Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

1902, the French governor of Indochina faced a huge problem in the city of Hanoi. They were suffering from a massive infestation of rats and the rats could carry diseases, including the plague. The governor implemented a plan to get rid of the rats. Thousands of people were recruited in the effort. However, the program had a serious flaw. Not only didn’t it solve the problem, but it made things worse. Learn more about The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1902, the French governor of Indochina faced a huge problem in the city of Hanoi. They were suffering from a massive infestation of rats, rats that could carry disease, including bubonic plague. The governor implemented a plan to get rid of the rats. Thousands of people were recruited in the effort. However, the program had a serious flaw. Not only didn't it solve the problem, but it made things worse. Learn more about the great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 and the problem of perverse incentives. episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow?

Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension. Nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest.

And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. To set the stage for what happened in Hanoi in 1902, you first need to know that at the time, Vietnam, along with what is modern day Laos and Cambodia, were all part of the French colony of Indochina. A failed former finance minister of France called Paul Dumas was assigned to be the governor of Indochina in 1897. His goal as governor was to bring French civilization and infrastructure to the region.

In particular, he wanted to bring this infrastructure to the parts of the colony where French people lived. In 1902, the capital of French Indochina was moved from Saigon to Hanoi. The area where the French colonial administrators lived in Hanoi looked like it could have been in France, minus the climate. The French neighborhoods had European houses, wide tree-lined European boulevards, and other European amenities. The one thing they lacked was flush toilets. Flush toilets would help improve sanitation and bring modern luxury to the French people of Hanoi. To this effort, they installed 14 kilometers or 9 miles of modern sewer pipes in the French section of the city. These pipes hooked up all the French homes and allowed them to have modern flush toilets and running water.

Paul Dummer and other French administrators were pretty proud of themselves and considered the creation of the sewer system a great accomplishment. And it was for a while. As it turned out, the sewer pipes that were installed were a perfect breeding ground for rats. The pipes were cool, dark, and provided protection from any potential predators. It also served as a superhighway to all the French homes which were hooked up to the new sewer system. Just as an aside, rats breed extremely rapid. A single breeding pair of rats, if left unchecked, and given sufficient food, can produce half a billion rats in just three years.

The French population in Hanoi freaked out with all the rats coming out of the sewers. Rats were known to transmit disease, so the French in Hanoi demanded that something be done about the problem. The French solution to the problem was simple. They would hire rat hunters that would go into the sewers and start killing rats. The program initially looked to be a success. In the last week of April of 1902, 7,985 dead rats were brought in. Throughout May, the number of rats brought in kept climbing.

Every day in May saw over 4,000 rats killed, and in June they were killing over 10,000 per day. At its peak on June 21st, 20, 112 rats were killed in a single day. This was a lot of rats, but there were two problems. The first is that they had to deal with hundreds of thousands of dead rats. The second was that despite the number of dead rats, it didn't seem to be putting a dent in the rat problem. So the French administrators decide to crank things up a notch. First, instead of hiring rat catchers, they would instead institute a bounty program on rats, and anyone in the city could participate.

This would significantly increase the number of people on the hunt for rats. Secondly, to eliminate the problem of dealing with so many dead rats, people only had to bring in the tail of the rat to get a reward. Each rat tail would be worth the equivalent of a penny, which wasn't too bad for your average citizen of Hanoi in 1902. Soon, thousands of rat tails began flowing in every day. Again, the French administrators patted themselves on the back for the launch of such a successful program. However, they soon noticed something odd. Rats began appearing in Hanoi with no tails.

People were catching rats and cutting off their tails to turn in for the bounty, but they weren't killing the rats. Why weren't people killing the rats? Because they wanted the rats to breed so there would be more rats that they could harvest for tails. After an investigation, they found that the problem was actually much worse. People were actually importing rats into the city so they could turn in their tails. And some people in the countryside outside of Hanoi were actually breeding rats so they could be harvested for their tails. Not only was the rat tail bounty program not a success, but in fact backfired by encouraging urging people to breed more rats.

The great Hanoi Rat Massacre is a textbook example of what economists call the cobra effect, or perverse incentives. The name Cobra Effect comes from a similar British program that was run in India. The British wanted to reduce the number of venomous cobras, so they put a bounty on dead cobras which were brought in. Just like the rats at Hanoi, people eventually began breeding cobras. Eventually, the British found out what was happening and they ended the program. All of the people who were breeding the now worthless cobras let them go, resulting in a bigger

population of cobras than there was before the program. There's actually a shocking number of cases of perverse incentives throughout history, some of which are still being done today. From 1945 through 1960, the Canadian federal government would pay provinces 70 cents per day for each child in an orphanage and $2.25 per day for each person in a psychiatric hospital. An estimated 20,000 children were falsely diagnosed as mentally ill in the province of Quebec so they could claim more money. When the Transcontinental Railroad was built, Congress paid the railroad companies per mile of track laid. The Union Pacific Railroad would then put in unnecessary bends and curves on the track just so it would be longer so they would make more money.

In 2002 in Afghanistan, the British military offered Afghan farmers $700 per acre of poppy which they destroyed. This resulted in an explosion of planting poppies so farmers could claim the reward. IBM used to have a program in place where they paid programmers for each line of code that they wrote. The end result was bloated software that had far more lines of code than was ever necessary. A paleontologist working in Indonesia put out a bounty on every fragment of a hominid skull that someone brought in. What people did was take fully intact skulls and break them so they had more fragments to turn in. Farm subsidies are often given only for certain commodities, and they are given without limit. This results in massive overproduction of particular crops, which are then used inefficiently because they're such a large surplus.

Several years ago, the U.S. Mint allowed people to buy $1 coins online with a credit card. Because they were a government agency, they didn't have to pay for postage. So if you purchased $100 with the coins, it only cost you $100. dollars. People would buy tens of thousands of dollars of one dollar coins with credit cards, bank the frequent flyer miles or cashback rewards, and then immediately deposit the coins in a bank to pay off their credit cards. Perhaps one of the best recent examples was in the UK, where they wanted more people to take COVID tests. So they offered 500 pounds to anyone who tested positive for COVID. People on Twitter immediately pointed out that this was an

incentive for people to get COVID, so they could spend the money that. they got on a PlayStation and then spend the next two weeks playing it because they were in quarantine. And this is just scratching the surface of the number of cases of perverse incentives. As for Paul D'Amere, the governor of Indochina, he eventually returned home to France and became the president of France in 1931. Hanoi actually did suffer an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1906, which most probably was spread by rats. Even though he and the French eventually left Vietnam, all of the rats remained, and today there are still millions of rats killed every year in the city of Hanoi. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson.

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