Introduction

Humanity faces a multifaceted crisis impacting global well-being and planetary health. The following analysis aims to illuminate the scope of these challenges and identify their underlying causes through a historical and systemic lens.

 My goal here is to help by:

1. familiarizing readers with the scope of the problems,
2. identifying the root causes,
3. proposing viable solutions for moving forward.

Let's begin with looking at the challenges we face. Take a moment to skim the list below to familiarize yourself with the state of the world today (note: this is not necessarily an exhaustive list).

Challenges we face

Poverty, socioeconomic inequality, & exploitation

• According to Our World In Data, most people in the world live in poverty: 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day, two-thirds live on less than $10 per day.
• The top 1% wealthiest people own approximately half of the world's wealth while the bottom 50% own about 1% of the world's wealth.
• People in wealthy countries consume a grossly disproportionate share of resources than those in poorer countries.
• Even in "rich" countries like the United States, most people live paycheck to paycheck.
• There is massive labor exploitation in many industries, for example in the clothing industry, the chocolate industry, the diamond industry, etc. The reality is that in virtually every situation people can be exploited, they are exploited to some degree or another.
• The vast majority of humanity are wage slaves. Wage slavery is when you are forced to work a job you don't want to because not doing so would mean loss of your ability to take care of yourself or your family. It is a problem for most of humanity, but it is far worse in places where labor is exploited and people are earning a few dollars a day and/or forced to work in deplorable conditions.

Access to basic needs: food, water, healthcare, housing, & education

• 1 in 4 people globally (1.9 billion people) are unable to regularly eat healthy, nutritious diets
• Approximately 9% of people globally experience severe food insecurity — they do not get enough food to meet minimum caloric requirements
• Globally, at least 2 billion people (25% of the world population) use a drinking water source contaminated with faeces.
• By 2025, half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas.
• According to the WHO, 50-66% of people in the world lack access to essential health services.
• Even in developed nations, our healthcare systems remain embarrassingly broken.
• 1 in 3 children globally will not go beyond an elementary school education, while 1/2 will not go beyond middle school.
• Our public education systems continue to be based on archaic learning models, focusing on test-taking and cramming technical knowledge which quickly becomes obsolete while spectacularly failing to provide us actually useful life skills such as critical thinking/reading/listening, communicating effectively, dealing with emotions and stress, or forming and nourishing healthy relationships, to name a few.
• The global housing market continues to be a big problem: rent and housing prices are rising globally with no sign of slowing down.

Environment

• We continue to ignore our climate scientists and devastate the environment through our reckless use of fossil fuels.
• We are polluting, overfishing, and acidifying our oceans.
• We are destroying precious rainforest in exchange for farmland.
• Our farming techniques ultimately sap the land of its fertility and often lead to further damage to our marine resources.
• Air pollution continues to be a major global problem, with outdoor air pollution killing 4.2 million people worldwide every year and indoor air pollution caused by household fuel combustion causes 3.8 million deaths per year.
• 9 out of 10 people worldwide live in places where air quality exceeds WHO guideline limits and it is estimated that air pollution takes an average of 3 years off all our lives.
• The animal agriculture industry represents anywhere from 18% to 51% of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions humans produce each year. This is coupled with other problems such as the grossly inhumane treatment of animals on these farms along with the promotion of disease due to the cramped living environments. See also: "ag-gag" laws.
• In 27 states in the US it is legal to feed pigs trash. Do I really have to say how horrifying this is, both for the pig and humans who ultimately eat them?

Waste

• We continue to generate disgusting amounts of trash that is dumped into landfills or in the ocean.
• According to the United States Department of Agriculture and a 2017 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, anywhere from 30-40% of food in America is wasted.
• According to FoodPrint, this waste costs America approximately $218 billion every year.
• Packaging waste — products that are assumed to be discarded the same year the products they contain are purchased — continues to be a huge problem, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stating that 28.1% of U.S. waste generation comes from packaging.
• The USDA estimates that 30%-40% of food is wasted due to supply chain inefficiencies, over-ordering, leftovers spoiling in people's fridges, etc. When you add up the water, labor, energy and other inputs that are involved in the entire end-to-end process of getting food to the table, it amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Human rights violations

• Slavery and extreme exploitation still exists today, with an estimated 21-45 million people trapped in some form of slavery today, ranging from sex trafficking, forced labor, domestic servitude, bonded labor, child labor, and forced marriage.
• There are numerous types of state-run concentration camps in existence today. They range from outright prison and torture camps, to labor camps, to "re-education" camps. People may think this is only a problem in authoritarian regimes, but even in the United States these things happen.

Crime

• Mass incarceration and systemic racial bias: The US has about 4% of the world's population and yet around 20% of the world's prison population. This is also in part due to the horrible failure that is 'The War on Drugs', in which people (predominantly African Americans) are given prison sentences—sometimes even life in prison—simply for selling marijuana.
• Bail unfairness — it costs money to post bail, so invariably rich people get to walk while poor people stay in jail. In fact, any flat-rate cost levied on citizens is invariably going to be unfair because poorer people will always have a harder time covering the costs, which is a major problem in our current economic system where wealth is extremely unevenly distributed.
• Felony disenfranchisement in the U.S.:  the removal of a person's right to vote after they've been convicted of a felony, even if it's a non-violent drug offense. This might be less of an issue if imprisonment was fair, but the reality is that African Americans are targeted due to systemic racial bias in policing, not to mention there are countless cases where police were found to have planted evidence to secure a conviction.
• For-profit prisons: The fact that there is a financial incentive to incarcerate people makes it so people are unjustly imprisoned for minor offenses, culminating in numerous scandals such as the kids for cash scandal.
• Prison conditions around the world — especially in authoritarian regimes — are horrifying, but even in the United States they are appalling and numerous issues keep coming up regarding the living conditions, the inhumane use of solitary confinement, false imprisonment, among others.
• Sociological research continues to illustrate how the prevailing economic mindset that has shaped our governments and social structures breeds behavioral problems ranging from street crime and violence to mental illness, substance abuse, and suicide. These are the psychological byproducts of a system that focuses everyone so narrowly on themselves and their own interests, one that equates success with wealth rather than well-being, and considers profit above almost everything else — even above the very lives of other people. Put simply, crime is a failure of society to provide people with the support and resources they need to live comfortably and happily.

Government & corruption

• Dictatorships abound: Worldwide, the divide between political parties only seems to be deepening and the threats to our democracies increasing, if we're fortunate enough to live in a democracy at all. According to the 2020 Democracy Index, only 8.4% of the global human population lives in a full democracy, 41% live in flawed democracies, and the rest (50.6% — half the world's population) live in authoritarian or effectively authoritarian ("hybrid") regimes.
• No safeguard against tyranny: Our election systems around the world are structured in such a way that people who clearly have no interest in anyone but themselves can be elected, even as presidents and prime ministers.
• Gerrymandering: In the U.S., this is the entirely anti-democratic practice of drawing voting district boundaries that heavily favor one party or another, effectively nullifying people's votes.
• Patent laws: The mere existence of patents stifles innovation and leads to patent trolling. Patents only exist because our economic system is based on individual profits, not collective well-being. We could create a world in which all inventions are freely shared with everyone, where everyone benefits, but we don't because we're so blindly following the current economic system.
• Lobbying: In its existing form it is essentially legalized corruption, in that people who have wealth have more influence than those who do not. This, sadly, makes countries like the United States more of an oligarchy than a democracy, but the reality is that lobbying is allowed virtually everywhere in the world and always will as long as people can be influenced by money.
• Abuse of power: Police brutality and corruption remain troubling issues all around the world, especially in authoritarian regimes. Currently, The United States is facing a reckoning of its own after a slew of excessive force cases—particularly against African Americans—became widely publicized. These issues are slowly revealing deep, systemic issues and corruption in policing.
• Civil forfeiture abuse in the US. From the ACLU: "Civil forfeiture allows police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime. Owners need not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away permanently by the government. Forfeiture was originally presented as a way to cripple large-scale criminal enterprises by diverting their resources. But today, aided by deeply flawed federal and state laws, many police departments use forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated by profit rather than crime-fighting. For people whose property has been seized through civil asset forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes exceeding the value of the property."

Economics

• We're stuck in the past with regard to how we structure our economies (capitalism) when a collaborative, resource-based approach would prove far more prosperous for humanity. Our leaders continue to debate pointless issues like how to increase taxes or how to combat inflation when money doesn't even need to exist in the first place. Whether people realize it or not, we can easily build a world where everyone is comfortable, happy, and free to pursue their passions without the need for money at all.
• Still about competition rather than cooperation: Globally, our countries remain divided by arbitrary boundaries shaped by historical conflicts and operate largely independently of each other, and in many cases compete with each other, rather working as one and seeing all humanity as one people.

Digital Age Impact on Human Well-being

• The rise of social media, smartphones, and constant connectivity has fundamentally altered how we interact and view ourselves. People increasingly compare themselves to curated online personas, leading to decreased self-esteem and anxiety.
• Children are growing up with reduced face-to-face social skills as screen time replaces physical interaction. 
• The dopamine-driven feedback loops of social media and games create addictive behaviors that can fracture family relationships and hinder emotional development. This is exacerbated by a work culture that normalizes constant digital availability.

Health Crisis

• We're seeing unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout globally. This stems from multiple factors: increasing social isolation, economic pressure, workplace stress, and environmental anxiety.
• The stigma around mental health prevents many from seeking help, while treatment remains inaccessible or unaffordable for most.
• Healthcare systems focus on treating symptoms rather than addressing root causes like trauma, toxic work environments, and societal pressures. Capitalism incentivizes corporations to focus on continuous treatments (keep customers paying for pills) rather than prevention.
• Global healthcare faces multiple converging challenges: antibiotic resistance threatens to make common infections deadly again; chronic diseases are rising due to lifestyle factors; healthcare workers are burning out from overwork and emotional strain.
• New medical technologies widen the gap between those who can afford cutting-edge care and those who cannot.
• The aging population in many places strains healthcare resources, especially in developed countries where the birth rate has fallen so low that.
• There is considerable evidence that excessive sugar is harmful to human health, and the current scientific recommendation is less than 5% of energy intake (25g or less for the average adult). Even the World Health Organization acknowledges this amount is "a sensible long-term health policy goal." And yet, food labels in the U.S. still recommend twice the amount of sugar because the sugar industry bribes politicians to prevent the labels from being updated to reflect our more modern understanding of human health, all so they can make money, even at the cost of people's health.
• Microplastics are everywhere and they are probably slowly killing us. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]

Breakdown of Community and Family Structures

• Traditional support systems are eroding as economic pressures force longer working hours and geographic mobility separates extended families.
• Parents struggle to balance work and childcare, leading to attachment issues, developmental challenges for children, and the reinforcement of intergenerational trauma.
• Community spaces and opportunities for social connection are disappearing, replaced by isolated living arrangements and online interaction.

Population Demographics and Urbanization

• Developed nations face challenges of aging populations and declining birth rates, straining pension and healthcare systems.
• Meanwhile, developing nations struggle with rapid population growth that outpaces infrastructure development.
• Mass migration to cities creates megacities with inadequate housing and services, while rural areas face decline and loss of essential services.
• Brain drain compounds these problems as educated workers leave developing regions for better opportunities elsewhere.

Why these problems are occurring

When we take a step back and view these challenges from a big-picture, systems perspective, it's possible to identify the root causes. It's important to do this because otherwise we risk treating symptoms rather than the underlying disease, leading to ineffective or even counterproductive interventions that fail to address the fundamental drivers of our problems (or worse, we may inadvertently create new ones).

While each problem listed above has its own specific context and contributing factors, a systems analysis strongly suggests that the fundamental structure of our global economic paradigm, the values and incentives it promotes, and the failures of our governance systems to manage its consequences and uphold collective well-being, form a core nexus of root causes driving the majority of these persistent global challenges.

Economic System Limitations

The global economic system, while producing unprecedented material wealth and innovation, contains structural features that contribute to many identified challenges:

• Growth imperatives can conflict with ecological boundaries and resource constraints
• Market mechanisms effectively allocate many goods but may fail to address public goods, negative externalities, and basic needs
• Short-term financial incentives often override long-term considerations
• Economic power concentration can translate into political influence
• Globalization has created winners and losers both between and within countries

Values and Incentive Structures

Prevailing cultural and economic values often emphasize:

• Individual material success over collective well-being
• Competition over cooperation in many contexts
• Short-term gains over long-term sustainability
• Consumption as a primary source of status and fulfillment

Governance and Social Structure Inadequacies

Political and social systems often struggle to:

• Represent diverse interests equitably in decision-making
• Address complex, long-term challenges effectively
• Maintain independence from concentrated economic power
• Coordinate action across national boundaries on global issues
• Adapt rapidly to technological and environmental changes
• Provide adequate social safety nets as traditional community structures evolve

These root causes are deeply interconnected. The economic system shapes values and creates powerful interests that capture governance structures. Misaligned values prevent the collective will needed to reform the system or demand better governance. Governance failures allow the negative aspects of the economic system and misaligned values to run rampant.

For a more in-depth analysis and explanation of these causes, continue reading Causes, or skip forward to my piece on Solutions.