The notion of unintended consequences came up in the previous post and I want to bring it out into the light of a new post. In brief, the idea is that, given humanity’s limited genius, actions we take will almost always have the likelihood of having unintended consequences. Sometimes helpful, oftentimes not and sometimes quite devastating.
The Laws of Unintended Consequences are, I think, easier to see in example than explain in theory.
For instance, the Treaty of Versailles signed at the conclusion of WWI – which treated Germans fairly harshly, it has been said – has been pointed to as one cause of WWII. The idea was to punish Germany “appropriately” for their part in WWI, but the result was a people who were receptive to the horrible actions of the Nazis in WWII.
What was intended for good had a result of evil.
For a more recent example, one commenter noted that the supposedly good intention of increasing ethanol (and thereby decreasing our dependency upon petroleum) has had the unintended result of causing corn prices to increase dramatically in Mexico.
This writer was arguing against sending aid to the starving of Africa or Mexico because it would have unintended – and negative – consequences for the very people do-gooders hoped to help.
But, it could be further noted, that NOT sending assistance of some sort may result in a restlessness and anger amongst the poor of the world, making them more receptive to the seduction of terrorism or other violent protest. Yet more unintended consequences!
It could be noted that a fear of unintended consequences could well lead to a paralysis. However, ignoring the laws of unintended consequences may well mean disastrous policy (from war-making, to economic policy, to energy consumption and on).
I’d be tempted to suggest that a middle road is vital. Acknowledge our limited genius and the possibility of unintended consequences, but further acknowledge that inaction has its own consequences – just as often negative in nature.
But, I fully recognize my own limited genius. What say you?
13 comments:
The sweet spot is to act on the best available information in a timely fashion and have systems in place to adapt to unforseen and unintended consequences. The marines call this the 70% solution: any more uncertainty and you are apt to make the wrong choices, and delaying until you have more certainty leads to being overtaken by events.
The other dimension is having the means to weigh the relative importance of the outcomes (intended and otherwise, by and for whom, in what time frame, etc.) Choices and tradeoffs get made every day. The problems arise when these decisions are made by those who are materially unaffected by the unintended consequences of their choices, or when hypersensitivity leads to paralysis and the inability to make hard but informed and morally unambiguous choices.
The human mind makes decisions within human timescales - at best a couple of generations on either side of our own - but many of the hard choices we face play out over much longer time frames. It takes a very different orientation to weigh the expedient, short term solution against the more difficult but ultimately more sustainable long term choices and conclude to change behavior to achieve the latter outcome.
This means that one has a responsibility to look outside a small circle of advisors--to get the best intelligence possible, not just that which agrees with one's prejudices. It means a willingness to correct course if one's actions prove harmful--mitigating unintended consequences wherever possible.
It also means a profound respect for truth, for information integrity, which could lead to course corrections (theologically called "repentance!"). So, one doesn't censor new info. on climate change, etc. One welcomes informed criticism from adversaries because it helps one correct where necessary.
It requires the virtues of humility (I could be wrong; I am not infallible), and of courage (I often must take some action rather than none). But maybe in the realms of economics, ecology, and international affairs, one should have the equivalent of the first rule for doctors: "Do No Harm." Don't make the patient, or the situation, worse. One is not always able to cure, to solve--in fact one is not always able to avoid harm--but if avoiding harm, avoiding making things worse, takes precedence over curing/solving, then perhaps we act more circumstantly in the world--and with a greater willingness to change course when it appears we HAVE caused harm.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dan,
I tried to leave a response on the previous post but gave up after the third BetaBlogger burp destroyed the comment.
I'm writing this one in a text editor so I can resubmit it in case of another fatal burp.
Damn BetaBlogger!
I didn't mean to imply that dumping the military budget on projects to alleviate poverty would have unintended consequences (implying unexpected). I mean the consequences are perfectly above board and predictable.
The amount of food available in the world is finite and can only be increased from its present level by a very small percent. If you dump a lot of money to chase a finite amount of food, the price of the food goes up.
Let's suppose you want to sell your house. Will putting your house on the market affect the real estate market in Louisville? No in the least. But suppose 20% of the people put their houses on the market within a month. What would happen? The price that a home could command in Louisville would drop like a rock. Actually it wouldn't take 20% of the homes, only 5% would do.
If you suddenly had a million dollars, you could afford to dine often on caviar and lobster tails. But what if 10% of the people in the country suddenly had a million dollars and all had a taste for caviar and lobster. Would the already over-fished oceans suddenly produce more lobsters in response to this "wealth"? No. The only thing that would happen is that the price would go up.
Like that, sending aide to a small group of people across the world will not affect world economics a bit. But adopting that as a major means of alleviating poverty would. While you are helping the first 5% of the world's poor, you will have bid the price of food so high that you will starve the other 95%.
We in the west are roiling and oinking in our great surfeit of fat. Tossing a scrap now and again to one or another group of poor around the world amounts to nothing more than a feel good placebo, but it must not be confused with compassion.
Eleutheros, you misunderstand the nature of the aid: Increasing food production IS limited. That was the problem with the so-called "green revolution" of the '60s. Other aspects of the problem include better distribution of food we have on hand; lowering population; lowering global energy consumption; working for sustainable development; free vaccinations for preventable diseases; clean water available to all, etc.
Claiming that the redirection of a bloated military budget is just "dumping food and making food prices go up" is an incredible reductionism.
In general, E, I like your commitment to simple living. What totally pisses me off about you is that you seem not to care much about the millions on the planet who cannot all adopt subsistence farming: Let them starve seems to be what you imply.
I also have increasingly less patience with those (whether on right or left) who believe government itself to be the worst of all problems rather than particular govt. policies and incompetence. That plays directly into the hands of the free-market fundamentalists (globalists) who are destroying us all. Government regulations--WISE ONES--are the only possible barrier to these plunderers.
Michael:"Let them starve seems to be what you imply."
Engaging in a little Kill the Prophet are we? My comments are not recommendations, they are observations.
Every agricultural "advance" from Jethro Tull to the Green Revolution intended to improve human nutrition. Rather what it did was drastically increase the number of malnourished people. Historically more food has always resulted in more people, not better nourished people.
Likewise every escalation of government that has intended to bring about equality has in the end resulted in an oligarchy and plutarchy which before were not possible until the people relinquished wealth and freedom to the government enough for the plutarchs and oligarchs to inject themselves use it to their own ends.
Those are observations. I've also observed that people who smoke very often get lung cancer. Your ire is so misplaced it would be like saying, "Oh so you don't care about people who get lung cancer, you WANT people to get lung cancer." Whether I care about them or not is entirely beside the point.
Those globalist plunderers to whom you refer could not exist without government regulations supporting them and quashing all grass roots competition. Protecting the poor and downtrodden is always the excuse, the facade, stated reason for interference. But it is NEVER the result.
Anytime you have the government usurping power over people's lives under the guise of managing things for the poor, you create mechanism whose pilot can easily be supplanted by someone else. Once you have people leaning on and acquiescing to the government to that extent, you create a hollow space within them that is easily filled by the next government like entity that comes along, be it wise and good or evil and malicious.
So the only real solution lies somewhere outside of government.
By the bye, correct me here by all means. I've never known anyone who advocates government, bureaucratic, or ivory tower solutions to things unless they themselves were (or wished to be) earing their living with their finger in the resulting pie.
Well, sure, let me correct you. I am not now nor have I ever been a part of any governmental organization. I have worked for NGOs which sometimes pressure governments, but I don't ever believe that government has all the answers and have usually worked for organizations that do not wait on government.
But that doesn't mean that government has no role to play. That belief is pure fantasy and a dangerous fantasy that let's the plunderers run rampant.
The comparison with tobacco addiction is apt. Observing that tobacco causes cancer, you warn. But do you support anything to wean folks from their addiction?
No, I don't mean necessarily government per se. I mean the notion of earning one's living as an advocate for the poor no matter the source of the funds that pay him, although a great deal of private funding is really government funding when it is done to avoid taxes.
I'd be glad to go into more details if you like, although this isn't the actual subject of Dan's post. But let me summarize what I'd say as this: I'm highly suspicious of paid advocates. It boils down to Upton Sinclair's saw: If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Of course I'd support anyone quiting smoking. I've done so in reference to a great many people. But having seen that great many people "quit" has made me a realist about it. It is difficult for people (from observation having never used the ghastly stuff myself). Success is seldom and hard won.
Like that the world is facing some difficult problems. No point in pretending that they aren't there or pretending that there are any easy solutions.
You say that everyone in the world can't be a subsistence farmer. Soon they will be ... out of grim necessity when the age of oil draws to a close. Not being able to be a producer of some sort outside the context of the oil economy will mean their doom.
A paid advocate is just another of the frills we can afford because of our oil economy and our willingness to exploit the labor and resources of the rest of the world. That is, unless we are exploiting the poor of the world, we cannot afford paid "professionals" to advocate for those very poor we have created and are exploiting.
Some interesting conversation, everyone. I'm sorry, but I've been a bit busy to take part myself. Keep it up, though.
"You say that everyone in the world can't be a subsistence farmer. Soon they will be ... out of grim necessity when the age of oil draws to a close."
So, then - assuming the worst - would you support programs designed to help folk know how to be subsistence farmers in their particular region? Would you support education to help people understand the possible ramifications of the end of the oil age? Rules intended to ease the crunch of moving from Oil Age living to Post-Oil Age living?
I'm of the mind that
1. We can and always should strive to assist our neighbor in realistic, non-enabling ways (I would assume most of us agree with this)
2. That (most?) often, such aid can be rendered most effectively on the local basis and by neighbors AND
3. That gov't "interference" in the form of regulations and wise assistance can be critical.
If we assume the old saw: Give a person a fish they eat for a day, teach them to fish and they fish for a lifetime - WITH the additional proviso that the water is clean, not over-fished and not owned by a corporation - then that seems to me to model ways that individuals can help (teach a person to fish) but also assumes some basic common cooperation (waters aren't polluted, over-fished, owned by someone else) and in our world, most often, common cooperation indicates gov't.
How shall we keep the waters clean, not over-fished, pre-emptively owned, etc without "gov't regulations and interference" - that is, some basic laws/rules/agreements?
Thoughts?
I suspect much of the resistance to "government interference" comes from folks whose experience of government is as a bureaucratic meddler, an inefficient implementor, a poor steward, an uneven enforcer, and even a perfidious collaborator with pollutors(think coal, Kentucky). Government can be all of these things, but they are not the limit of its capablities and some of these safeguard all our interests. Those that pertain to shared resources and our natural heritage are a critical element of any conservation effort.
Advocates of landowner rights place a premium on the choices made by the individual private proerty owner, regardless of unintended consequences, the impact of these choices on shared resources, the size of the management unit, the short and long term objectives of the land owner, and may not account for the qualitative values of the land that do not so easily tally on a balance sheet. Before the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, private ownership and decentralized regulation lead to extraordinary levels of pollution and environmental degradation. Before the Endangered Species Act, private ownership and the unrestricted free market allowed for the rapid extinction of the single most abundant species on earth (the passenger pigeon) and the near extinction of American bison and many other species. In the global marketplace our resources are trated as fungible, so who needs temperate broadleaf forests in the eastern US if we have them in China and Japan? The scale of the problem is greater than private individuals or non profit agencies to deal with, nor is private ownership the best tool to safeguard the resources on which all life depends.
There are three ways to change behavior: voluntarily, through incentives and subsidies, coersively through regulation and law. Voluntary action does not occur at the scale and scope required to address the issues of climate change and natural resource management alone. A combination of all three, applied appropriately, is what the situation will require.
"But, it could be further noted, that NOT sending assistance of some sort may result in a restlessness and anger amongst the poor of the world, making them more receptive to the seduction of terrorism or other violent protest. Yet more unintended consequences!"
Oh...appeasement.
For instance, the Treaty of Versailles signed at the conclusion of WWI – which treated Germans fairly harshly, it has been said – has been pointed to as one cause of WWII. The idea was to punish Germany “appropriately” for their part in WWI, but the result was a people who were receptive to the horrible actions of the Nazis in WWII.
Or perhaps the mistake at Versailles was not to punish Germany servely enough. In WWI German armies were defeated, but they were defeated in France. A generation later, they came back. Next they were defeated in Germany and that nation has been peaceful ever since. A severe enough beating changed their attitudes, whereas a lighter one did not. The Germans had to confront their own actions and the disasterous consequences which fell upon them to a degree that they could avoid in the less destructive first war.
Post a Comment