(2018–2025)

History of GPI

Founded in 2018, the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) was an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford, focusing on philosophy, economics, and psychology. Its mission was to address deeply unresolved questions crucial for people seeking to do the most good, where good is understood in impartial terms. Beyond conducting its own research, GPI aimed to promote the broader uptake of these questions among academics. At the time, many of these issues were relatively neglected within academia.

Over its seven-year existence, GPI researchers published a wide range of papers in peer-reviewed journals. It also made many more papers made available via a working paper series, which included contributions from both GPI researchers and external scholars. These papers spanned a wide range of topics, including the ethics of the long-term future, mind and value, the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, transformative artificial intelligence and economic growth, existential risk, animal welfare, philanthropic decision-making, and effective giving.

In addition to producing research, GPI fostered a vibrant academic community around global priorities research, a research field that aims to identify, understand, and address the world’s most pressing problems. It hosted 20 academic workshops, as well as the Derek Parfit Memorial Lectures in philosophy and the Tony Atkinson Memorial Lectures in economics. It also organised a successful summer fellowship program that introduced many early-career researchers to global priorities research and ran a thriving predoctoral program in economics, placing our alumni at (in geographic order) Berkeley, Stanford, Northwestern, Chicago (x2), Georgetown, Columbia, MIT, MIT Sloan, Oxford, LSE (x2), TSE, and Zurich.

GPI closed at the end of  July 2025, but many threads of the institute's research will continue to be explored by a community of interested researchers. GPI's research agendas in philosophy, economics, and psychology highlight many areas that still have substantial room for further research. You can access these research agendas and publications below, and a list of resources is provided at the end of this webpage. If you would like to receive email updates about any future research endeavours that continue the mission of the Global Priorities Institute, you can also sign up here.

Research Agendas

Several additional topics in economics are covered in an older version of the research agenda. Readers interested in a broader set of topics can view them here.

Publications

The following is a list of research publications by staff at GPI (marked with a *), research affiliates (marked with #), and others who published in our working paper series. You can also find summaries of selected papers here.

Books

Philosophy Publications

Ethics and Future Generations: Longtermism, Existential Risk, and Population Axiology

Decision Theory and Ethics: Fanaticism, Cluelessness, Moral Uncertainty, and More

Political Philosophy

Risks From Artificial Intelligence

Bernardi, Mukobi, Greaves*, Heim & Anderljung 2024

Digital Minds

Mind and Value

Economics Publications

Normative Economics

Population and Welfare

Animal Welfare

Existential and Catastrophic Risk

Risks and Opportunities from AI

Philanthropic Decision-Making

Evidence and Policy-Making

Effective Giving

Psychology Publications

Global Catastrophic Risk and Longtermism

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Minds

Moral Psychology

Resources