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The Cobra Effect (Part 2)

When I started this project to learn about unintended consequences, my first post to go viral (top page of Hacker News) was about the Cobra Effect. The Cobra Effect is another name for “perverse results,” or how when we want more (or less) of something, we sometimes instead create the conditions that produce the opposite of our intended outcomes. In that post I took three well-known examples of the cobra effect and invented antidotes for them.

Those well-known Cobra Effect examples all involved animals (cobras, rats, and pigs) and so my antidotes were based around the animals’ reproductive cycles. I made the claim that those animal examples had the solution built into the problem. Readers loved it (creative look at an old topic!) and readers hated it (you can’t stop the Cobra Effect!).

Since the Cobra Effect is a type of unintended consequence that keeps coming up, I decided to write part two. Continue reading “The Cobra Effect (Part 2)”

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Importing Risk and Risky Regulations

After last week’s post I became interested in the way acclimatization societies created unintended consequences from non-native species introduction around the world. Those societies sometimes introduced species without thought to impact on the local environment. More recently, governments developed environmental protection regulations to protect endangered species. These regulations have had Cobra Effect type second-order effects as well. Let’s look at why and what we could do instead. Continue reading “Importing Risk and Risky Regulations”

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Substitutions – The Temperance Movement and Ether

Unintended consequences come about when a change, believed to improve the current situation, actually makes the situation worse. That these changes are often well-meaning only adds to the irony of second-order effects. One source of new problems is the substitutions made when replacing the status quo.

As I’ve started to research famous second-order effects, several of the famous historical claims (like the one that follows) seem to be “just so” stories. The claims are too simplistic. There is just one change and just one result. While these stories make for a memorable explanation, without more detail, we just miseducate ourselves on second-order effects. Continue reading “Substitutions – The Temperance Movement and Ether”

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The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes)

The “cobra effect” is a type of perverse incentive. The effect occurs when a solution actually worsens the problem it is trying to solve. Named for a supposed bounty program that went awry in colonial India, there are many examples of incentives that lead to more of the very thing that should be reduced.

Interestingly, when you search for cobra effect, the other top examples all concern animals — an attempt to decrease the rat population in colonial Hanoi, Vietnam and an attempt to reduce the number of feral pigs in Georgia. This is strange because these animal-related problems all contain the solution within themselves.

If you read about these examples, you’ll learn a bit (and often just a bit) about the history of each time and place. But what you won’t read is how these incentives could have been aligned with their intended outcomes. In this post, I propose some changes that the designers of these incentives could have used so that they might have actually gotten their desired outcomes. Continue reading “The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes)”