It's hard to solve problems in a society devoted to pretending they don't exist. The biggest problem we have today is that "we" pretend that there are no problems.
Denialism can't be 'fixed'. It fixes itself.
Getting past denialism, here is a concise list of root causes of collapse, as brief as possible, and borrowing heavily from Paul Kennedy's:
"The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"
In other words, these are all of the MASSIVE issues that are being denied right now...
Hubris: 'exceptionalism', denial, laziness, complacency
Moral decay: greed, materialism, gluttony, nihilism, hedonism, cynicism, narcissism
Lack of competitiveness: Recurring trade deficits, outsourcing, industrial arbitrage
Rent-seeking: excessive speculation, excessive laws, lawyers, regulations, lobbying
Complexity/sclerosis/stagnation: intractable bureaucracy, incompetence
Depletion of the treasury: borrowing for consumption versus investment
Currency debasement: Monetizing debt, printing money
Financial engineering: Derivatives and Ponzi Finance as substitute for real economy
Strategic overreach: Troops in 145 countries, war mongering, serial blunders
Resource/energy depletion: Buying oil from terror sponsors, fracking, environmental degradation
Consumption over investment: Consuming the future via stock buybacks and special dividends
Propaganda/spectacle: Faux News, reality TV
For those who still believe in Macroeconomic policy here is how today's asinine policies deviate from the prescribed implementations.
This shows the magnitude of incompetence inherent to today's thought dealers:
We need not expect "responsible" application of policy, because the concept of responsibility no longer exists.
Only collapse and reset can break rampant denialism.