Every action causes a reaction. Many reactions/consequences are counter productive and make the problem worse.
Every action causes a reaction. Some reactions are pleasant surprises, many are negatives, some are counter productive (perverse) and make the problem worse. Since consequences matter more than intentions, we have a social obligation to plan for them (and avoid them).
We can fix X by just doing Y, it's simple, just throw money at it. What could go wrong? The left always has the best of intentions, and ignores what the road to hell is paved with.
Historically there are more failures of big-government than successes, and every action has a reaction. Progressives look for all the good that one of their things might do, without considering any of the bad or how people might adapt. Otherwise, the wouldn't be progressive but thoughtful conservatives.
🗒️ Note:
Unintended Consequences - Economics and progressive activism are in direct contradiction with each other. Economics is looking for the unseen and unintended. Doing so would hamper being a champion of the next big-government cure for what ails us: and leftism would go extinct. Thus ignorance (denial) is a survival mechanism for the left.
The phrase "unintended consequences" is used as either a wry warning against the hubristic belief that humans can control the world around them, or more often against a really bad implementation of not-so-smart ideas or implementations.
Even if you weigh the value of these issues differently than I do (and many will), all responsible adults should accept responsibility for their own actions (and policies). Thus they need to accept responsibility for all negative consequences as well as positive ones: under the old adage, "you break it, you bought it!" And that means they need to honestly dissect all the potential failures in advance and honestly listen to all criticisms in advance, or be irresponsible douchebags that hurt people for sake of their own egos. Remember, if you created the actions, you’re responsible for the benefit AND THE HARM that comes from them. And the more you failed to use your brains, and think/listen in advance (or avoid corrective action during the execution), then the more responsibility you bear for negative outcomes.
And the American sociologist Robert K. Merton, repopularized the term in his 1936 paper, "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action”.
Even Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect” (another way of saying, “shut up and think it through”).
The rules come in many flavors:
Blowback, Intelligence agencies use their own jargon for unintended consequences called "blowback", where doing one thing, results in another, which may be worse that the original problem. [1]
Cobra Effect, after the disastrous outcome in Colonial India. There were too many poisonous snakes, so the Brits offered a bounty on them. So people started breeding them for bounty. The government cancelled the bounty, and the cobras were set free: increasing the total population. [2]
Campbell's law, "The more any social indicator is used for decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor".[3]
Goodhart's law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[4]
Lucas critique, was a brilliant proof showing why Keynesianism always fails. Because, 'any change in policy will systematically alter the structure of econometric models that the decision was based on' -- thus the models are always wrong. [5]
A pre-mortem is where you say, “this project was a disaster, now what went wrong and how do we fix it?” (Before you've done anything). Then you prophylactically fix all the problems you can think of, before you've done anything else. It doesn't stop the completely unexpected, but it does reduces the count, builds contingencies, and lets more voices be heard up-front (buy-in).
Historically, we used to celebrate the wise old cynics, that would shoot holes in our well intentioned but bad ideas, and save us from ourselves. The wise know it’s much less costly and harmful to strangle a bad idea in its infancy, than to let the mothra hatch and burn down Tokyo. But hope and change flips common sense on it's head: and leftism preys on the starry eye'd optimistic youth, over craggily wizened experience... and most leftist political promises are met with the wide eye'd enthusiasm that complete ignorance about past mistakes brings. But who are you going to believe? The experienced cynics with historical perspective, or Generation Twitter: those that don't have an attention span beyond 140 characters? Only if you care about people (and not hurting them), will you listen to former and try to think through the consequences before causing them.
Here are a few examples:
1990 Yacht Tax - Democrats in Congress passed a "fair share" luxury tax (30%) on airplanes, cars and yachts (as part of an Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990), and promised it would bring in $9B over the next 5 years. What actually happened is it killed industries, lost thousands of jobs, and net taxes raised were negative.
55 MPH Speed Limit - The federally mandated 55 MPH speed limit failed at every goal. It saved 1/4th the oil promised ($350M), but it cost $3.65B in enforcement. We went from 70% speed limits compliance to 90% non-compliance. Accidents and fatalities were flat, but declined when we raised speed limits later. Bitter legal/constitutional fights wasted $ millions and decades of court time.
Airbags - Safety devices (airbags) help more than hurt (usually). But they do hurt/kill. Who decides if you should pay for them? Here's an alleged victim of airbags who had her feet on the dash when it went off.
BMI - BMI (Body Mass Index) doesn't differentiate between muscle and fat. A moronic weight to height ratio tells little about health or fitness, and flags many athletes as obese. But it was used by leftist politicians to talk about our overweight crisis and try to beg up money and power to fix it (e.g. control the population under a false premise).
Bad Predictions - People are resistant to change, and progressives want change -- so in order to get change, they need to sensationalize problems and paint a utopic picture of what the solutions will be like if you do what they want, and disaster if you don't. Whereas conservatives want lesser change, so don't need to hype problems and can be skeptical (moderate) about solutions.
California Wildfires - Progressive blame everything but their policies for everything, thus California blames Global Warming for their much larger fires of late... it has nothing to do with their environmental policies around forest management (stopping logging, firebreaks, and thinning/grooming). If you could reason with progressives (or logic worked), they'd already be rational moderates .
Carpool lanes - These monstrosities cost California $2.5B+, a 20% capacity loss, increased pollution, decreased carpooling, and increased injuries 50%+ (frequency and severity). It turns out a high speed lane right next to a parking lot increases accidents and injury on entry/exit, and not allowing drivers to use the entire road only decreases traffic flow from optimum.
Cobra Effect - The disastrous outcome in Colonial India. There were too many poisonous snakes, so the Brits offered a bounty on them. So people started breeding them for bounty. The government cancelled the bounty, and the cobras were set free: increasing the total population.
Colonoscopy - Colonoscopy has been touted as something everyone should do, and best way to reduce risk. But the largest/best study to date shows no reduction in deaths due to colon cancer. Much of the world is reluctant to waste time/money on this invasive procedure, when cheaper and less invasive stool sampling is nearly as good (and more likely to be done).
Deepwater Horizon - This disaster was caused (or contributed to) by Environmentalism. By not allowing drilling in places like the near coasts, and frozen wastelands like ANWR, and so on, we were forced to get oil in more risky places like deepwater drilling, or shipping the oil much further: both increases risks of accidents, more than the faux environmentalism helps anyone.
Helmet Laws - When people feel "safer" they often take bigger risks and do dumber/riskier things. It's called risk compensation (Peltzman effect). Drivers around them see the helmets and assume safety/competence, so drive closer. Helmets impedes vision/hearing and that increases accidents. Helmet laws saved some lives, and cost others.
Housing and Urban Development - HUD (Housing and urban development) has various programs that are meant to help low income and first time buyers into their own homes. Sounds great, right? Too many people can’t afford a house, so a little wealth redistribution ought to help them out? Yet, in many cases the opposite has happened. Here's my story about some of the negative and unintended consequences of HUD.
Hunting is conservation - Hunting creates a vested interest in protecting wildlife, and the hunting licenses pay for that protection. In one of those not-shocking unintended consequences: hunters care about the outdoors, and pay a ton for access to forests and the tasty animals they take out. Places that allow hunting have more and better managed forests than those that don't.
Laffer Curve - This is the brain-dead obvious idea that taxes have limits. At some point, if you tax people too much then more people stop working. E.g. there are unintended consequences. Since it's obviously true, with dozens of real-world examples, many Democrats will claim it's been disproven or false. The only thing in displute is that it shifts due to time/situations/individual values.
Light Rail - In the real world Light Rail doesn't work: it costs more, increases fares, does less, increases total travel time, reduces rider overall and from other services, slows other traffic, increases pollution, and thus supporting them is anti-environment, anti-economics and anti-science. But cities promise they'll make up those losses in volume. They never do.
Mass Transit - If an idea has to be subsidized, it's probably not a good (economically viable) idea that will offer mass benefit. Of course if the goal is wealth redistribution (stealing from some and giving to others in trade for votes), then these are great. Mass transit is an example of the failures of public policy, but a great way to buy votes from the gullible.
Minimum Wage - Minimum wage is the delusion that bureaucrats and politicos know more about what's fair than the laborer and the employer, and that there's a magic round number that fair for everyone, everywhere, at the same time. It hurts employment, increases automation and offshoring, and drives up prices. But other than that...
Progressives ruin everything - If your voices are extremist activists that exaggerate or mischaracterize (or don't understand) a problem, and see the only solution as fascism (State control of private business or the individual), and they see everything as black or white (extremes), it will always end poorly. Every reasonable idea will either be blocked, or taken too far.
Prohibition - Prohibition increases scarcity (+allure of doing something naughty). Scarcity increases value. Value creates black-market (crime). Crime creates more tolerance for authoritarianism. Which all result in less freedom, and more value in whatever is prohibited. Alcohol prohibition, the war on drugs, gun control, didn't kill availability, but they did reward organized crime.
Recycling - Recycling is not the panacea that some think it is, it is about teaching the gullible to follow without question, while increasing pollution, waste, taxes, and government control over our lives. That's not conspiracy, these are just facts. But still the gullible trained proles follow out of ignorance or virtue signaling as a demonstration of symbolism over substance -- they put their agenda above science.
School Lunches - Democrats (Michelle Obama) decided to make socialized federal nutritional mandates ("Smarter Lunchrooms"). This removed flavor so (a) fewer kids ate school lunches: lower utilization (b) threw more of it away: higher waste (c) and ate out of vending machines instead: ate worse. They did what governments do, and make things worse.
Seatbelt Laws - If you don't wear a device that the state demands, they will take your property, liberty, or life (if you resist). The fact that most of the time the seatbelt helps, but in a few cases (fire, submersion, certain impact angles) it can hurt or kill you, doesn't matter. One size fits all, and progressives know what's for your own good better than you do.
Social Security - Instead of helping people to save for retirement (and owning what they saved), we created Social Security. A youth-tax Ponzi-scheme that taught people to not plan for their future, turned people into dependents, and Americans savings went down. Results: by trusting government, many are far worse off than if there were no safety nets, and they'd save for themseles.
Tax Policy - Democrats keep using Tax Policy wrong. Instead of using it to generate revenues, they try to instill social justice. Punish the "bad people" and reward the Good. That's pretty fucked up right there -- because by their own idea, they're punishing success and rewarding sloth/failure. You get what you incentivize. Then they wail when you point that out.
Vietnam/Price for peace - If you think war is expensive, you should see what peace can cost. In Indochina the peaceniks wanted peace at any price, and for the U.S. to get out of Vietnam, despite multiple warnings by the CIA about what would happen (that South Asia would fall and the Marxists would exterminate/re-educate/expatriate the opposition). The peaceniks got their way, the benevolent communist people’s party got control, and the cost was >6 Million dead, and at least that many refugees driven from their homes, while the peaceniks have never apologized about what happened as a consequence of their "peace at any price".
Welfare - Johnson's "War on Poverty" added welfare: paying people to not work or get married, and have/keep kids out of wedlock. Oh and it punished people that tried to get off of the dole. Shocker of shockers, you get what you incentivize, and welfare got more people to not work, have kids out of wedlock, and it hurt the kids, families, and society at large.
Gun control shows that 30,000+ gun control laws have only resulted in more violence and gun crime. The areas with the strictest (and lowest gun ownerships), have the worst crime/murder problems. The areas with the loosest laws, have the least. And the stricter places got worse after the laws were passed. It's self defeating, but you can't teach the zealots of anti-gun religion any facts that contradict their dogma.
Helmet, seatbelt, and airbag laws, all are known to have increased death and injury. Some of this is due to risk compensation (Peltzman effect), so people feel safer wearing a helmet and do dumber/riskier things', other drives see the helmet and make assumptions on safety and competence, so drive closer to them, or just that the helmet impedes vision/hearing and that increases accidents.
Raising taxes (beyond certain unknown thresholds) causes more hoarding of money and many to hide money (off shore, in their mattress, etc.) and can de-stimulate the economy and often result in LESS money going to those very programs than if things had been left alone
The point is not that all these programs (solutions) are wrong or bad, though many did more harm than good. The point is that all these well meaning programs had huge long term costs associated with them as well. Those that consider this in advance and are reluctant to approve of "do something", to prove that they're rational human beings, with a working brain and skeptical thinking capabilities: they want to explore and consider all the ways it can fail, and fix those in advance (to prevent undue harm).
The rest are irresponsible knee-jerk emotional types, that either don't have reasoning capacity, or are letting their emotions (ego) run the house. They want to help so much, and be so optimistic on any result of their great ideas, that they won't consider the alternatives. And then when you show the harm done, their egos are so vested in their ideas, that they feel like attacking the implementation is attacking them. Thus, ad hominem's and taking it personally, are a given. (You attacked them first, in their little ego-driven world).
The first thing we need to teach these progressives is that you don't change people by passing laws or making rules. They are usually counter-productive. Doing nothing means you're not responsible for the deaths/injuries that happen because of other people taking risks: but doing something (changing things) means you are not liable for the new outcome. If the rate stayed the same in the former case, you're not responsible for any lives lost or consequences. But doing something and making things worse, means you're liable for those increased deaths. Thus caution is warranted. Of course this paragraph starts with a false premise that progressives are still teachable: if they were capable of learning, they would already have some prudence and caution (and life gave them many opportunities to learn that). So by nature of their political philosophy, they've already proven their growth capacity.
So while I understand the naivete in youth, it just saddens me when older (and should be wiser) people are still enthusiastic advocates for progressive everything, and can’t think it through. Or as I say, “what’s the worst that can happen?” But I've learned that it doesn't matter. Those that want to ignore the risks of their actions don't appreciate the help and advice of those wiser and more cautious than they are. And thus articles like this, can only serve as confirmation bias for the people who have already learned the lessons life has offered them. And the rest, resent efforts at sharing wisdom. Thus the wise cynics are dying out, or giving in to the futility of slowing our devolution into anything but an idiocracy.
👁️ See also
Progressives - Progressives want progress (towards Marxism), and they're willing to sacrifice as many people as that takes.
