The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people, and especially of governments, always have effects that are unanticipated or “unintended.” We live in a world that is a complex system with interconnections we do not know, can’t or have not yet imagined, or as the American naturalist John Muir offered: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
A well-known example is when the British government in India offered financial rewards for people who killed and turned in cobras. People, reacting to incentives, began breeding the snakes. Once the reward program was scrapped, the population of cobras in India rose as people released the ones they had raised. This event gave birth to the term “the cobra effect” which describes an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers. In other words, an unintended consequence.
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