Make a list of the world's biggest problems and it quickly gets long: climate change, war, poverty, hunger, disease, pollution, biodiversity loss, housing, inequality, corruption, distrust, polarization, misinformation, loneliness, mental illness, addiction. Each has its own experts, charities and summits.
Look closely, though, and the same causes keep showing up underneath very different problems. Humanity's Checklist names six of them.
How to tell a root cause from a symptom
A symptom is a problem people experience directly. A root cause, which the checklist calls a source, is a system that keeps producing many symptoms at once. A useful root cause passes five tests:
- Shared: it shows up beneath problems that otherwise look unrelated.
- Upstream: changing it changes behavior before problems form.
- Reach: it is a system most people pass through every day.
- Flippable: it can be redirected rather than eliminated.
- Buildable: a small team can start working on it now.
The six root causes
1. The story we tell ourselves. The dominant story is one of decline: we are doomed, divided and powerless. People act out the story they believe, so a culture that expects collapse stops trying to prevent it. This is the deepest root, which is why it sits at the top of the checklist. More on the story.
2. Coordination. The knowledge and money to solve most problems already exist. What fails is getting the right people to act together. Climate change, overfishing and arms races are all coordination failures. More on coordination.
3. Vision. We cannot build a future we cannot see, and the futures we picture most vividly are dystopias. Without a shared picture, there is nothing to coordinate around. More on vision.
4. Attention. Social media is the nervous system of the human superorganism, and it is tuned for outrage because outrage holds attention. Billions of people spend hours a day anxious, divided and passive. More on attention.
5. Status. Status has turned into the worship of money. More than $300 billion a year flows into designer goods while giving struggles for attention. What a culture admires is where its money goes. More on status.
6. Gatekeepers. A few platforms, app stores, algorithms and investors decide what gets built and who gets seen, so most good ideas never ship. More on gatekeepers.
How they connect to the problems
Each world problem sits downstream of several of these sources:
| Problem | Sources that feed it most directly |
|---|---|
| Climate change | Story, coordination, vision |
| Poverty | Story, coordination, status, gatekeepers |
| Polarization | Story, vision, attention |
| Misinformation | Story, attention, gatekeepers |
| Loneliness | Story, coordination, attention |
| Inequality | Story, status, gatekeepers |
Every problem sits beneath the story, because the story shapes how people respond to all of them. These links are working hypotheses, published openly so anyone can challenge them.
Why "greed" and "bad leaders" are not on the list
Two common answers to "what causes the world's problems" are greed and bad leaders. Both are real, but neither works as a starting point. Greed cannot be removed from human nature; status is the version of it that can be redirected. Bad leaders sit downstream of the story people believe and the way they coordinate, and replacing one rarely changes the system that produced them.
Lack of money is not on the list either. In a world that spends more than $300 billion a year on designer goods, the resources exist. They are pointed at the wrong things.
Treating the cause
If these six are the root causes, the most effective response is to work on them directly. That is what Humanity's Checklist proposes: one focused project for each source, and the question of whether $5 million spent there could do more than budgets far larger spent on symptoms.