Earlier this year, Nan Ransohoff, head of Public Goods at Stripe, published a viral blog post about the coming third wave of American philanthropy. She estimated that wealth associated with frontier AI companies could lead to more than $37 billion in new philanthropy each year. At current valuations, that figure would be even higher.
The expected surge of funding has led to concern in some quarters that there is nowhere for this money to go — and that donors who care about effective giving will have trouble finding good places to donate. There are a couple aspects to this worry: that institutions don’t yet exist at sufficient scale to spend this money; and that, even if they did, there just aren’t enough cost-effective ways to do so.
We agree that a diverse set of funders and implementers will need to scale to enable the best use of new resources. But we think it’s important to remember that these potential flows remain small compared to the scale of tractable problems in the world.
In fact, we think this wave could be spent well many times over. While scale-up will take time in some areas, others — like global health — can deploy resources quickly. Even where institutions must grow or new ones will need to be created, early funding commitments can give them the runway to do so rapidly and efficiently. Below we’ve pulled together examples of how additional funding could be spent well at a far larger scale than we or others are expecting. While far from “tapping out” the good philanthropic opportunities in the world, these new flows could make a real dent in the world’s most pressing problems.
This list, of course, is far from exhaustive and is just a rough sample of good things philanthropy could do that happened to already be on our (limited) radar. We think of it as illustrative and wouldn’t want to confidently stand behind every cell here being correct. In the aggregate, we think these would cost nearly $610 billion per year — more than 15x what Nan’s blog post anticipates, nearly equivalent to all U.S. philanthropy today, but still only half a percent of nominal world output.
Max Roser of Our World in Data wrote a post in 2018 that we all love, titled “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.” We think about the prospect of increased giving in a similar way: the third wave is big; the third wave is small; there’s a lot the third wave can do.
Here are some ideas for problems philanthropy could help meaningfully address, with coarse estimates of the resources needed:
The list may seem daunting, but it’s long because the world is a big place with lots of challenges. This year, some 4.5 million kids will die before they turn five; roughly 23 billion land animals will live in factory farms at any time; and AI capital expenditures will outstrip safety spending by over a hundred times.
Progress is possible, however, and philanthropy can be part of the story. In 2010, around 827,000 people died of malaria; by 2023 that number had fallen almost 20% despite rapid population growth in exposed areas, as insecticide-treated bednets and other solutions were scaled up, in part through philanthropic funding. In 2014, only 6% of U.S. layer hens were cage-free; in 2024 it was more than 40%, after a sustained pressure campaign. And as the risks of AI become more evident, they’re now openly discussed by the U.S. and Chinese governments, the UN, and even the pope — marking a big shift from being seen as a niche and esoteric concern when we first started getting involved in 2015.
There are some practical near-term barriers to scaling up quickly, of course. It takes time to hire staff, develop more ambitious plans, and execute new programs. But we don’t think donors should worry that the social returns on new funding will fall off a cliff.
To illustrate this, consider a basket of global health spending focused on tackling the largest disease burdens in low- and middle-income countries: essential nutrition, childhood vaccines, and proven prevention and treatment tools for malaria, TB, and HIV. Major funders in these areas spend about $18 billion annually today, and based on their own estimates are saving nearly 3 million lives each year. They also think there’s much more to do, and have developed detailed plans for deploying more resources, like the Global Plan to End TB and the Immunization Agenda 2030. Nan’s estimate of new philanthropy — $37 billion a year — if all directed to global health could come close to fully funding these five plans, which total about $42 billion annually. A crude estimate based on the modeling in these plans, with some adjustment for likely over-optimism, is that funding them could save more than 2 million additional lives each year.
This scale of impact is broadly consistent with our expectation for declining marginal returns: as health funding scales, we expect the cost of saving a life to get higher, but not dramatically so. In 2021, we wrote a post about how we thought GiveWell’s opportunity set would change with scale. At the time, we very roughly modeled a doubling of expected funding as reducing marginal cost-effectiveness by about one-quarter. When we try to extrapolate to bigger changes in funding levels on today’s margin, our rough best guess would be that each doubling of spending reduces marginal cost-effectiveness by a bit more than one-third, and a conservative estimate would be that doubling spending halves marginal cost-effectiveness.
There are some practical near-term barriers to scaling up quickly, of course. It takes time to hire staff, develop more ambitious plans, and execute new programs. But we don’t think donors should worry that the social returns on new funding will fall off a cliff.
So, we expect that even if the third wave was as big as Nan’s base estimate and it all went to global health, additional funding could still save a life for perhaps 2-3x today’s cost. At our 2021 estimate of diminishing returns, the whole third wave going to global health could save ~2.6 million lives a year; at our current estimate, ~2.2 million lives; and with a more conservative bound we project saving ~1.8 million lives annually.
So if the third wave were all directed to global health, it could save many tens of millions of lives over the coming decades. And as philanthropy scales, yes, marginal cost-effectiveness will decline, but steadily rather than sharply, and it will remain outstanding in objective terms.
The size of these problems — and the cost of addressing them — can make anyone feel insignificant. Even for the world’s wealthiest people, fully addressing even one of the highest-priority or most fixable problems often requires more than their entire net worth, which is a major motivator for our model of charitable funds with multiple major donors.
But looking at these challenges in a large table also underplays the value of incremental progress. All of us are donors to GiveWell, who identify highly cost-effective opportunities for individual donors — and estimate that they can, very roughly, save a life for $3,500-5,500 through supporting one of their top charities.
Beyond GiveWell, there are several items on our list for which giving can scale incrementally today, including through organizations like GiveDirectly, Gavi, the Global Fund, the Animal Welfare Fund, Longview, and others. Whether someone is giving $100, $1,000, $1 million, or $1 billion, there are good ways to spend that money right now.
Yet there are other challenges for which we need dramatically scaled-up or even entirely new institutions to absorb an influx of new philanthropy. Scaling programs to eventually spend $100 billion per year or more, if the third wave gets that big — equivalent to more than 10 Gates Foundations — would take time and demand careful attention to cost-effectiveness. And this problem may be particularly acute for AI safety, where a lot of third-wave donors may focus and the existing infrastructure is smaller and newer. But part of the promise of the third wave is the opportunity to build infrastructure that can solve problems that aren’t easy for donors to address — similar to the creation of Gavi and the Global Fund a generation ago. (And both could still use more resources today; Gavi came $2.5 billion short of its 2025 replenishment target, with opportunities to scale well above that.)
Part of the promise of the third wave is the opportunity to build infrastructure that can solve problems that aren’t easy for donors to address — similar to the creation of Gavi and the Global Fund a generation ago.
We’re already trying to address a small piece of this. Our closest funding partner, Good Ventures, has dramatically expanded their giving this year — with one explicit goal being to help scale up cost-effective organizations and initiatives, so that good projects are shovel-ready when a third wave lands. In 2025 we deployed more than $1 billion for the first time in our history, and in 2026 we expect to at least triple that. This includes some big new efforts: We’re seeking proposals for new or scalable funds tackling important, underfunded problems in global health and wellbeing and we put out a call for ambitious AI safety initiatives.
But this is a massive project. Donors, funders, and implementers can and should all think in new ways about, not just what the next dollar can most effectively achieve, but what the next $100 billion (or more) can unlock that didn’t seem possible before.
With thanks to Abbey Chaver, Matt Clancy, Amanda Glassman, Ben Goldhaber, Martin Gould, Darius Meissner, Tanae Rao, Adin Richards, Christian Ruhl, Jason Schukraft, James Snowden, Elbert Ventura, Hannah Yang, and other CG colleagues for input, plus anonymous external reviewers.