Why massive problems are easier to solve

From Global Crises to Moonshot Solutions: The Power of Data and Collaboration

April 20, 2026 /Mpelembe Media/ — The provided materials center on how humanity can successfully tackle its most intractable global challenges by combining “moonshot” innovation, empirical data, and collaborative action.

Here is a summary of the core themes:

Moonshot Philanthropy and 10x Thinking: Championed by leaders like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and organizations like Google’s “Moonshot Factory” (X), this philosophy argues that solving massive, historic challenges is often easier than fixing small ones because grand visions attract superior talent, urgency, and capital. This approach relies on aiming for transformative 10x impacts rather than incremental 10% gains, actively pursuing high-risk/high-reward philanthropic investments, attacking the hardest problems first, and celebrating quick failures to rapidly iterate toward breakthroughs.

Empirical Evidence and Overcoming Fatalism: Organizations like Our World in Data (OWID), founded by Max Roser, use long-term global statistics to fight the “despondency trap”—the paralyzing societal belief that massive problems are worsening and positive change is impossible. By making data on historical improvements in extreme poverty, child mortality, disease, and living standards accessible, OWID proves that human progress is achievable. This data-driven optimism guides resources toward highly effective interventions and charities, empowering policymakers and individuals to make informed decisions.

Global Crisis Response and Collaborative Intelligence: The synthesis of ambitious goals and rigorous data is crucial during emergencies. Examples include the accelerated public-private “moonshot” funding of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, and the massive, volunteer-driven efforts by OWID and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) to aggregate messy, decentralized pandemic data into reliable global databases. Furthermore, grassroots educational initiatives like the Climate Fresk and Earth System Fresco demonstrate how collaborative, gamified workshops can empower the public to understand these complex scientific challenges and mobilize climate action.

Why Big Problems Are Actually Easier to Solve: 5 Impactful Lessons from the Data Frontier

1. The Curiosity of the “Despondency Trap”

We are currently caught in a cycle of “passive fatalism”—a psychological state where the sheer magnitude of global challenges leads to paralysis rather than participation. Despite living in an era of unprecedented data access, a majority of the public believes the world is stagnant or actively decaying. This is the “despondency trap”: a “passion deficit” where we assume that because a problem is terrifying, it must be insurmountable.The metrics of our world can indeed feel like a list of horrors. Every year, 300,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes. In the last decade alone, we deforested 47 million hectares—an area the size of Sweden. Each year, 5 million children die before their fifth birthday. Confronted with these figures, the human mind often defaults to a sense of hopeless resignation. However, empirical reality suggests a counter-intuitive alternative. By embracing “Moonshot” thinking—what I call the Brin Hypothesis—we find that the most massive challenges are often the most solvable. Why do we feel so hopeless when the data proves we are living through a period of historic, albeit incomplete, progress?

2. The Brin Paradox: The Gravitational Pull of 10x Thinking

Google co-founder Sergey Brin offers a philosophy that upends traditional management theory:”Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.”This paradox is rooted in the mechanics of human ambition and the strategic allocation of capital. “Incremental Problems”—those seeking a mere 10% gain—rarely ignite the imagination. They are the domain of generalists and lower-level staff, perpetually restricted by short-term ROI and internal budgets. They lack “passion-driven solutions” because they don’t offer the intellectual or moral stakes required to mobilize elite talent.In contrast, “Moonshot Problems” (seeking 10x gains) act as a primary catalyst for mobilizing elite human and creative capital. A massive challenge creates a gravitational pull. It attracts top-tier experts who seek a meaningful technical creative outlet and opens the floodgates for venture capital and large-scale philanthropy. While a mundane logistical bottleneck may linger for years because no one cares enough to fix it, world-changing issues create an urgency that discourages temporary “patches” and demands transformative breakthroughs.

3. The PDF Penalty: Why Agility Trumps Institutional Bureaucracy

The pandemic laid bare a technological and ethical farce: global institutions paralyzed by the “PDF Penalty.” While the World Health Organization (WHO) and national governments struggled with legacy systems, a lean team of six at Our World in Data (OWID) became the primary global source for COVID-19 statistics.This wasn’t just a technical glitch; it was a moral failure. When data is buried in inconsistent, unreadable PDFs rather than accessible spreadsheets, only wealthy nations with the resources to “scrape” that data can act on it. Institutional incompetence became a barrier to global equity. Max Roser, the founder of OWID, described the early days of the outbreak as an “archaeological dig,” where his team had to dictate numbers from PDFs manually while colleagues typed them into spreadsheets. The frustration was visceral:”The real story was the growth rate. That’s the key thing that you have to know in an outbreak of an infectious disease, and the focus wasn’t on the growth rate. And I was going mad. I just couldn’t believe how poor this reporting was.”By prioritizing transparency over bureaucracy, OWID mobilized 1,500 citizen scientists to track policy measures across 180 countries. They proved that in a crisis, a small, agile team focused on data accessibility can outperform global institutions with billion-dollar budgets.

4. The “Improving Mentality”: Why Success is the Only Engine for Change

To solve a problem, one must first believe that progress is not just a dream, but a prerequisite. This “improving mentality” is suppressed by a culture that romanticizes the past or fixates on dystopian futures. We must bridge the “Perception Gap”: for example, while 72% of the global population supports climate action policies, the public consistently underestimates this collective will. For leaders, this gap is not just a curious fact—it is a strategic opportunity to mobilize a hidden majority.Progress is the only evidence that agency works. Consider the following contrasts between historical baselines and our current trajectory:

Terrorizing Problem: Extreme poverty was the default condition for over 90% of humanity from 1800–1950. vs. Recent Progress: That figure has fallen to less than 10% today.

Terrorizing Problem: In 1980, adult literacy was a mere 56% globally. vs. Recent Progress: Today, 87% of the world’s adults can read and write.

Terrorizing Problem: Child mortality rates were over 20% globally as late as 1950. vs. Recent Progress: The global average fell to 3.8% by 2021.Identifying a problem is not a cause for despair; it is an opportunity to apply the same mechanisms that have already saved hundreds of millions of lives.

5. Moonshot Philanthropy: Navigating the 100x Efficiency Gap

The Effective Altruism (EA) movement applies Moonshot logic to the social impact sector, arguing that an “Extraordinary Charity” is not just slightly better than average—it can be 100 times more effective. This is Moonshot Philanthropy: the high-risk, high-reward investment in radical breakthroughs.Central to this model is the “Moonshot Factory” strategy of attacking the hardest part of the problem first—the “monkey” rather than the “pedestal.” In the X methodology, you don’t waste time building a pedestal for a monkey you haven’t yet trained to speak. You tackle the hardest, most likely-to-fail component immediately. If you can’t train the monkey, you “fail fast” and pivot.The data supports this audacity. Distributing insecticide-treated bed nets costs roughly €200 per year of life saved. This intervention helped halve the malaria death toll in just 15 years. However, a Data Ethicist must note the discrepancies that demand our attention: while the WHO estimates 300,000 annual malaria deaths among children, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates closer to 400,000. High-quality data is the difference between a minor intervention and a total eradication strategy.We saw this same logic in Operation Warp Speed. By injecting $10 billion to $18 billion into a public-private partnership, the U.S. accelerated mRNA technology that had been in development since 1989. That moonshot didn’t just fight COVID-19; it provided a platform to attack cancer, HIV, and malaria.

6. Conclusion: The Architecture of Future Ambition

The synthesis of Sergey Brin’s ambition and Our World in Data’s empirical rigor creates a robust architecture for the future. We must maintain a three-part truth: The world is awful, the world is better, and the world can be much better. Progress is never inevitable; it is a choice sustained by human agency and the refusal to accept the “PDF Penalty” of institutional life. The “big problems” of our time—climate change, future pandemics, and global inequality—are daunting precisely because they are the only things capable of inspiring the next historic breakthrough. As you look toward the next decade, ask yourself: How will you choose to use your energy and resources to contribute to the next global moonshot?