People are complicated. Life is complicated. Ecosystems are complicated. Alex Tabarrok writes, “The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.” This so often happens in any kind of government program, regulation, law or attempt to control something within a complex system with a relatively simple action. Things will happen that we didn’t anticipate.

A policy of suppressing forest fires that goes on to cause even greater fires.

An attempt in Bogotá to reduce traffic by restricting who could drive each day based on licence plates that led people to circumvent the policy by buying more cars.

More open workplaces that cause people to behave more privately.

Elimination of predators that leads to the proliferation of grazing animals and a reduction in diversity.

The effects of literally any dam built anywhere.

Or social distancing policies that results in outdoor natural spaces being crammed with people at weekends.

Often, as with some of these, the outcome can be the opposite of what you intended, known as the cobra effect.

Controlling complex systems is difficult.

Thanks to Bruce Howard for supporting this one.

The law of unintended consequences

In direct democracy the people vote directly to create the laws, rules and regulations and such. In representative democracy, the people instead vote to elect a representative, who will then either act directly, or vote with other elected representatives to create the laws, rules and regulations and such. Most democracies are a form of representative democracy as I understand it, with the occasional instance of direct democracy thrown in, as in say, a referendum.

Direct and representative democracy.

I love this concept from Stewart Brand, that different aspects of the world change at different speeds. So, fashion and art changes and cycles faster than commerce which is faster than infrastructure, and in turn governance, culture and finally Nature. The outer layers tend to innovate faster and so pull along, or be stabilised by, the lower, slower layers. At the boundaries you get constructive turbulence, say between Uber and governance, or how the growth in video streaming requires Internet infrastructure to come along with it. I’m sure you can find counter examples, but as a framework for thinking about big complex things I find it quite handy.

Sketchplanations tagged with government