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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Landscape Analysis of Institutional Improvement Opportunities, published by IanDavidMoss on March 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary The Effective Institutions Project is a global working group that seeks out and incubates high-impact strategies to improve institutional decision-making around the world. Over the past several months, we conducted a landscape analysis to identify which of the world’s institutions (e.g., prominent government agencies, corporations, NGOs, etc.) offer the highest-leverage opportunities for philanthropists and professionals seeking to improve world outcomes over the next 10-100 years. Methodology To build a short list of important institutions to prioritize for deeper analysis, we combined existing lists of the world’s top private foundations, employers, universities, etc; assessed which institutional affiliations appeared most often among the members of global commissions convened over the past five years; and solicited nominations of important institutions from 30 global experts representing a range of fields, geographies, and professional networks. Next, we conducted research and developed 3-5-page profiles on 41 institutions. Each profile covered the institution’s organizational structure, expected or hypothetical impact on people’s lives in both typical and extreme scenarios, future trajectory, and capacity for change. Finally, we built a quantitative model to gauge the potential benefits of engaging with each of these 41 organizations by way of a hypothetical large, well-designed philanthropic investment. The model provided a rough estimate for the impact that an investment of this nature might have on two outcomes of interest: 1) global wellbeing-adjusted life-years over the next 10 years and 2) reducing the probability of existential risks over the next 100 years. The analysis takes into account the feasibility of influencing each institution and the likelihood that equivalent improvements would be implemented in the time frame anyway. Key Findings Our analysis suggests that opportunities to drive better world outcomes by improving institutional decision-making are relatively concentrated among a small number of organizations. This finding holds across both of our outcomes of interest, and the top-ranked institutions turned out to be largely the same in each analysis. Our list of top institutions features heavy representation from tech companies and US government bodies, six of which ranked among the top ten in both our 10-year and 100-year analyses: Amazon DeepMind Meta (formerly Facebook) OpenAI The Executive Office of the US President The US National Security Council. Additional top-ranked institutions from a near-term perspective included Google and the World Health Organization. Additional top-ranked institutions from a long-term perspective included Alphabet, the European Union, and the US Congress. Finally, we assessed that Chinese citizens and organizations may have opportunities to improve world outcomes via engagement with the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and China’s State Council on certain non-politicized issues. Our extremely rough, please-don’t-take-these-numbers-literally estimate is that an investment of $100 million a year focused on well-designed strategies in this arena would be worth the equivalent of saving 4-30 million lives (20-200x as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities) over the course of a decade, or eliminate as much as one-tenth of total existential risk from all sources over the course of a century. Conclusions and Next Steps This article is a first attempt to answer a research question of vast complexity conducted with very limited resources (about 250-300 hours of effort in total across all parties). All conclusions put forward here should therefore be regarded as t...