I am skeptical of the idea of “root causes” and the assumption that progress comes from addressing the roots of problems. The following points draw from discussions in our annual Summer Institutes of Civic Studies and are indebted to my co-teacher, Karol Soltan.

1. The metaphor of a “root” seems misplaced. Social issues are not like plants that have one root system at the bottom and branches and leaves at the top, so that if you cut or move the root, you kill or move the whole plant with a single action. Very often, social phenomena are connected in systems that incorporate feedback loops and cycles, whether virtuous or vicious. It’s possible for one thing (A) to affect another thing (B) and for B also to affect A. Very often, outcomes are not the result of one ultimate cause but of the interaction of many causes. And causes can be viewed as outcomes, because there’s lots of reciprocal causation.
2. Often, successful social action occurs even though the activists don’t know the root cause of a problem or they disagree about what it is. An example is the global movement to end slavery. Religious abolitionists argued that the root cause of slavery was sin, going back to the Fall of Man. “Free labor” abolitionists, like Abraham Lincoln, said that slavery was a plot to undermine a competitive market of labor in which the individual worker could profit. In contrast, Karl Marx wrote in 1847 that slavery was a lynchpin of global capitalism: “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry.” Frederick Douglass saw racism (“the wolfish hate and snobbish pride of race”) as a–or perhaps the–root cause of slavery. I suppose that all of them pointed to genuine causal factors, but the main point is that they formed a coalition that targeted the actual problem, not its underlying causes, and they won.
3. Trying to identify root causes can delay or even block effective action. My friends Joel Westheimer and Joe Kahne wrote a very influential and valuable paper in 2004 entitled “Educating the ‘Good’ Citizen: Political Choices and Pedagogical Goals.”* They found that civic education programs in the US tended to fall into three categories, defined by their objectives for the students. An example illustrates the differences. In a program that aims to produce “personally responsible citizens,” a student will “contribute food to a food drive.” In a program whose ideal is to develop “participatory citizens,” a student will “help to organize a food drive.” In a program that emphasizes “justice-oriented citizens,” the student will “explore why people are hungry and act to solve root causes.” As Karol notes, the first two begin with an action, but the third begins with “exploring,” which doesn’t actually do any good in the world. Now, to be sure, one can also explore a diagram of a complex, interconnected system for a long time before doing anything, so it’s not only root-cause analysis that can fatally delay action. But I think that root-cause analysis is particularly likely to frustrate action because it sends us in search of the biggest, hardest, deepest aspect of a problem, which is exactly where the odds of success may be lowest. And that’s a mistake if problems do not actually have roots.

*Political Science and Politics, April 2004, pp 241-24.

See also Roberto Unger against root causes and roots of crime.