Episode 255: The Cobra Effect [2]
thus they were paid twice - once for selling the drug, and another for destroying the crop.
Today, Afghanistan is the world's number one producer of opium
and is responsible for 80% of all of the opium produced worldwide.
And for our last incentive we are going to go to a country, and
indeed a continent, that we haven't talked about yet in this episode.
We're going to South America, and heading to Bogota in Colombia.
If you have been to Bogota, you will probably have spent quite some time stuck in traffic.
The city's traffic is notorious, and with an over-reliance on private
cars and an inefficient public transport system there is a vicious cycle.
Public transport is bad so people use cars, so there are more cars on
the road, there's more pollution, and the situation gets even worse.
In 1998 the local government proposed what it no doubt thought was an innovative solution.
In fact, it was inspired by a policy from Mexico City 8 years before, but the
local government thought it would help solve the problem of traffic and pollution.
Cars with different combinations of letters and numbers would be allowed to drive
on different days, meaning that drivers wouldn't be able to use their car every day.
Good idea, in theory, but what it led to in practice was an increase in
the number of cars per household, as people bought second cars in order to
be able to drive on the days when their primary car wouldn't be able to.
To make matters worse, because buying a car is expensive, these
second cars would often be cheaper, older, and more polluting models.
So instead of encouraging people to take public transport on the days of the week they
couldn't drive, many just switched to more polluting cars, meaning that there were
just as many cars on the road, and they were pumping out more and more exhaust fumes.
As a result, pollution increased, not decreased.
And we could go on.
The Chinese listeners may remember Chairman Mao's “4 pests” campaign,
which encouraged the eradication of “mosquitoes, rodents, flies, and
sparrows”, which he believed were responsible for destroying the crops.
There were huge incentives to get rid of these pests, and the population,
especially of sparrows - which are small birds - was decimated.
But it turns out that these sparrows played a pretty important role in the crop ecosystem.
They ate insects.
And without any sparrows to eat the insects there was a huge infestation,
damaging the crops even more than the sparrows, and contributing to a mass
famine that is thought to have killed anywhere from 15 to 60 million people.
And if you have ever travelled on a train in the United States and thought - hmm, this
doesn't seem to be a particularly direct route, the track seems to be looping from side
to side, perhaps you were travelling on a piece of track built when the United States
Congress decided to pay railway builders per distance of track laid, thus encouraging
dishonest railway construction companies to lay track in loops rather than in a direct line.
Now, it might be easy for us to say, with the benefit of hindsight, to look back
at all of these examples and think “surely they could have thought of that before”.
Or at least, surely they could have learned from other examples.
But while there might only be a small group of people who devise, who create, such a
scheme, as soon as it is public there are thousands, millions, perhaps even hundreds
of millions of people for whom this scheme might present a money-making opportunity.
And, try as you might, for all of the second, third, and fourth-degree thinking, all of
the brainstorming about how someone might try to abuse the system, or how there might
be problems that people hadn't thought about, history certainly suggests that, try
as you might, it's easy to forget something that might later seem blindingly obvious.
As the author of Freakonomics, Steve Levitt, once said, “When you introduce an incentive scheme,
you have to just admit to yourself that no matter how clever you think you are, there's a
pretty good chance that someone far more clever than yourself will figure out a way to beat it.”
OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Cobra Effect.
I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
No doubt there are examples of the Cobra Effect that you have
seen in your town, city or country, and I would love to know.
What were their intentions?
What actually happened?
Do you think this was something utterly predictable,
or did someone find some ingenious way around it?
I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started.
You can head right into our community forum, which is at
community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
