Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Unintended Consequences

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

One of the most famous lines in poetry comes from the poet Robert Burns, who spoke of ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men.’ The line has been used in reference to the fact that no matter how good the plan or the intentions behind it, things will often not go according to plan.  Indeed, there have been times in history when plans have made things far worse than the problem they were trying to solve. But there have also been times when things have turned out better than hoped for reasons not understood at the time.  Learn more about unintended consequences and how things sometimes don’t turn out like they were planned on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most famous lines in poetry comes from the poet Robert Burns, who spoke of the best-laid schemes of mice and men. The line's been used in reference to the fact that no matter how good the plan or the intentions behind it, things will often not go according to the plan. Indeed, there have been times in history where plans have made things far worse than the problem that they were trying to solve. But there have also been times where things have turned out better than hoped for reasons not understood at the time. Learn more about unintended consequences and how things sometimes don't turn out like they were planned on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. There are unintended consequences that we encounter every day, some of which involve decisions that we've made. Perhaps you took a job somewhere that required you to move, and as a result of your move, you met your future spouse. You didn't move to meet your future spouse, but it was a pleasant result of having made the move. There are also sometimes unpleasant results that can be unexpected as well.

While these things are a part of daily life, most of them fall under the category of the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is a concept from chaos theory that illustrates how small changes in a system's initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes. It's often metaphorically described with the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world could eventually lead to a tornado or hurricane in another. The butterfly effect can and almost assuredly will lead to unintended consequences, but that really isn't what this episode is about. This episode is about rather direct results that were not intended or were overlooked. As with our personal decisions, sometimes those decisions can result in good things and other times in bad things. I want to start with a classic example, which is known as the Cobra Effect.

I previously did an episode on the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902. Basically, the French government wanted to get the rat population under control in Hanoi and wound up making the problem worse. This wasn't the first time that something like this had happened. The cobra effect is named after an incident that took place in the 19th century in Delhi, India. The city had a problem with cobras. Cobras are extremely deadly snakes, and the British who controlled India at the time put a plan in place to rid the city of cobras. They would provide a bounty for every dead cobra that was brought in. The plan sounded good. The government would harness the economic incentives to encourage people to kill

cobras for which they would be rewarded. The plan worked. At first. Then people realized that if they killed all the cobras, there would be no more cobras to turn in for bounties. So they began breeding cobras, so they would have lots of cobras to turn in. Eventually, the British found out what was going on and ended the program because it was being gamed.

All of the cobra farmers, having realized that their product was now useless and not wanting to spend any more money to raise them, just let them go. The end result was more Cobra's than there were at the start of the program. This anecdote is often used to illustrate something known as Goodheart's Law. Goodheart's law states that when something is picked as an indicator, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people will start to game it. In the case of the Cobra example, the goal was to get rid of Cobra's. But the metric that was measured was not the absence of Cobra's, but rather dead Cobra's. If the powers that B wanted dead Cobra's, then dead Cobra's they shall have.

Another example of Goodheart's law has to do with academic citations. Academics write research papers and get them published. That's a huge part of what every researcher does. However, how can you determine which researchers have had the biggest impact in their field? It isn't just a matter of who writes the most papers because somebody could just write a lot of meaningless papers. One method of determining the impact of researchers was proposed in 2005 by a physicist by the name of Jorge E. Hirsch. He proposed tracking the number of times a research paper had been cited in other research papers. This became known as the Hirsch Index or just the H index for short.

It was a sound idea, but then people began to game the system. Citing yourself counted as a citation, so people began to do that more often. Researchers would often swap citations with other researchers, some journals would require papers to add irrelevant citations just to boost the H index of some of their authors. Sometimes the exact opposite of the intended result can occur without having anything to do with Goodhart's Law. A case in point was the SS Eastland disaster. After the Titanic sank in 1912, steps were taken to ensure that such a disaster never occurred again. One of the problems with the Titanic was that there were not enough lifeboats on board the ship for all the passengers.

The United States Congress passed the Siemens Act in 1915, which, among other things, required ships to be retrofitted to include enough lifeboats for everyone on board the ship. So far, this sounds very reasonable. However, most of the ships at that time were not designed for that many lifeboats. And one such ship was the SS Eastland. The Eastland was a passenger steamship that ran sightseeing tours out of Chicago, In order to meet the requirements of the law, they had to put the lifeboats high up on the ship, which was really the only place they could put them.

The problem was this made the ship extremely top-heavy. On July 24, 1915, 2,570 passengers boarded the ship to go out for a cruise. With many of the passengers on the top deck of the ship to get a better view, which is what you do on a sightseeing tour, the ship started to list to one side and eventually rolled over. The ship was only in 20 feet of water in the river, and it was only 20 feet away from the dock, but 844 people were killed. The proximate cause of the disaster was the addition of lifeboats,

which were required in order to avoid such a disaster. Sometimes rules put in place end up changing the behaviors of people, which nullify any benefits the rules may have had in the first place. This is known as the Peltzman effect. The Peltzman effect was named after the economist Sam Peltzman, who in 1975 published a controversial paper about the effectiveness of seatbelt legislation. Peltzman claimed that when safety measures were put in place, it resulted in people taking more risks because they felt safe. The increase in risky behavior would nullify the benefits of safety precautions that were put in place. To be sure, if you're in a car crash, a seatbelt will protect you.

However, Peltzmann claimed that in the aggregate across all of society, the more safe people felt, the more risks they took. This is known as risk homeostasis. For example, in 1968, Sweden changed from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right. For anyone who has ever driven on the side of the road that they aren't accustomed to, you pay very close attention to what you are doing. For 18 months after Sweden made the change, traffic fatalities actually will. went down. Then, once people got comfortable with the change, the number of accidents started going up again. The comedian George Carlin once made a joke that if you really want people to drive safely, you shouldn't put an airbag in the steering wheel. You should put a sharp spear.

Sometimes you just don't know what the downstream results of something will be because nobody has thought out that many steps. This example takes place once again in India. As recently as the late 1980s, India had an estimated 40 million vultures. Then in the 1990s, the vulture population started to shrink rapidly and dramatically. Nobody was sure what was happening. Vultures were robust birds that played an important part in the ecosystem, especially in India. India has the largest population of cows in the world, and they're an animal that is sacred in Hinduism, which is practiced by 80% of the population. When a cow died, it was common to let the carcass be eaten by scavengers, in particular vultures. In the 1990s, cows in India began being treated

with a drug known as Diclofenic, an anti-inflammatory drug that was given to sick cattle. It turned out that even a small amount of Diclofenic was lethal to vultures. It would cause their kidneys to stop functioning. The vultures ate the cows that still had the drug in their system and subsequently died en masse. The vulture population shrank by over 99,000, but they were in the vulture. And today, there are only believed to be about 20,000 vultures left in India from the initial population of 40 million. With the vultures gone, the cow carcasses began to rot out in the open. They became a source of disease and a source of food for rats and feral dogs.

Packs of dogs with ample food started to attack and kill people. Dichlophenek was eventually banned in 2006. But all this happened because of a very good. intentioned idea of prescribing drugs to sick cows. No one could have foreseen what giving cows a drug could have led to. However, there have been other cases where people probably should have known better, and perhaps the best example I can think of has to do with invasive species. In a previous episode, I covered the rat eradication efforts on South Georgia Island and the South Atlantic. In the case of South Georgia, the rats were introduced by accident from sailors in the early 20th century. However,

in some cases, invasive species were introduced on purpose. Macquarie Island is an Australian island located between mainland Australia and Antarctica. It was discovered in 1810 by the British. As happened whenever humans discovered an uninhabited island, they ended up bringing rats and mice with them. As happened on most islands, the rats began to breed uncontrollably. The 19th century solution to the problem of rats was to introduce a predator, in this case, cats. Cats were brought to the island and allowed to roam freely in the hopes that they would kill

the rats. They did kill some rats, but the cats found it much easier to just attack the seabirds on the island, which had no natural predators. In 1878, settlers to the island brought rabbits with them as a source of food. They let the rabbits go wild on the island, and they bred like rabbits. By the 1970s, there were 130,000 rabbits on the island that had devastated the island. That had devastated the island's vegetation, in addition to the cats and the rats. Beginning in the late 1960s, efforts were made to start to control the rabbit population, with the introduction of yet another invasive species, the European rabbit flea, which was a carrier of myoxema virus, which is deadly to rabbits. The rabbit population plunged. With no more rabbits to prey on,

the cat population began to attack native seabirds again. In 1985, an effort was made to eradicate the cats on the island, and by the year 2000, all the cats were gone. And that was good for the seabirds, but it caused the rabbit population to explode again to its highest levels ever, and they began eating everything stripping the island of vegetation. In 2007, an effort began to wipe out all of the rats, mice, and rabbits in one fell swoop with poison. By 2014, the island was finally declared pest-free. After 200 years. By all accounts, the wildlife and vegetation on the island has had a remarkable comeback in the last 10 years. But this is hardly the only story of invasive species in Australia.

Perhaps the best known case is that of the cane toad. The cane toad was introduced to Australia in 1935 on purpose to try and feed on the cane beetle, which damaged sugar crops. 102 cane beetles were brought into the country, and today there are estimated to be over 200 million of them. It turns out that cane toads like to eat a lot more than just cane beetles, and they've spread over much of the eastern part of the country. They also have a poison sack, which means that they're killing not only their prey, but also

the predators that would otherwise feed on them. Not all unintended consequences are bad, so I will leave you with some unexpected good things that can come from something that otherwise might have been bad. Perhaps the best example of this is the Korean demilitarized zone. or the DMZ. The DMZ was created as a buffer between North and South Korea after the Korean War. The DMZ is 250 kilometers or 160 miles long and 4 kilometers or 2.5 miles wide. For over 70 years, the DMZ has been devoid of any human activity. No one from either country is allowed inside. The result has been the flourishing of wildlife. The area has gone completely back to nature and there are now

several species that are only found in the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula. It might be easy to laugh at many of these examples that I brought up, but it can be very difficult to know what the second or third order consequences of any action will be. Oftentimes, if people knew what would happen, they would never have done it, which is precisely why they're called unintended consequences. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Ben Long and Cameron Kiefer.

I have two more reviews for you today in an effort to catch up on my backlog. They both come from Apple Podcasts in the U.S. The first is from listener Merp Alert, who writes, Perfect Podcast for ADHD listeners. I wish I'd discovered this podcast a while ago. The short episodes and super diverse topics covered are a dream for somebody with ADD like me, who is curious about everything but has a notoriously short attention span. Feeds my Wikipedia wormhole urges, but without the result in physical inertia,

since I can listen to them while doing housework. The second review comes from listener Bill Blaster One, who writes, Outstanding Podcast. Gary's a very professional, well-spoken order, and produces and writes excellent podcasts. They're about 15 minutes long and are very informative. Download or peruses podcast, and you will be entertained. Highly recommended. Well, thank you very much, Bill Blaster and Murp Alerts.

Reviews like these are one of the good, unintended consequences of doing this podcast. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a book, boostagram. You two can have it right on the show.