What Do You Dream About?

Ultimate vs Proximate Causation

When a disaster or tragedy occurs, the first question is typically “why?”. During an emotional time immediately following a tragedy, we look for the immediate cause of an accident or catastrophe and in that heady time extrapolate this hypothesis backwards instead of coolly researching further and deeper. Too often we blame the proximate cause of an undesirable event and focus our attention on it than look deeper to the ultimate cause. The effect is a system of expensive band-aids that alleviate symptoms but don’t address the cause.

A high-visibility case in point is the state of health in our nation. Diabetes and heart disease are becoming top-ranked killers in the United States. We spent $174,000,000,000 in treating diagnosed Diabetes in 2007. There is massive research in place and wonderful foundations addressing the Diabetes epidemic. Exotic diabetes drugs are being put to market to combat the complications of Diabetes, but little exposure is given to the ultimate cause of Diabetes. When we say Diabetes we implicitly are talking about type-2 Diabetes, formerly known as adult onset Diabetes, and 80% of these cases are preventable.

How? By taking better care of ourselves. By making smarter choices in diet and taking more time to exercise. If just $17,400,000,000 (10% of above) were shunted into food education and healthy food subsidization, parks and path development, and exercise initiatives, the remaining 90% would begin to dwindle. Since that money can already be considered spent as a cost-benefit, this would allow more funds to be released to promoting a health lifestyle or we could simply pocket the savings.

Unfortunately it appears to be human nature to focus on proximate causes than dig deeper and answer the tougher questions that usually have an answer that requires self-discipline and accountability. Ironically the same people who tout such personal qualities as the core of the American values would balk at funneling money into said programs. Similarly, people isolate themselves from the problems of others and then proclaim that these problems do not exist.

Beyond preventable diseases being treated by researching and developing medicine that address the symptom and not the cause, the pattern of addressing proximate causes over ultimate causes can be found everywhere. The sub-prime mortgage crash, the Afghanistan war, cyclical and generational poverty, the education crisis, the list goes on.

In Collapse by Jared Diamond, he discusses the ultimate vs proximate causation of the collapse of entire civilizations from Easter Island to the Anasazi to the Soviet Union and Rwanda. While there is variation within the proximate causes of the collapse of these societies, it turns out that the ultimate causes fall within just a few subsets of myopic decisions which almost always are attributable to exploitation of local resources. Had small adjustments in consumption and expansion been made early-on, the savings would snowball and create a sustainable society. Unfortunately at the end, even right before the dramatic collapse, the society seemed robust and continuing to expand. It requires decisions where the benefits are not immediately, or seemingly ever, realized.

This is the dilemma we face. Adjusting our behavior when we can’t see why. Seeing a good thing and not taking all of it. Knowing a bad thing and fixing its root causes instead of alleviating the pain. That is how we survive and thrive.