Ranking Humanity's Problems by Tractability, Not Severity

Here is an exercise I find more useful than the usual one. Instead of listing humanity's biggest problems by how bad they are, rank them by whether there is any realistic chance of solving them.

Candidates: religion — or more generally, disconnection from reality; the evils of hierarchy; the evils of money; the problem of coordinating humanity in one direction; division into nations; inequality.

Why Tractability Rather Than Severity

Because prediction here is very hard, and the cost of guessing wrong is enormous.

Look at the last thirty years. Gay marriage was resolved in about a decade, far faster than anyone forecast. Marijuana prohibition is going the same way. Nobody predicted which questions would yield and which would still be standing in a century.

And the cost of misjudging this is not merely wasted effort. People have spent themselves entirely on problems far above their pay grade without making a dent. Socialism and communism attacked inequality on the assumption that a government committed to abolishing it would be sufficient. Inequality turned out to be far deeper than the analysis allowed, it is still here, and it is worsening.

So the ranking matters because we might be fighting the wrong problem. Even the attempt to rank may tell us something about how hard these things really are.

The Claim: Religion Is the Most Tractable

This surprises people, since religion looks like the most entrenched thing on the list. Two grounds.

First, there are existence proofs. Scandinavia is essentially non-religious. Whatever difficulties there are in getting from a religious society to a secular one, the destination demonstrably exists and is habitable. That is more than can be said for most items here.

Second, the trend is already established. The last few centuries have steadily eroded religion's authority. In many countries it no longer sets policy, no longer controls education, and no longer determines what may be published. We are not proposing to start this process; we are proposing to continue one already well underway.

By Comparison

Hierarchy. No human society has ever lacked them, and their pyramid structure works structurally against the interests of the lower levels. That conflict looks permanent. (I have since argued that biology undercuts this — cells and ant colonies coordinate without command structures, which means the universality of hierarchy is a fact about humans rather than about coordination. That makes hierarchy more tractable than I judged here, though it does not tell us how.)

Money. No society has ever lacked it either. It will continue to serve as an incentive for good and for harm, and I see no plausible route to changing that. This one I still rank as intractable.

Politics. Closely related to hierarchy, and controlled by money and power. It does not look soluble without radically changing the system of government — but here there is an opening, because some countries and some US states practise direct democracy, which addresses part of the evil of political hierarchy. Like religion, it has working examples.

The Conclusion

Religion and the reform of political hierarchy look soluble, because both have existence proofs. Hierarchy in general and money in general do not.

The general principle I take from the exercise: an existence proof is worth more than an argument. A problem that has been solved somewhere, even once, even partially, is in a different category from one that has never been solved anywhere. Not because the solution transfers — it usually does not — but because you know the target is reachable, and you are debating route rather than possibility.

That is a much better basis for allocating effort than severity, which tells you what you would like to fix rather than what you can.