List of "Mediumtermist" Cause Areas

By James Brobin @ 2026-07-31T02:23 (+5)

In this post, I compile a list of “mediumtermist” cause areas, where mediumtermism means trying to make the world 75 years from now as good as possible. This list is not meant to be a definitive list or a suggestion for what people should work on, but I thought it would be helpful to share for others who are thinking about this. 

For context, I focus on this time horizon because I think that our ability to predict the effects of our actions steeply diminishes as we go forwards in time. I’m not very confident about what time horizon to choose, but this feels roughly accurate.

Important Cause Areas

Global Catastrophic Risks

Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are low-probability risks of massive harm on a global scale. These tend to be neglected by policy makers because they’re usually incentivized to focus on likely outcomes and on the near-term so that they can stay in office.

Biological risks

Biological risks are GCRs from biology. The most discussed biological risks are pandemics, but they can also come from other sources such as mirror bacteria. Biological risks are particularly tractable, since we have lots of concrete ideas for how to reduce them. They are also particularly neglected, since many important interventions are not fully funded.

Nuclear risks

Nuclear risks are risks that any two major powers engage in nuclear war. Such a war could kill hundreds of millions or even billions of people depending on how many nuclear weapons are used. 

Climate change

Climate change is the environment become less livable for humans as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

Influencing AI’s Trajectory

It seems like AI could be a highly transformative technology. Given this, influencing how the world responds to and makes use of AI could be particularly important. Some domains we should expect AI to influence include the economy, our culture, and our politics. This is probably difficult to work on since it seems really difficult to predict how this technology will develop and how it will integrate into our society. At the same time, it seems like there are probably lots of broad interventions that will be helpful long-term.

Broad Improvements To Society

Broad improvements to society are those that make life better for most people and have compounding effects. Helping to extend the life of a dying elderly person would not constitute a broad improvement to society, since the effects of such an action are unlikely to persist for long. On the other hand, making it easier for people to afford college would have persistent compounding effects since it would lead to economic growth.

Institutional Reform

Many of the world’s most important institutions are designed in broken ways that prevent them from serving the public good as effectively as possible. Some examples include the way in which the NIH’s funding policies discourage innovation, how democracies fail to represent the people’s will, and how corporate power has excessive influence over American politics. The abundance movement is one way to work on institutional reform in the US right now.

Economic Growth

Economic growth means increasing the amount of goods that a society produces. This increases how resources people have, which increases their quality of life. It also causes more money to go into research, both as funded by states and by companies, which allows for broad improvements to society.

People normally think about the economic growth of the country they live in, but it's important to remember that the benefit of economic growth is much higher in the world’s poorest countries than it is in the richest ones.

Economic growth can usually be caused by making the world better in other ways such as by funding research, increasing immigration, or redistributing wealth.

Research

Research improves society by identifying problems and finding solutions to them. Notably, these solutions tend to be highly persistent and to compound on one another.

Immigration

Immigration improves society by bringing labor to where it’s demanded most, which produces economic growth.

Wealth Redistribution

Wealth redistribution improves society by distributing resources to people who will use them to benefit society. For instance, if a poor individual gains more wealth, they may use it for more education, whereas a wealthy person may merely use it to afford another vacation.

Promoting Social Change

Society has seen continuous economic growth over the past 12,000 years, but society hasn’t continuously gotten better. In fact, sometimes economic growth has made society actively worse. For instance, in the 1800s, the invention of the cotton gin caused the demand for slavery to increase rather than decrease. And, more recently, the rise of wages worldwide has enabled more people to regularly eat meat than ever before, which has led to the extreme confinement and torture of hundreds of billions of farm animals.

As such, merely protecting humanity and improving the economy is not enough. We also need to ensure that humanity is driven and motivated by the correct social values.

Although society has seen the rise and fall and rise and fall of many different social values since the rise of agriculture, over the past couple hundred years, social values have generally drifted in the right direction. Slavery has been banned, women have gained suffrage, and gays have gotten the right to marry.

Given this, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that the social values we promote today will lead to positive change long-term.

Generally, I like to split these social values into two categories:

Social Values In The Overton Window

Right now, there’s a lot of important social issues in the Overton window. Some of these include transgender rights, housing reform, and prison reform. Some benefits of focusing on these issues are that you’re likely to see positive changes within the next decade and people will generally think you’re normal for caring about them.

Social Values Outside The Overton Window

Right now, there’s also, of course, a lot of important social issues that are outside of the Overton window. Even though they’re important and they need solving now, most people rarely ever think about them. Some examples of these include farm animal welfare, wild animal welfare, and teen rights. It can be valuable to discuss these issues to bring them into the discourse, but a major disadvantage of discussing them is that people will think you’re really weird!

Jacob Watts🔸 @ 2026-08-16T13:53 (+2)

Hey, good list fellow traveler.

In the spirit of collaboration, might I just add a few that came to mind. They may have occurred to you and simply not met your criteria.

Ecocide and ecological destruction is a broader issue than climate change. Perhaps, that is the worst of the bunch, but I believe that industrial scale destruction of land, air, and water is noteworthy. Look at eg. ocean acidification, poisoned water shelves, soil erosion, bio-accumulation of forever chemicals. I find that EA can be kind of a contrarian space such that when ecological issues are brought up it is mostly to emphasize how little we care, but these are public goods we all rely on and the piper will demand a certain level of payment.

Also, people should work less. They should have better conditions. A significant fraction of the world does back breaking work for shit money and that's not utopian. A bunch of the work is pretty much pointless anyways, it's just that the workers lives aren't considered worthwhile because they are poor.

People should live longer lives and have less disease.

People should have more friends and better communities. A lot of people smoke cigarettes and scroll Facebook and they'd probably rather do something better in a more perfect world.

There should be less war.

Also, a few points where I at least superficially disagree with you:

  1. "growth" as such is not an obvious target to me. I feel there is a bit of slight of hand here where what people mean to say is "it is good when more good stuff happens" and what they end up saying is "it is good when commerce of any kind happens". You actually approach some of the most significant aspects of this critique in your critique of slave cotton and cruel farms, so I suspect we're not as far apart on this as we could be.

GDP for example often comes up as the implied metric of "economic growth" and I would argue that it actually includes a lot of bad things as well. Doing evil commerce is bad. Enclosing previously non-economic spheres of life such that they are now added to the index is bad. All manner of environmental destruction and poisoning the commons are bad and the long term negative impacts are not suitably captured by this index. Working people into pain and despair is bad. And depending on what is actually being produced, elements of this index can also just be irrelevant or unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards.

It feels like a case of "graph madness" to simplify the whole world into just "more stuff" being produced and to be a complete nihilist about what that stuff actually is. Certainly, some forms of production are more or less essential to human well being. I would argue there's not much reason to think that this index captures all of that nuance even under relatively favorable "graph world" assumptions. In the real world, especially given you've already shown a commendable willingness to differentiate between "who has wealth right now" and "morality", it seems even less likely that GDP would have much to say in the face of these obstacles.

I would argue that these problems are so deep that it is not even productive as short hand to say that it is good in terms of human well being when GDP goes up. I found your explanation really appealingly parsimonious and I'm not being facetious when I say it resonated more than most cases for growth.

"Economic growth means increasing the amount of goods that a society produces. This increases how resources people have, which increases their quality of life."

But I would invite you to maybe interrogate:

  1. If that is what growth means, a lot of economic activity is bullshit. Environmentally harmful activities could easily leave us with less. If we are doing commerce instead of something else, the pie might not have grown at all so much as become commercialized.
  2. Even if the pie did get bigger, rising tides need not lift all ships. Consider the case of eg. wages stagnation, cost of living rises, and investors hoovering up all of the actual profit being made; arguably kind of the default case. I would argue it is in general quite relevant who is materially benefiting from commerce/industry and "growing the pie" is just a bulwark against this kind of analysis. Real, "don't look behind the curtain" shit.
  3. There are a lot of things other than commerce that make life worth living. If I work more and spend more, that's more commerce, but I would often enjoy my life less.

That's just a cursory sketch of a critique of growth. I hope you kind of see what I'm getting at and why "growth" per say might not be exactly worth aiming for in its own right.

To be really honest, I would go as far as to say the idea of "growth" / GDP as the one true economic index is often employed as sort of just a cynical "pro-wealthy people" talking point. There are certainly true believers, but also it has received a lot financial funding and laundered prestige it doesn't deserve. In my humble opinion, that's sort of a recurring problem within the ~"science" of economics; loads of "Nobel" Prize winning economists have said things to that effect. Would you believe it, according to the king's top wealth scientist, it's actually really good that the king is wealthy lol. I critique because I love; my undergrad minor was econ and I am a serial econ book enjoyer, but I also read books about con artists lol.

  1. Slavery never ended in the United States. Chattel slavery did, but forced work of men in chains under threat of violence and torture happens every day until we stop it.

Sometimes they pay them shit money, <$1 a day, but not always. Personally, I don't really see why they bother except so that it can be brought up in conversations like this. It's an obviously insulting amount of money and there is no pretext of consent. I guess it's the same logic as growth in a way, "commerce washes all sins". The real reason the convicts work is to avoid being assaulted by the guards and/or thrown into solitary.

The 13th amendment explicitly allows this and under US jurisprudence this is justified as a legal form of slavery. In the end, the civil war just sort of nationalized the slave trade and changed how it operates a bit. They still pick cotton and everything.

Not that it matters, but 90%+ of these people aren't even alleged to have done anything violent. And they sure ain't white collar crimes either lol. For whatever reason, people mostly don't care about slavery as long as it's happening to the right people I guess. I think most people don't really know because a prison is the perfect place to hide a bunch of people in chains and you get taught in school that slavery is over. They do work for the federal government and also private corporations like Walmart and McDonald's [https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e].

You already touched on prison reform, so forgive me for preaching to the converted.

Solid list! Good to have you as an accomplice!