Everywhere, it seems, we are urged to “address the root causes” of our problems. The phrase “root causes” is novel; until the 1970s, writers of American books, newspapers, and academic journals almost never mentioned “root causes.” And then they did–at an accelerating pace, right up to the present.[1]
So we now read that we need “community programs to address the root causes of violence [in New York City subways]”; that a progressive district attorney should not be blamed for a jump in crime, because “to prevent crime you have to address the root causes of crime,’ such as unemployment”; and “that we need to “address the root causes of migration—violence and insecurity, poverty, pervasive corruption, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and the impacts of climate change.”
Ivory-tower academics like me love looking for root causes. My own Made in America claims that we can best understand current American culture by finding its roots in American culture 300 years ago. But, if our concern is dealing with today’s problems today, addressing root causes is too often an unhelpful and distracting tactic. This post goes on to explain why.
(Two notes: (1) Matt Yglesias recently had a related column: “Ask how to solve problems, not why they happened”; and (2) there is apparently a specific procedure in engineering and technical operations called “Root Cause Analysis,” which I am not discussing here.)