The scale, neglectedness and tractability framework asks three questions about a problem before asking which charity to fund. In the version 80,000 Hours publishes:
- Scale: If we solved the problem, how good would it be?
- Neglectedness: How many people, or dollars, are currently working on it? See neglectedness.
- Solvability, often called tractability: If we doubled the effort going into it, what fraction of what remains would we expect to solve?
Multiplied together, the three give an estimate of how much good an extra unit of money or work would do. Because the scores are logarithmic, 80,000 Hours adds them instead of multiplying.
Where it came from
GiveWell Labs, the project that became the Open Philanthropy Project (later Open Philanthropy, and since 2025 Coefficient Giving), compared causes by importance, tractability and how crowded they were. A 2014 post used those three criteria to narrow down U.S. policy areas. In December 2013 Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours proposed a cause-selection framework of importance, tractability and uncrowdedness, crediting GiveWell Labs for the names. Robert Wiblin’s 2016 article for 80,000 Hours turned it into the formal version still in use.
Cautions from its own authors
80,000 Hours lists the limits plainly. The scores are imprecise, and adding them adds uncertainty. Narrowly defined problems tend to score better than broad ones. Trade-offs between the yardsticks rest on contested value judgments. Solvability is the hardest factor to score, and the true differences between problems are probably smaller than the scores suggest. Wiblin also warns that the factors overlap: a problem can stay important because it is neglected, so the same fact can be counted twice.
How Charitology uses it
Charitology treats the framework as a good tool that needs one more input: a moral framework. Scale needs a unit, such as lives, wellbeing, rights secured or species protected, and choosing the unit is a moral choice. A problem can rank first under one lens and last under another. So Charitology asks the questions once per framework. Its frameworks data, used by the Values Compass, sketches how each framework tends to rank causes, so a giver can see where the rankings agree. Where they cannot be put on one scale at all is Open Problem 2, the Exchange Rate Problem.
The framework scores problems, not the depth of the work. A problem can be crowded at the relief level and neglected at the source level. Charitology’s working hypothesis is that this pattern is common, which is the Symptom Trap. This project has not established that pattern.