We tend to think of self-esteem as being a root cause of problems, and it’s deeply embedded in the way we think about lots of things, for example it was a common assumption that obese children suffered from low—esteem, that violent acts, teen pregnancy and crime were caused by people who had low self-esteem, that low self-esteem sat at the heart of addiction. Public policies have been developed based on this simplistic premise, and many more books have been written on ways to boost or improve self-esteem because it was thought this was a problem that should be solved.