I am interested in exploring the idea of Big Goal projects (aka goal-oriented megaprojects).
This is the second article in a series about Big Goal projects (last one here). This article explores 4 historical Big Goal projects that utilized 4 different kinds of levers to move the world. The examples are admittedly simplified, and this is early thinking. Skeptics, please feel free to pile on. But it is worth studying the lessons learned from history.
At the heart of these examples are the idea of leverage: forces like governments and markets are utilized to move the world towards big global goals. Each of these examples were possible because big-enough philanthropic resources were combined with the right program structure.
The first example is how Andrew Carnegie utilized Government (lever #1) to make public libraries a “thing,” a hundred years ago. No matter your opinion on public libraries, this is a powerful story of leverage. Over his lifetime, Andrew Carnegie gave over $2 billion dollars (in present-day dollars) to help build more than 1,400 public libraries in the US alone. He started by simply endowing 14 libraries, utilizing philanthropy to demonstrate his concrete vision to municipalities. Later, he paid for the building but required buy-in and co-investment from a local public authority from day one, to provide an ongoing budget for operations. Today, one hundred years later, local public libraries in the US alone have $14 billion dollars in budget annually, and employ well over 100,000 of the most charming people on earth, librarians. Carnegie gave a staggering sum of money to his chosen social change cause - which, in global terms, was enough to create a small rivulet of water. Then, a lot more money from the government followed that path, and that rivulet turned into a stream, and then a raging river.
The second example is how CEPI and Gavi utilized the massive operating capacity of the private sector (lever #2) to successfully help to discover, scale up, and deliver (via COVAX) nearly 2 billion doses of COVID vaccine to the Global South in an absurdly short amount of time. These efforts were far from perfect, especially as richer governments tried to secure more vaccine supply. But CEPI created very early momentum for vaccine R&D, investing in 14 vaccines, 7 of which were approved, and 3 of which saw widespread global use. Over time, they played a major role in engaging and attracting the wheels of tens of billions of dollars of private sector capacity for discovery, testing, approval, and scale up. Lastly, CEPI and Gavi also helped to aggregate the buying power of many poorer governments through COVAX, to create an advance market commitment for the vaccine, further harnessing massive private infrastructure in service to the Global South.
The third example is the fight against smoking, which uses the sticky lever of human behavior (lever #3) to achieve lasting change (and also uses government regulation). Bloomberg Philanthropy and others have given more than $1.5 billion dollars to help shape smoking norms in more than 100 countries that hold 5 billion people. One component of this work is attempting to shape human norms. Human behavior is extremely difficult to change, and to be clear, very hard to attribute to any single effort. However, at least in theory, many people in the world today haven’t yet attracted marketing from cigarette companies - and therefore have fewer existing cultural norms around smoking. It can be incredibly powerful to nudge people into seeing smoking as unhealthy and gross, before norms are firmly established. Human behavior has stickiness to it, and is infectious: big pushes around human norms can lead to lasting changes in behavior for massive numbers of people.
The fourth example is the discovery and dissemination of the polio vaccine, using the lever of technology (lever #4). Polio used to paralyze 16,000 people each year in the US alone - kids could go to a crowded summer camp or public swimming pool and contract a lifelong, debilitating disease. In the 1940s and 50s, the March of Dimes raised the modern day equivalent of $1+ billion (notably from many small contributions) to both discover and disseminate the polio vaccine. This now-routine childhood immunization has saved an estimated $4 billion dollars in annual healthcare expenditures, plus untold human suffering every year since then.
Of course, levers aren’t mutually exclusive; some of the examples above employ more than one lever. The broader point is that if you bet big enough and structure that bet well, it’s possible to harness a big force, and create an out-sized impact.
Again: these are simplified examples. But stepping back, I think there are several common-sense lessons that these examples help to illustrate.
These examples are all clever - but I should caveat that magical levers like this aren’t always available - nor are they the be-all, end-all. Not every project needs a lever. When social change programs improve a person’s education or general access to opportunity, I believe the gains over their lifetime and into future generations compound at a scarily fast rate. Leverage isn’t required, and levers often come with risk. One reason that many people include GiveDirectly in their giving portfolio for example, is that this is a straightforward, highly-scalable way of helping the extreme poor, with consistent results. The benefit to individuals has clearly-documented immediate compound effects for whole communities (e.g. Egger et al, 2022) - and in my opinion are likely to compound over lifetimes. The world has many, many times the resources required to simply give directly, and pay to eliminate the most extreme forms of global poverty.
Stepping back, I think sometimes in social change, we are hesitant to bring our full human ambition. We are unusually afraid of being labeled as a failure. I think these historical examples are both inspiring because they show us what is possible - and instructive because they present lessons for how to pursue a Big Goal.
When it comes to the most important work of all - human equity - let us make no small plans.
The next article will profile two contemporary examples of Big Goal projects. In that article, I’d like to examine specific features of those projects that in my opinion result in greater impact cost-effectiveness (i.e. increasing returns to scale), and lower risk - while also acknowledging potential drawbacks of having bigger goals.
