Charitology
The Charitology Encyclopedia

Neglectedness

How few resources already go to a problem relative to its size. Other things equal, an extra dollar tends to do more where few other dollars go, because the best opportunities there have not yet been taken.

A problem is neglected when few people or dollars are working on it compared with how big it is. 80,000 Hours measures neglectedness simply: how many people, or how many dollars, are currently dedicated to solving the problem?

Why it matters

The first resources that go into a problem usually go to its best opportunities. Later resources go to the next best, and so on. So returns diminish as a field fills up. 80,000 Hours argues that returns most likely diminish logarithmically, which means each doubling of resources buys roughly the same amount of progress. If that is right, a dollar added to a problem that gets a million dollars a year can matter far more than a dollar added to one that gets a billion.

GiveWell Labs, the project that became the Open Philanthropy Project, made a similar point in 2014 with a different word. When it compared U.S. policy areas, it asked how crowded each one was: how much existing advocacy already pushed for the same goals, and where the gaps were.

Three cautions

  1. Neglected for a reason. Neglectedness is a good guide only when a problem is neglected for bad reasons. Some problems get little money because they are small or because nobody knows how to make progress on them.
  2. The factors overlap. Robert Wiblin of 80,000 Hours notes that a problem can stay important precisely because it is neglected. He suggests judging how important and how tractable a problem would be if nobody were working on it, so that one observation is not counted twice.
  3. Boundaries move the answer. A narrowly defined problem almost always looks more neglected than a broad one. How you draw the edges of a problem changes its score.

Neglect as a property of the system

Charitology adds a system view. Neglect is not random. The Story Bias predicts that problems without faces or headlines will be neglected. The Proximity Pull predicts neglect of distant need, and the Single Lens predicts neglect of goods that the dominant moral frameworks cannot see.

Charitology’s founding hypothesis, the Symptom Trap, is that work at the structure and source levels is neglected relative to relief. That hypothesis is untested. Testing it starts with the Depth Census.

Sources

  1. A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact · Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours, 2016 · First published in 2016 and last updated in December 2025.
  2. The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care · Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum, 2016
  3. Narrowing down U.S. policy areas · Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog, 2014