Acute Angles - That's Not What We Wanted

by David Fidelman

A big benefit of the computer revolution is that information contained in fragile forms such as old documents and movies on perishable film stock can be saved in non-perishable digital format. With the rapid advances in computer technology, all the discs and tapes on which they are saved soon become obsolete, and nobody has the equipment to read them. So all those old documents and movies are lost, unless somebody had the foresight to save the originals.

This computer experience is the result of the Law of Unintended Consequences, compared to which Murphy’s Law is a piker. Any time you think of something new, things will not to turn out the way you intended. Airlines and hotels, knowing that a certain percentage of their reservations will be canceled, regularly overbook, then everybody shows up. Last Thanksgiving a local restaurant, based upon its experience the previous year, took reservations for half its capacity and kept the other half available for customers who make last-minute reservations or come in with no reservations. The customers, based on their experience the previous year, made sure not to wait until the last minute and made their reservations early. The restaurant ended up half empty. In order to introduce free market competition into the purchase of electricity by the consumer, the state of California stopped government regulation of utilities and permitted the customer to use any of a number of different providers. San Diego became the nation’s first fully deregulated city, and electricity prices quadrupled over the summer. Wide-spread consumer complaints forced the government to impose price caps on utility bills, and citizens are now calling for the state to take over and run California’s electric industry.

Another benefit of computers is that everything can be stored in the computer’s memory, eliminating all that unnecessary paperwork. And you can send information to someone by e-mail without having to type out a memo. Because it’s so easy to disseminate the information, copies are sent to everybody. Then everybody prints everything out and stores the copie in file cabinets. That’s why the first thing you see when you go into an office supply store is stacks of boxes of 5000 sheets of printer paper. And file cabinets. Printers are cheap because the manufacturers make their profit selling the ink cartridges. It’s like the early days of safety razors, when the razors could be given away so you would buy the razor blades.

The Peter Principle is an example of unintended consequences. If an employee is exceptional at his (or her) job, that employee gets promoted. If he does that job well, he gets promoted again. Finally he is promoted to a level at which he’s over his head in a job he can’t do well. You don’t want to demote him, so he stays in that position. Eventually the organization ends up with a bunch of incompetent high-level employees.

A small businessman working on government contracts finds that taxes are eating into his profits. So he complains to his Congressman about big government, and wants government operations to be streamlined to cut costs and lower his taxes. As a result of Congressional pressure, the government agency decides to attain greater efficiency and save on administrative costs by “bundling” contracts – that is, combining a number of small contracts into one large one. Then only one contract has to be administered and a lot of duplication is avoided, resulting in more efficient government. It also results in a contract too large for the small business to bid on. Therefore no taxes because there is no longer any business.

Good ideas can lead to ecological disasters. In the 1880’s somebody in Hawaii decided to import mongooses from India to kill the rats that were destroying the sugar cane fields. The mongooses discovered that the local birds tasted better than rats, and proceeded to wipe out the island’s ground-nesting birds. In 1935 farmers imported the South American cane toad into Northern Queensland, Australia, to get rid of a beetle that was devastating their sugar cane crops. Unfortunately, the beetles fly at night and are inaccessible to the toads, so the toads eat everything else.
Cloning may turn out to be another example of a good idea gone astray. Scientists are working on methods of reproduction without sex (even though what most men want is sex without reproduction). Once women find out they don’t need men for reproduction, we’re liable to end up with only one man on earth – to take out the garbage.

We should keep in mind the old adage: Be careful what you wish for – you may get it.