This. In keeping with Gates' philosophy, when working effectively with non-governmental levels of capital it's critical to make sure you leverage as much as pos

This. In keeping with Gates' philosophy, when working effectively with non-governmental levels of capital it's critical to make sure you leverage as much as possible to effect real change. Things that play out across a long timespan (relative to a human lifespan) are an excellent opportunity to accomplish that. Education: We've had teacher-run schools. We've more recently had test/metric run schools. Let's (in the US) finally try and effectively fuse those two into better outcomes per dollar for kids in public schools. My personal pet peeve: develop a modeling technique that predicts an "average" educational outcome for a student given his or her family's socioeconomic status and other inputs. Then at least we have a basis for a fair measure of teacher success -- no teacher can turn every child who grows up without a single book in the home into Albert Einstein or Marie Curie. Economics: Post-scarcity minimum / basic income, as mentioned. Democracy: Follow on and unify the various open-* voter information efforts (example: http://votesmart.org/ http://votesmart.org/ ) and find the best and most unbiased way to communicate that. Democracy only works with an informed electorate, and we can do much better than throwing our hands up and letting the most ad buys have the strongest influence. Nutrition: There's a huge amount of bogus advice out there. Synthesizing this into actionable, individualized suggestions and helping people eat healthier by unifying food and recipes with budget. Eating healthier for one day does you no great help -- eating slightly better for your entire life does.