethought Foundation working on?
Global priorities research is an academic discipline at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and the social sciences. It aims to determine how individuals and institutions should spend their limited resources in order to improve the world by as much as possible.
What does the Forethought Foundation do?
The Forethought Foundation is especially interested in the idea that the primary determinant of the value of our actions today is how those actions influence the very long-run future. It believes that by making the right decisions today, humanity has the opportunity to positively steer civilisation’s trajectory for thousands of years to come.
To this end, the Forethought Foundation is interested in supporting excellent research that:
- Defends or criticises the idea that we should primarily care about the very long-run impact of our actions.
- Works out the implications of a long-term view for our decisions today.
- Is of importance for the long-run future of civilisation, even if the research is not directly about the idea of long-term impact.
It supports such research through scholarships and fellowships to students in global priorities research, as well as research grants and prizes for established scholars.
The Forethought Foundation is a project of Effective Ventures (as is Giving What We Can — see our transparency page), and works in close collaboration with the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Forethought Foundation?
We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of the Forethought Foundation beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.