Factor 04 of 9
Societal factors
Institutions and structures: extractive rule, collective action failures, conflict, exclusion, and unmanaged global risk.
Barriers within this factor
Each barrier has its own page with the evidence and sources behind it.
- 1Extractive institutions
Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) argue nations prosper when institutions are inclusive and decline when they are extractive. Corruption, weak rule of law, and instability belong here.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 2Collective action problems
Hardin (1968) described the "tragedy of the commons." Olson (1965) showed small organized interest groups often defeat large diffuse public interests. Ostrom (1990) documented many communities that manage shared resources successfully through local rules and trust.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 6 experimental methods)
- 3Conflict and violence
War destroys lives, capital, and institutions and interrupts education for generations.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 6 experimental methods)
- 4Discrimination and exclusion
Barriers based on race, gender, class, disability, or other characteristics prevent people from using their abilities. Field experiments, which send identical applications that differ only in a signal such as a name, give direct evidence on hiring. Exclusion also works through legal rules, funding decisions, who teaches, and across generations.
Evidence and sources (6 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 5Social determinants of health
The WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health (2008) concluded that the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age drive most health inequality.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 6Global and existential risks
Ord (2020) argues humanity underinvests in reducing risks such as pandemics, nuclear war, climate change, and emerging technologies. His probability estimates are his own judgments, not measurements.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 6 experimental methods)
Evidence strength
Main findings behind this page, grouped by the strength ratings, from strongest to weakest. Each tier lists the findings that received that rating.
| Strength | Findings |
|---|---|
| Strong | U.S. hiring callback gaps. The NIH grant gap. Occupational shares since 1960. Racial gaps in mobility. Public goods experiments. |
| Moderate | Employer-level concentration of discrimination. Long-run effects of Peru's mita. COVID-19 excess deaths. Local governance of shared resources. Racism and health as an association. |
| Limited | Corruption and rule-of-law indexes, which measure perceptions. The commons argument as a universal claim. Pandemic preparedness returns. Existential risk estimates. |
| Contested or debated | Gender bias in academic hiring. Redlining maps as the cause of later gaps. |
Actions that can reduce these barriers
Proven actions for the societal barriers have not yet been researched. Each barrier below lists proposed and experimental methods only, with the stage labels and ratings explained below.
Proposed and experimental methods
Each barrier also has a list of proposed and experimental methods. It covers methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places but not widely used, or tried and then failed or reversed, so readers can see what is being tested. Each method has a stage label and an evidence rating in parentheses. The stage labels are Theoretical (proposed but not yet tested as an intervention), Early trial (small or first studies), Large trial (large randomized or field trials), Approved but not scaled (legally approved or running in some places but not widely adopted), In wide use (widely adopted but newly tested or questioned), Sold commercially without trials (used for polygenic embryo screening), and Failed or reversed (tested and shown not to work, or adopted and then withdrawn). The word contested is added where the evidence is disputed. Failed, reversed, and unhelpful methods are listed last and begin with "Failed," "Reversed," or "Not shown to help." A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works, and the rating shows the strength of the evidence.
Ideal conditions that counter this factor
Political and institutional conditions
What the evidence shows
Moser, Voena, and Waldinger (2014) found U.S. patenting rose 31% in the fields of Jewish chemists who fled Nazi Germany, mainly by attracting new researchers to those fields. Institutions matter (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012). Narcissism predicts who emerges as a leader but not who leads effectively (Grijalva et al., 2015), so selection based on track record rather than confidence may protect institutions. These describe conditions the evidence supports, not a position on how to achieve them, which is often contested.
Ideal:
- Peace and stability
- Rule of law
- Protection from persecution
- Freedom of inquiry and expression, including freedom of science from political control
- Openness to talent from anywhere
- Leaders chosen for their record rather than their self-confidence
- Broad access to opportunity
- Public investment in education, health, and basic research
Evidence strength: Mixed. Persecution and instability driving talent away is limited (the main study covers one field and one historical episode, rated C for general claims), leader selection is moderate (one meta-analysis, rated B), historical cases only for the cost of political control of science (Vavilov under Lysenkoism), and implementation is debated.
In the pioneer cases
Statements from the pioneer records that this site classifies under the societal factor. The classification is this site's.
| Pioneer | Effect | Statement |
|---|---|---|
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Accessible institutions. The Polytechnic admitted foreign students and advised him how to qualify. Switzerland granted him citizenship in 1901. |
| Albert Einstein | Barrier absent | Stability. His key years (1905 to 1915) preceded persecution. He completed general relativity in Berlin during World War I but was not drawn into the war. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Open publication. Annalen der Physik scrutinized first papers, then published later ones with little refereeing. With five prior papers, his relativity paper was probably accepted on receipt. |
| Albert Einstein | Not overcome | Later obstacles. Antisemitism drove him to emigrate in 1933, after his major work. |
| Marie Curie | Barrier | Russian-ruled Warsaw barred women from university. |
| Srinivasa Ramanujan | Helped | A sponsor. Hardy's approval raised his status at once. Madras made him a research scholar and Hardy brought him to Cambridge. |
| Jonas Salk | Helped | Public funding. The March of Dimes, founded in 1938, funded the research and trials. |
| Norman Borlaug | Helped | Institutional backing. In 1944 he joined a Mexican government and Rockefeller Foundation wheat program, turning down DuPont. |
| Norman Borlaug | Note | Critics. The broader Green Revolution has critics over fertilizer and water use. This is a policy debate, not a dispute about his contribution. |
| Katalin Karikó | Barrier | In 1985 she left communist Hungary with her family, carrying savings from selling their car sewn into her daughter's teddy bear (sources differ on $900 or £900). |
| Katalin Karikó | Barrier | In 1995 Penn gave her a choice between abandoning her research and accepting a demotion with a pay cut, as she was diagnosed with cancer and her husband was stuck in Hungary. She described being demoted four times. |
| Katalin Karikó | Helped | A private-sector path. She joined BioNTech in 2013. |
| Katalin Karikó | Not overcome | Never granted tenure. |
| Tu Youyou | Barrier | She had no doctorate, no training abroad, and no membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which led Chinese media to call her a "three noes" scientist. |
| Tu Youyou | Barrier | Her project began in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, when most research had stalled and many experienced experts had been sidelined. With pharmaceutical workshops shut, her team extracted herbs in household vats, and several members, including Tu, developed health problems from solvent exposure. |
| Tu Youyou | Barrier | The work was part of a secret military project, and nothing from it was published until an anonymous 1977 paper on artemisinin's structure, with reports on its antimalarial effects following in 1979, so it was little known outside China for years. |
| Tu Youyou | Helped | A national mission. Project 523, a secret program begun in 1967 to find new malaria treatments, involved over 500 scientists from about 60 military and civilian institutions. Its office coordinated collaboration and logistics, and her academy's leadership appointed her to head its research group. |
| Tu Youyou | Not overcome | Credit remains disputed. Project 523 involved many scientists, and some Chinese scientists and historians object to crediting one person. Tu herself described the discovery as the effort of an entire team. |
| Percy Julian | Barrier | Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the grandson of enslaved people. Montgomery had no public high school for Black students, so he entered DePauw University inadequately prepared and started as a probationary student. |
| Percy Julian | Barrier | After he earned a master's degree from Harvard in 1923, Harvard denied him the teaching assistantship needed to continue to a doctorate, reportedly out of concern that white students would resent a Black instructor. |
| Percy Julian | Barrier | After his physostigmine breakthrough, DePauw refused him a permanent faculty position. At the time, American colleges were not prepared to have a Black person teach white students. |
| Percy Julian | Barrier | When his family moved to the white suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, around 1950, their home was attacked, including a firebombing. The family stayed. |
| Percy Julian | Helped | A private-sector path. When universities closed their doors, the Glidden Company hired him in 1936 to direct research in its soybean division. In 1953 he founded Julian Laboratories, which he sold in 1961 for more than $2 million. |
| Percy Julian | Not overcome | He was denied the academic career his research merited, and his family faced racist violence. When Glidden declined to pursue further biomedical work, he left to start his own company. |
| Ignaz Semmelweis | Barrier | No support from the top. His chief, Johann Klein, opposed the idea and refused to renew his contract in March 1849. Political differences added to the conflict: Semmelweis's Hungarian patriotism offended Klein, a firm monarchist. |
| Ignaz Semmelweis | Helped | A second post. After moving to Budapest, he again reduced maternal deaths as a professor there. |
| Ignaz Semmelweis | Not overcome | He left Vienna in 1850. In 1865 he was committed to an asylum, where he died two weeks later of an infection, probably from injuries inflicted by guards. Some historians suggest he may have had a form of dementia. His ideas were vindicated only after his death, as germ theory developed. |
| Baruch Spinoza | Barrier | He published the Theological-Political Treatise anonymously in 1670, and it caused great alarm. It was banned in the Netherlands in 1674. |
| Baruch Spinoza | Note | A door he refused. In 1673 the University of Heidelberg offered him a professorship. He declined because it required him not to disturb the established religion. |
| Baruch Spinoza | Not overcome | The only work he published under his own name in his lifetime was an exposition of Descartes. He died in 1677 at 44 of a lung illness, reported as tuberculosis. Inhaling glass dust from lens grinding has been suggested as a cause but is unproven. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Barrier | She was taken from West Africa and arrived in Boston on the slave ship Phillis in 1761, aged about seven. Her real name is unknown. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Barrier | Many colonists refused to believe that an enslaved African girl could have written the poems. Susanna Wheatley sent her to London because she judged the chances of finding a publisher were better there than in Massachusetts. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Barrier | Her publisher required an attestation of authorship. It was signed by 18 prominent Bostonians, including John Hancock, and printed at the front of the book. Whether she faced an in-person examination is debated. Her biographer Vincent Carretta suspects the signers knew her socially. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Not overcome | After her owners' deaths she struggled to support herself. She married John Peters in 1778, lost two children in infancy, and died in poverty on 5 December 1784, aged about 31. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Helped | Recognition. The Royal Society at first judged his letters not worth printing in its Transactions. After a French experimenter confirmed in May 1752 that lightning is electrical, the Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1753, its highest scientific honor, and Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees the same year. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Note | A fire company. In 1736 he organized the Union Fire Company, Philadelphia's first fire protection society. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Note | Slavery. Franklin enslaved people for much of his life, and his newspaper carried advertisements for slave sales. He became an outspoken opponent of slavery late in life. In 1787 he became president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and his last public act was a 1790 petition to Congress asking for an end to slavery and the slave trade. |
| Gregor Mendel | Helped | A monastery that invested in him. Abbot Cyril Napp sent him to the University of Vienna from 1851 to 1853, where he studied physics under Christian Doppler and botany under Franz Unger. |
| Gregor Mendel | Not overcome | He died in 1884 without recognition for his work on heredity. After he became abbot in 1868, administrative duties and a long dispute with the government over taxes on the monastery largely ended his research. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | He was born enslaved in Diamond Grove, Missouri, and was kidnapped as an infant with his mother. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | Highland College in Kansas accepted him and then turned him away because of his race. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | Many of the farmers he served were tenants too poor to buy fertilizer or equipment, and since they could be evicted, they had little reason to invest in the land. |
| George Washington Carver | Helped | Philanthropy and federal support. Morris K. Jesup funded the 1906 wagon, which carried seed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and reached about 2,000 people a month in its first summer. |
| George Washington Carver | Not overcome | The tenancy system and his farmers' poverty limited how widely his methods were adopted. His three patents, for a cosmetic and for paints and stains, were not commercially successful. |
| Yuan Longping | Barrier | He witnessed mass starvation in rural Hunan during the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward. |
| Yuan Longping | Barrier | He was denounced as a counter-revolutionary in 1966, during the Cultural Revolution. |
| Yuan Longping | Helped | Protection from the state. An official in Beijing who had read his paper ordered that he be protected and funded. In his oral autobiography, Yuan says that Xiong Yanheng of the State Science and Technology Commission found his paper and passed it to bureau director Zhao Shiying. With the approval of the Commission's leader Nie Rongzhen, Zhao wrote in May 1966 ordering local officials to support the research. In 1975 the central government committed funds to spread hybrid rice. |
| Yuan Longping | Helped | A national team. In November 1970 his assistant Li Bihu and Feng Keshan, a technician at a farm on Hainan Island, found a wild male-sterile rice plant there, which became the key breeding material. From 1971 the material was shared with more than 20 research units in 13 provinces, and in 1972 hybrid rice became a national priority project. |
| Yuan Longping | Helped | Rollout. The first hybrid variety came in 1973, and commercial planting began in 1976. |
| Yuan Longping | Not overcome | He was nominated three times for the Chinese Academy of Sciences but was never elected, although he was elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1995. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Barrier | She completed the coursework at the University of Pennsylvania's Towne Scientific School but in 1892 received a certificate of proficiency instead of a bachelor's degree, because the university did not grant degrees to women. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Barrier | Before 1900, women chemists were mostly limited to assistant jobs under men, teaching, or nutrition work. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Barrier | Her federal civil service papers were submitted under the name "M. E. Pennington," hiding that she was a woman. When this was discovered, Civil Service officials reportedly tried to withdraw the offer, though her own later account says she was already at work (Stephan, 1996). |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Helped | Harvey Wiley. The chief of the Bureau of Chemistry hired her and, according to the Science History Institute, intervened to keep her in the post. In 1907 she became the first chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Research Laboratory. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Helped | Local results. Her laboratory's report on Philadelphia's milk supply led to a post at the city health department, and the milk standards she developed were adopted by health boards across the country. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Helped | Wartime demand. During World War I she personally took part in about 500 test journeys of refrigerated railcars over two years, and in 1919 she received the Notable Service Medal from Herbert Hoover. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Not overcome | Penn never awarded her the bachelor's degree she had earned, and her entry into federal service depended on concealing that she was a woman. |
| Fritz Haber | Not overcome | Born to a Jewish family, he had converted to Protestantism in 1892, but in 1933 Nazi race laws forced most of his Jewish staff out. He resigned rather than agree to the dismissals, left Germany, and died in Basel in January 1934. |
| Fritz Haber | Note | Haber also directed Germany's development of poison gas in World War I and supervised the first chlorine attack at Ypres in 1915. His wife, the chemist Clara Immerwahr, who is widely described as opposing gas warfare, took her own life days later. Nitrogen fertilizer has also contributed to water and air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity loss (Erisman et al., 2008). Like Franklin's, his case shows that one person can make great benefits possible and also cause great harm. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Barrier | Why his work was suppressed. Trofim Lysenko, who had Stalin's support, rejected Mendelian genetics and publicly denounced Vavilov from 1934 to 1939. In 1938 Lysenko became president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which Vavilov had led from 1929 until his dismissal in 1935. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Barrier | Arrest. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and accused of treason and spying for Britain. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Barrier | Death in prison. He was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison, and he died of starvation in Saratov prison on 26 January 1943. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Helped | Early state backing. As head of the Lenin Academy, he oversaw the founding of about 400 research institutes, according to Britannica, and the state funded his collecting expeditions abroad. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Not overcome | He died in prison. After the August 1948 session of the Lenin Academy, genetics was suppressed in the Soviet Union until Lysenko lost government support in 1964. Vavilov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Note | In the autumn of 1948 alone, 127 teachers, including 66 professors, were dismissed, and genetics textbooks were destroyed (Strunnikov, cited in Borinskaya et al., 2019). |
Key figures
| Measure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| People forcibly displaced, end of 2024 | 123.2 million, nearly double the figure a decade earlier | UNHCR Global Trends 2024 |
| People forcibly displaced, end of 2025 | 117.8 million, 5.4 million fewer than a year earlier and the first decrease in a decade, but still about 1 in 70 people worldwide | UNHCR Global Trends 2025 |
| Corruption Perceptions Index, 2025 | Global average dropped for the first time in more than a decade, to 42 out of 100. 122 of 182 countries (67%) scored below 50. Only 31 countries have improved their scores since 2012 | Transparency International |
| Rule of Law Index, 2025 (143 countries, 95% of the world's population) | Rule of law declined in 68% of countries, up from 57% the previous year, the eighth straight year in which more countries declined than improved | World Justice Project |
| Rule of Law Index, specific measures, 2025 | Freedom of opinion and expression fell in 73% of countries, and judicial limits on government power declined in 61% | World Justice Project |
| Premature chronic disease deaths in low- and middle-income countries, 2021 | 82% | WHO (see the biological factor) |
| Health gradient by social position | Declines step by step at each lower level | Marmot (2004) |
| U.S. hiring field experiments | A meta-analysis of every available U.S. hiring field experiment (28 studies, 55,842 applications for 26,326 positions) found that since 1989, white applicants received on average 36% more callbacks than African Americans and 24% more than Latinos. There was no change in discrimination against African Americans over 25 years and modest evidence of a decline for Latinos, which the authors treat cautiously because few studies included Latino applicants | Quillian et al. (2017) |
| Hiring discrimination in nine countries | Across 97 field experiments with more than 200,000 applications in nine countries in Europe and North America, discrimination against nonwhite natives appeared in every country. In the highest-discrimination countries, white natives received nearly twice the callbacks of nonwhites, and in the lowest, about 25% more. France had the highest rates, followed by Sweden | Quillian et al. (2019) |
| Discrimination at large U.S. employers | A field experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications to 108 of the largest U.S. employers found distinctively Black names reduced the chance of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points. Discrimination was concentrated: the fifth of firms that discriminated most accounted for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants. There was no average gender gap, but some firms favored men and others favored women | Kline, Rose, and Walters (2022) |
| Allocation of talent, 1960 to 2010 | In 1960, 94% of U.S. doctors and lawyers were white men. By 2010 the share was 62%. A model-based study estimated that improved allocation of talent, as women and Black men entered occupations previously closed to them, explains 20% to 40% of U.S. growth in output per person from 1960 to 2010 | Hsieh, Hurst, Jones, and Klenow (2019) |
| Women's legal rights worldwide | Women have about two-thirds (67%) of the legal rights of men worldwide. Only 4% of women live in economies close to full legal equality, and no economy grants women equal economic opportunities. Fewer than half (47%) of the policies and institutions needed to make these laws effective are in place. Between 2023 and 2025, 68 economies enacted 113 reforms | World Bank, Women, Business and the Law 2026 |
| Discrimination in science funding | Black applicants' chance of winning a major NIH research grant was about 10 percentage points lower than white applicants' (Ginther et al., 2011). A 2019 NIH analysis of 2011 to 2015 applications found award rates of 10.7% for African American or Black applicants and 17.7% for white applicants. Topic choice explained over 20% of the gap after controlling for prior achievements, leaving most of it unexplained. An unexplained gap is not by itself proof of reviewer bias | Ginther et al. (2011), Hoppe et al. (2019), Taffe and Gilpin (2021) |
| Gender bias in academic hiring, a contested finding | Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) found 127 science faculty rated an identical lab-manager application as more competent and hireable when it carried a male name. Williams and Ceci (2015) found 873 faculty preferred equally qualified women about 2:1 for hypothetical tenure-track positions, though critics argue their design did not reflect real hiring. A larger replication of Moss-Racusin et al. reported by Jussim and colleagues found the reverse, which the authors list as accepted by Meta-Psychology, but it had not appeared there as of October 7, 2026. The direction of gender bias in academic hiring therefore depends on the career stage and study design | Moss-Racusin et al. (2012), Williams and Ceci (2015) |
| Limits of field experiments | Field experiments measure discrimination only at the first step, the callback, so they do not capture what happens in interviews, pay, or promotion. They also face a methodological critique (Heckman and Siegelman, 1993): if employers perceive more variation in unobserved qualities for one group, callback gaps can misstate discrimination in either direction. Reanalyses using a correction method developed by Neumark (2012) found most estimates robust, though a Swedish reanalysis found the critique mattered for some studies | Neumark (2012), Neumark and Rich (2016) |
| Racial gaps in mobility across generations | In U.S. tax and census records covering nearly the whole population, Black and American Indian children have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than white children. Comparing children from families with the same income, the Black-white gap is driven by lower wages and employment among Black men, with no such gap between Black and white women. Parental marital status, education, and wealth explain little of it, and Black boys have lower adult incomes than white boys from comparable-income families in 99% of Census tracts | Chetty, Hendren, Jones, and Porter (2020) |
| 1930s redlining maps | A federal agency graded neighborhoods for lending risk, and the lowest-graded areas often had mostly African American residents. Comparing areas on either side of the map boundaries in 149 cities, the maps led to lower homeownership, house values, and rents and to more racial segregation in later decades. Later research disputes the mechanism: the agency that drew the maps lent widely in low-graded neighborhoods and drew them after most of its lending was done, while the Federal Housing Administration had already been excluding these neighborhoods by its own methods. The long-run gaps are well documented, but whether the maps themselves caused them is contested | Fishback, Rose, Snowden, and Storrs (2021), Aaronson, Hartley, and Mazumder (2021) |
| Racial gaps in mortgage lending | Latinx and Black borrowers with the same credit risk paid significantly higher interest rates on government-backed mortgages, costing them over $450 million a year. Algorithmic lenders showed similar gaps for some loans and smaller gaps for others. The widely quoted figures of 7.9 basis points and $765 million come from the 2019 working paper, not the published version | Bartlett, Morse, Stanton, and Wallace (2022) |
| Racism and health | A meta-analysis of 293 studies, mostly from the United States, found that reported racism was associated with poorer mental health (r = -0.23), including depression and anxiety. Associations were stronger in cross-sectional and non-representative studies, so how much is causal is uncertain | Paradies et al. (2015) |
| Same-race teachers, what helps | In the Tennessee STAR experiment, Black students randomly assigned at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade were 9 percentage points (13%) more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points (19%) more likely to enroll in college. There was no effect on white students, and North Carolina data gave similar results. The authors suggest role-model effects as one possible channel. A review of 37 studies found benefits of student-teacher racial matching, especially for Black and Latino students | Gershenson et al. (2022), Redding (2019) |
| Racial discrimination in the European Union | A survey of 6,752 people of African descent in 13 EU countries found 45% experienced racial discrimination in the previous five years, up from 39% in 2016, and 34% when looking for work. Only 9% reported it. Germany had the highest rate | EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (2023) |
| A caution on implicit bias | Measured discrimination, as in the field experiments above, is stronger evidence than scores on implicit bias tests. A meta-analysis of 492 studies (87,418 participants) found that procedures can change implicit bias scores, but those changes produced trivial changes in behavior and did not explain behavior change. An earlier meta-analysis described the Implicit Association Test as a poor predictor of discriminatory behavior. The test's developers replied that small effects can still matter across large populations, but acknowledged the test is problematic for identifying which individuals will discriminate | Forscher et al. (2019), Oswald et al. (2013), Greenwald, Banaji, and Nosek (2015) |
| Scope of the mobility, redlining, and lending studies | The mobility, redlining, and lending studies show large, persistent racial gaps. For redlining, whether the maps themselves caused these gaps is contested. They do not each identify present-day discrimination as the sole cause of the gaps they measure | Strength ratings |
| Public goods experiments | Contributions fell to very low levels when free riders could not be punished, with 53% to 75% of participants contributing nothing by the final round. When participants could punish free riders, contributions rose toward full cooperation | Fehr and Gächter (2000) |
| Managing shared resources | A review of 91 studies of real communities managing shared resources supported most of Ostrom's design principles for successful local governance | Cox et al. (2010) |
| COVID-19 excess deaths, 2020 and 2021 | WHO estimated 14.83 million excess deaths worldwide, 2.74 times the 5.42 million deaths reported as caused by COVID-19. Only about half of countries had complete death data, so many estimates are modeled | Msemburi et al. (2023) |
| Existential risk estimates | Ord's probability estimates for existential catastrophe are his own judgments, not measurements, so they are not given here as figures | Ord (2020) |
| Peru's colonial mining mita | In Peru, districts just inside the boundary of the mita, a colonial forced mining labor system in force from 1573 to 1812, have about 25% lower household consumption today and about 6 percentage points more child stunting than districts just outside it. The effect persisted through land tenure and public goods such as roads. Because the boundary was drawn centuries ago, this comparison isolates the effect of an extractive institution better than cross-country studies can | Dell (2010) |
| Underinvestment in pandemic preparedness | A model combining the frequency and severity of pandemics estimated expected global losses from future pandemics at over $700 billion a year. It found that spending $60 billion up front and $5 billion a year to expand vaccine production capacity would yield an expected net gain of more than $500 billion. A University of Leeds policy brief argues that preparedness return-on-investment claims rest on unreliable assumptions, so the size of the underinvestment is uncertain | Glennerster, Snyder, and Tan (2022), University of Leeds |
References cited on this page
- Dell, M. (2010). The persistent effects of Peru's mining mita. Econometrica, 78(6), 1863-1903. DOI
- Glennerster, R., Snyder, C. M., & Tan, B. J. (2022). Calculating the costs and benefits of advance preparations for future pandemics. NBER Working Paper 30565. Published 2023 in IMF Economic Review, 71(3), 611-648. DOI
- Karakas, A. D. (2025). The persistent effects of Peru's mining mita: double machine learning approach. arXiv preprint 2506.18947 (not peer reviewed)
- REPPARE, University of Leeds (2024, May). The cost of pandemic preparedness: unclear and unaffordable? Policy brief summarizing Brown, G. W., Bell, D., von Agris, J., and Tacheva, B. (2024), funded by the Brownstone Institute
- Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown.
- Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243-1248. PubMed
- Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health (2008). Closing the Gap in a Generation. WHO IRIS
- Marmot, M. (2004). The Status Syndrome. New York: Times Books.
- Ord, T. (2020). The Precipice. London: Bloomsbury. New York: Hachette.
- UNHCR: Global Trends, Forced Displacement in 2024
- UNHCR (2026). Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2025
- Transparency International: CPI 2025 findings
- World Justice Project: Rule of Law Index 2025
- WHO: Noncommunicable diseases fact sheet
- Quillian, L., Pager, D., Hexel, O., & Midtbøen, A. H. (2017). Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time. PNAS, 114(41), 10870-10875. DOI
- Quillian, L., Heath, A., Pager, D., Midtbøen, A. H., Fleischmann, F., & Hexel, O. (2019). Do some countries discriminate more than others? Evidence from 97 field experiments of racial discrimination in hiring. Sociological Science, 6, 467-496. Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
- Kline, P., Rose, E. K., & Walters, C. R. (2022). Systemic discrimination among large U.S. employers. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(4), 1963-2036. DOI
- Hsieh, C.-T., Hurst, E., Jones, C. I., & Klenow, P. J. (2019). The allocation of talent and U.S. economic growth. Econometrica, 87(5), 1439-1474. DOI
- World Bank (2026). Women, Business and the Law 2026
- Ginther, D. K., Schaffer, W. T., Schnell, J., Masimore, B., Liu, F., Haak, L. L., & Kington, R. (2011). Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards. Science, 333(6045), 1015-1019. DOI
- Hoppe, T. A., Litovitz, A., Willis, K. A., et al. (2019). Topic choice contributes to the lower rate of NIH awards to African-American/black scientists. Science Advances, 5(10), eaaw7238. DOI
- Taffe, M. A., & Gilpin, N. W. (2021). Racial inequity in grant funding from the US National Institutes of Health. eLife, 10, e65697
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