The Global Priorities Institute and the Forethought Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Prizes in Global Priorities Research:

• Best overall paper: Jeffrey Sanford Russell, "On two arguments for fanaticism".
• Runner-up prizes for best overall paper:
  • Jack Spencer, "The procreative asymmetry and the impossibility of elusive permission".
  • Sultan Mehmood, Shaheen Naseer and Daniel L. Chen, "Training effective altruism".
  • David de la Croix and Matthias Doepke, "A soul’s view of the optimal population problem".
• Best paper by a graduate student:
  • Philosophy: Karri Heikkinen, "Strong longtermism and the challenge from anti-aggregative views".
  • Economics: Danny Bressler, "The mortality cost of carbon".
• Student paper commendation:
  • Matthew Chen, "The comparative development legacies of Dutch colonial rule and The Vorstenlanden in Java".
• ECCP 2021 paper prize:
  • Winner: Fikri Pitsuwan, "Intergenerational experimentation and catastrophic risk".
  • Commendation: Philip Schoenegger, "Sure-thing vs. probabilistic charitable giving: Experimental evidence on the role of individual differences in risky and ambiguous charitable decision-making".

About the prizes

Eligible for the prize were any papers or working papers published in 2021* as well as papers specifically written for the purpose of this prize. Submissions needed to be in English and of reasonable length. We reserved the right not to judge excessively long submissions**.

Authors could submit their own work, but we also looked for nominations of work by others. We called for submissions from people of a wide range of academic seniority and awarded prizes for students in a separate category.

Global priorities research

There are many problems in the world. Because our resources are scarce, it is impossible to solve them all. An actor seeking to improve the world as much as possible therefore needs to prioritise, both among the problems themselves and (relatedly) among means for tackling them. This requires careful analysis. Some opportunities to do good are vastly more cost-effective than others, but identifying which are the better opportunities requires grappling with a host of complex questions - questions about how to evaluate different outcomes, how to predict the effects of our actions, how to act in the face of uncertainty, how to identify more practically usable proxies for the criteria we ultimately care about, and many other topics.

We call academic research attempting to answer these questions global priorities research and papers submitted or nominated for one of the prizes fell within this scope - addressing questions of crucial practical importance for agents trying to set priorities in a way that is suitably informed by concern for what will best promote the impartial good. For further details, please see GPI's research agenda. Note, however, that entries did not need to address questions from this agenda where candidates believed there were other questions of crucial importance for global priorities research.

Prizes

The following prizes were awarded in each of economics and philosophy:

• A prize of GBP 3,000 for the best overall paper
• A prize of GBP 2,000 for the best paper by a graduate student
• Runner-up prizes of GBP 1,000
• Commendation prizes of GBP 200 for all sufficiently strong entries by graduate students

In addition, we were awarding a prize for the best paper from participants of our 2021 Early Career Conference Programme.

Eligibility

Everyone is eligible for the overall prize. Any graduate student in philosophy, economics, or a related subject is eligible for the graduate student prize.

*For papers published in journals, the relevant date is when the paper was first published online (rather than a potential later ‘in-print’ date).
**For papers not published in a journal, the guide for this is more than 45 pages in economics or more than 10,000 words in philosophy.