2

Anything That Can Go Wrong, Will

ALL YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, but sometimes those consequences are unexpected. On the surface, these unintended consequences seem unpredictable. However, if you dig deeper, you will find that unintended consequences often follow predictable patterns and can therefore be avoided in many situations. You just need to know which patterns to look out for—the right mental models.

Here is an example. In 2016, the UK government asked the public to help name a new polar research ship. Individuals could submit names and then vote on them in an online poll. More than seven thousand names were submitted, but one name won easily, with 124,109 votes: RSS Boaty McBoatface. (The ship was eventually named RSS Sir David Attenborough instead.)

Could the government have predicted this result? Well, maybe not that the exact name RSS Boaty McBoatface would triumph. But could they have guessed that someone might turn the contest into a joke, that the joke would be well received by the public, and that the joke answer might become the winner? You bet.

People turn open contests like this into jokes all the time. In 2012, Mountain Dew held a similar campaign to name a new soda, but they quickly closed it down when “Diabeetus” and “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” appeared near the top of the rankings. Also that year, Walmart teamed up with Sheets Energy Strips and offered to put on a concert by international recording artist Pitbull at the Walmart location that received the most new Facebook likes. After an internet prankster took hold of the contest, Walmart’s most remote store, in Kodiak, Alaska, won. Walmart and Pitbull still held the concert there and they even had the prankster who rigged the contest join Pitbull on the trip!

Unintended consequences are not a laughing matter under more serious circumstances. For instance, medical professionals routinely prescribe opioids to help people with chronic pain. Unfortunately, these drugs are also highly addictive. As a result, pain patients may abuse their prescribed medication or even seek out similar, cheaper, and more dangerous drugs like street heroin. According to the National Institutes of Health, in the U.S., nearly half of young people who inject heroin started abusing prescription opioids first.

Patients’ susceptibility to opioid addiction and abuse has substantially contributed to the deadliest drug crisis in American history. As reported by The New York Times on November 29, 2018, more people died from drug overdoses in 2017 than from HIV/AIDS, car crashes, or gun deaths in the years of their respective peaks. Of course, no doctor prescribing painkillers intends for their patients to die—these deaths are unintended consequences.

Through this chapter, we want to help you avoid unintended consequences like these. You will be much less likely to fall into their traps if you are equipped with the right mental models to help you better predict and deal with these situations.

HARM THY NEIGHBOR, UNINTENTIONALLY

There is a class of unintended consequences that arise when a lot of people choose what they think is best for them individually, but the sum total of the decisions creates a worse outcome for everyone. To illustrate how this works, consider Boston Common, the oldest public park in the United States.

Before it was a park, way back in the 1630s, this fifty-acre plot of land in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, was a grazing pasture for cows, with local families using it collectively as common land. In England, this type of land is referred to legally as commons.

Pasture commons present a problem, though: Each additional cow that a farmer gets benefits their family, but if all the farmers keep getting new cows, then the commons can be depleted. All farmers would experience the negative effects of overgrazing on the health of their herds and land.

In an 1833 essay, “Two Lectures on the Checks to Population,” economist William Lloyd described a similar, but hypothetical, overgrazing scenario, now called the tragedy of the commons. However, unbeknownst to him, his hypothetical situation had really occurred in Boston Common two hundred years earlier (and many other times before and since). More affluent families did in fact keep buying more cows, leading to overgrazing, until, in 1646, a limit of seventy cows was imposed on Boston Common.

Any shared resource, or commons, is vulnerable to this tragedy. Overfishing, deforestation, and dumping waste have obvious parallels to overgrazing, though this model extends far beyond environmental issues. Each additional spam message benefits the spammer who sends it while simultaneously degrading the entire email system. Collective overuse of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture is leading to dangerous antibiotic resistance. People make self-serving edits to Wikipedia articles, diminishing the overall reliability of the encyclopedia.

In each of these cases, an individual makes what appears to be a rational decision (e.g., prescribing an antibiotic to a patient who might have a bacterial infection). They use the common resource for their own benefit at little or no cost (e.g., each course of treatment has only a small chance of increasing resistance). But as more and more people make the same decision, the common resource is collectively depleted, reducing the ability for everyone to benefit from it in the future (e.g., the antibiotic becomes much less useful).

More broadly, the tragedy of the commons arises from what is called the tyranny of small decisions, where a series of small, individually rational decisions ultimately leads to a system-wide negative consequence, or tyranny. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

You’ve probably gone out to dinner with friends expecting that you will equally split the check. At dinner, each person is faced with a decision to order an expensive meal or a cheaper one. When dining alone, people often order the cheaper meal. However, when they know that the cost of dinner is shared by the whole group, people tend to opt for the expensive meal. If everyone does this then everyone ends up paying more!

Ecologist William E. Odum made the connection between the tyranny of small decisions and environmental degradation in his 1982 BioScience article: “Much of the current confusion and distress surrounding environmental issues can be traced to decisions that were never consciously made, but simply resulted from a series of small decisions.”