Search for:

Start here
Career guide
Research
- Problem profiles Find out about the world's biggest and most neglected problems.
  See all problem profiles →
  Top areas to work on
  Preventing an AI-related catastrophe
  Catastrophic pandemics
  Nuclear war
  Great power conflict
  Climate change
  Capacity building
  Building effective altruism
  Global priorities research
  Improving decision making
  Other promising areas
  Civilisation resilience
  Artificial sentience
  Promoting positive values
  Space governance
  Risks of stable totalitarianism
  Factory farming
  Easily preventable or treatable illness
  Wild animal suffering
  See all problem profiles →
- Career reviews Learn about high-impact career paths.
  See all our career reviews →
  Top skill sets for tackling global problems
  Political and bureaucratic skills
  Organisation-building
  Research
  Communicating ideas
  Programming
  Experience with an emerging power
  Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem
  Our list of top high-impact career paths
  AI safety technical research
  AI governance and coordination
  Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
  Information security in high-impact areas
  Expert in AI hardware
  Helping build the effective altruism community
  China-related AI safety and governance
  Grantmaker
  Operations in high-impact organisations
  Research into global priorities
  More promising paths
  Be a founder
  Software engineering
  Journalism
  See more →
  How to build great career capital
  See our top recommendations →
  See all career reviews →
- Advanced series Our most important research findings.
  Introduction
  Your most important decision
  Foundations
  A definition of impact
  Longtermism
  Harmful jobs
  Global priorities
  Problem selection
  Existential risks
  Top problems list
  Contribution
  How to think about your contribution
  Effective solutions
  List of high-impact careers
  Personal fit
  Gut instinct
  Differences in productivity
  Comparative advantage
  Strategy
  Ambition
  Coordination
  Exploration
  Impact and satisfaction
  Accidental harm
  Read the full series →
- Browse all our content Pick a topic to explore or check out our most popular pieces.
  Career planning and decision making
  How to make your career plan
  All our other planning resources
  Selected topics
  Moral philosophy
  Career capital
  Job satisfaction
  Anonymous advice
  Unconventional advice
  Advocacy
  Existential risk
  Top-recommended careers
  See all topics →
  Top articles from outside our guides
  Best charities to donate to
  Misconceptions about effective altruism
  High-impact research questions
  What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try?
  How many lives does a doctor save?
  What's the impact of voting?
  Advice for undergraduates
  All articles →
See all problem profiles →
Top areas to work on
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe
Catastrophic pandemics
Nuclear war
Great power conflict
Climate change
Capacity building
Building effective altruism
Global priorities research
Improving decision making
Other promising areas
Civilisation resilience
Artificial sentience
Promoting positive values
Space governance
Risks of stable totalitarianism
Factory farming
Easily preventable or treatable illness
Wild animal suffering
See all problem profiles →
See all our career reviews →
Top skill sets for tackling global problems
Political and bureaucratic skills
Organisation-building
Research
Communicating ideas
Programming
Experience with an emerging power
Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem
Our list of top high-impact career paths
AI safety technical research
AI governance and coordination
Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
Information security in high-impact areas
Expert in AI hardware
Helping build the effective altruism community
China-related AI safety and governance
Grantmaker
Operations in high-impact organisations
Research into global priorities
More promising paths
Be a founder
Software engineering
Journalism
See more →
How to build great career capital
See our top recommendations →
See all career reviews →
Introduction
Your most important decision
Foundations
A definition of impact
Longtermism
Harmful jobs
Global priorities
Problem selection
Existential risks
Top problems list
Contribution
How to think about your contribution
Effective solutions
List of high-impact careers
Personal fit
Gut instinct
Differences in productivity
Comparative advantage
Strategy
Ambition
Coordination
Exploration
Impact and satisfaction
Accidental harm
Read the full series →
Career planning and decision making
How to make your career plan
All our other planning resources
Selected topics
Moral philosophy
Career capital
Job satisfaction
Anonymous advice
Unconventional advice
Advocacy
Existential risk
Top-recommended careers
See all topics →
Top articles from outside our guides
Best charities to donate to
Misconceptions about effective altruism
High-impact research questions
What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try?
How many lives does a doctor save?
What's the impact of voting?
Advice for undergraduates
All articles →
Job board
Podcasts
- The 80,000 Hours Podcast
- 80k After Hours
- The 80,000 Hours Career Guide
- Effective Altruism: An Introduction
- Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems
- On Artificial Intelligence
Get 1-1 advice
Newsletter

New releases
All articles
About

Home Topics Fields Economics

Search for:

New releases
All articles
About

Explore our archive by topic...

Foundations (307)
- Effective Altruism (128)
- Existential risk (87)
- Future generations & longtermism (67)
- Moral philosophy (68)
  - Moral patients (5)
  - Moral uncertainty (2)
- Reasoning well (113)
  - Decision making (35)
  - Epistemics (4)
  - Forecasting (4)
World problems (335)
- Most pressing problems (242)
  - Artificial Intelligence (73)
  - Building effective altruism (66)
  - Catastrophic pandemics (38)
  - Climate change (16)
    - Geoengineering (3)
  - Global priorities research (41)
  - Institutional decision making (34)
  - Nuclear war (26)
- Other pressing problems (113)
  - Artificial sentience (4)
  - Atomically precise manufacturing (2)
  - Charter cities (1)
  - Civilisational resilience (3)
  - Economic growth (4)
  - Ending Ageing (1)
  - Factory Farming (19)
  - False ideas on social media (5)
  - Global Health (22)
  - Global public goods (3)
  - Great power conflict (15)
  - Gun Control (3)
  - Harmful restrictions on migration (4)
  - Improving values (2)
  - Individual reasoning & cognition (12)
  - Mental health (problem area) (2)
  - Risks from malevolent actors (1)
  - Risks of stable totalitarianism (4)
  - S-risks (4)
  - Science policy & infrastructure (14)
  - Space governance (3)
  - Voting reform (4)
  - Whole brain emulation (3)
  - Wild animal suffering (4)
- Problem prioritisation (21)
Careers (489)
- Careers to build career capital (26)
  - Congressional staffer (4)
  - Early-stage startup employee (3)
  - Economics PhD (14)
  - Machine learning PhD (4)
- Categories of impactful careers (218)
  - Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche (4)
  - Communication (5)
  - Earning to Give (64)
    - EtG advice (6)
    - EtG pros and cons (15)
  - Government & policy (67)
    - Party Politics (11)
  - Organisation-building at effective nonprofits (39)
    - Foundation Program Management (9)
    - Fundraising (10)
    - Philanthropic Advising (9)
  - Research in relevant areas (76)
    - Biomedical Research (16)
    - Scientific research (15)
- Other careers (148)
  - Art & Entertainment (5)
  - Biomedical Research (11)
  - Computer Science PhD (14)
  - Consulting (9)
  - Data science (21)
  - Design (2)
  - Education (5)
  - Finance (20)
    - Asset Management (7)
      - Quantitative hedge funds (4)
    - Investment Banking (7)
  - Lawyer (8)
  - Marketing (3)
  - Medicine (26)
    - Doctor (12)
    - Medical Researcher (6)
  - Nursing (1)
  - Philosophy academia (2)
  - Politics (52)
    - Civil Service (11)
    - Party Politics (19)
  - Web designer (1)
- Sometimes-recommended careers (211)
  - Academic Research (96)
  - China-Western coordination (7)
  - Data collection for AI alignment (1)
  - Earning to give in quant trading (6)
  - Effective climate change interventions (9)
  - Engineering (8)
  - Expert in AI hardware (4)
  - Found a tech startup (29)
  - High impact executive assistant (3)
  - Historian of large societal trends (5)
  - Information security (7)
  - Investigate new problems (1)
  - Journalism (22)
    - Journalist (7)
  - Longtermist philanthropy (1)
  - Non-technical roles in leading AI labs (7)
  - Organise an effective altruism group (1)
  - Policy careers (4)
  - Public intellectual (9)
  - Research management (7)
  - Software Engineering (31)
  - Specialist in emerging global powers (5)
  - Think tank research (2)
- Top-recommended careers (198)
  - AI safety technical research (40)
  - Biorisk strategy & policy (30)
  - Building the effective altruism community (19)
  - China-related AI safety & governance (7)
  - Forecasting research & implementation (16)
  - Founder of new projects (36)
  - Grantmaker (16)
  - Long-term AI policy (38)
  - Operations at high impact organisations (13)
  - Research into global priorities (39)
Career advice & strategy (301)
- Accidental harm (14)
- Advice for undergraduates (13)
- Being ambitious (13)
- Career capital (54)
- Career planning (25)
- Community & coordination (10)
- Exploration (20)
- Graduate school (19)
  - PhDs (12)
- How to get a job (22)
- Leverage (7)
- Mental health (21)
- Now vs. Later (16)
- Personal fit (71)
  - Ability (19)
  - Job satisfaction (28)
- Risk (10)
- Unconventional advice (106)
Fields (104)
- Computer science (18)
- Economics (31)
- History (9)
- Law (7)
- Machine learning (19)
- Philosophy (17)
- Physics (1)
- Psychology (9)
- Statistics (5)
Other topics (193)
- About 80,000 Hours (64)
  - Updates (43)
- Anonymous advice (18)
- COVID-19 (19)
- Doing good in your current job (89)
  - Advocacy (28)
  - Donating effectively (24)
  - Income (31)
  - Volunteering (7)
- Promoting effective altruism (2)
- User stories (4)

Topic archive: Economics

Filter by content type:
All31
Podcasts20
Blog posts9
Skills1
Key articles1

All content tagged "Economics"

2023

November

#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
Podcast

October

#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
Podcast

September

Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem
Skill

June

#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on two big-picture critiques of GiveWell’s approach, and six lessons from their recent work
Podcast

March

#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
Podcast

2022

April

#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs
Podcast

2021

December

#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch
Podcast

November

#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah
Podcast

September

#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
Podcast

January

Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics
Blog post

2020

August

#84 – Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it worked
Podcast

July

#83 – Jennifer Doleac on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons
Podcast

2019

February

#52 – Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better, and how to get them
Podcast

2018

December

#49 – Rachel Glennerster on a year’s worth of education for under a dollar and other ‘best buys’ in development
Podcast

November

#48 – Brian Christian on computer science algorithms that tackle fundamental and universal problems — and whether they can help us live better in practice
Podcast

October

#45 – Economist Tyler Cowen says our overwhelming priorities should be maximising economic growth and making civilisation more stable. Is he right?
Podcast

July

#38 – Yew-Kwang Ng on ethics and how to create a much happier world
Podcast

May

#32 – Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.
Podcast
#30 – Eva Vivalt’s research suggests social science findings don’t generalize. So evidence-based development – what is it good for?
Podcast

March

#25 – Why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do, according to economist Robin Hanson
Podcast

2017

September

#7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
Podcast

June

#2 – David Spiegelhalter on risk, statistics and improving the public understanding of science
Podcast

May

How much do hedge fund traders earn?
Blog post

2015

July

‘Replaceability’ isn’t as important as you might think (or we’ve suggested)
Blog post

2014

September

Yardsticks: how to compare the scale of different social problems (Updated)
Article

August

Yardsticks: how to compare the scale of different social problems (First published)
Article

June

The payoff and probability of obtaining venture capital
Blog post

2013

November

Career Opportunities for Economics PhDs
Blog post

October

Why consider becoming a trader?
Blog post
The value of economics PhDs: A conversation with Robin Hanson
Blog post

2012

November

Why don’t people help others more? – part 2
Blog post

August

Social interventions gone wrong
Blog post

Filter by content type:
All31
Podcasts20
Blog posts9
Skills1
Key articles1

Join our newsletter

Get weekly updates on our research, plus jobs and other opportunities to get involved.

Get 1-1 advice

Want to tackle a pressing global problem with your career?

Speak to an advisor

Our research

Start here
Career guide
List of world problems
List of careers
Advanced series
New releases
All our research

Future generations
Artificial intelligence
Anonymous advice
College advice

Take action

Find a job
Get 1-1 advice
Make a career plan

About us

Why 80,000 Hours?
Meet the team
Our donors
What others say about us
Our mistakes
Our community
Translations of our content

80,000 Hours is an Effective Ventures project. Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) is a charity in England and Wales (with registered charity number 1149828, registered company number 07962181, and is also a Netherlands registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 825776867). Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US) is a section 501(c)(3) organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398). EV UK and EV US are separate charities that collaborate closely under the “Effective Ventures” name.

Please contact us to suggest ideas, improvements, or corrections.

We do our best to provide useful information, but how you use the information is up to you. We don’t take responsibility for any loss that results from the use of information on the site. Please consult our full legal disclaimer and privacy policy. See also our cookie notice and adjust your .