
The Cobra Effect - henrik_w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
======
simonh
Housing policy in Britain is a bit like this. Houses in Britain are so
expensive that many people are priced out of the market. So the government
offers tax breaks and cheap loans to first time buyers. This means first time
buyers can afford to offer more money to purchase a house, bidding against
each other and driving house prices even higher.

This has been going on for decades, but they still do it because there are no
votes for letting house prices fall, and plenty of votes in offering help to
first time buyers. The fact that the general taxpayer is footing the bill is
just a detail.

~~~
digi_owl
Same has been going on in Norway since the 80s.

Graphing household debt and housing prices show them basically moving in
lockstep.

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mmanfrin
Would rent control fall under this? Rent control creates artificial pressures
for people not to leave housing, which restricts housing from being opened up
to people moving in to a region, which causes rents of non-occupied units to
rise.

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gweinberg
It seems to me that the idea of the bounty wasn't bad, the problem is just
that it was too high. If they just decreased the bounty to the point that
raising cobras was no longer profitable rather than all the way to zero,
people would still turn in the cobras they had rather than releasing them. And
they might still catch an occasional cobra for a small bounty, if the
opportunity presented.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Alternately, once they realized it wasn't working, announce that the bounty
would end in a month, so that the breeders would hustle to kill all their
cobras and bring them in.

(Or, to shift a _little_ blame away from the British, maybe if the breeders
hadn't been stupid/dickish enough to release a fuckload of live cobras in
their neighbors' back yards.)

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neoCrimeLabs
This immediately made me think of bug bounties and the vulnerability black
market.

How long until the money gets good enough for people to start introducing
obfuscated vulnerabilities into code in order to further profit from it at a
later time? With increasing financial incentive and an open market it might be
an increasing risk with opportunistic or disgruntled developers.

~~~
eCa
One mitigating factor is that it is easier to _git blame_ a codebase than a
cobra.

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smoyer
It's interesting that this appeared on the front page at the same time as the
announcement that Amazon would stop selling competing streaming video devices.

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carsongross
Yep, you get more of what you pay for. Apply to, for example, single
motherhood:

[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/Screen%20S...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/Screen%20Shot%202013-09-26%20at%205.30.23%20PM.png)

Gang aft agley, indeed.

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agumonkey
I don't get the graph's message. (I'm not smart)

~~~
Steko
While the linker wants to make the above point about welfare, the chart
appears in the below article describing one facet of income inequality.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-
amer...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-americas-
marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-worse/280056/)

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davidu
It's important to think about this when crafting sales incentive plans... You
will often be tempted to motivate a particular behavior but then you realize
that behavior is so successful that it's actually caused a new, and
potentially worse problem.

Generally these are all good problems to have though. :-)

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Houshalter
If they set a date where the bounty would end, this wouldn't have happened.
The cobra breeders would know their cobras would become worthless in a month,
and so collect the bounty while they could.

The rat thing could have prevented by collecting the whole rat instead of just
the tail.

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eCa
Also known as 'be careful what you measure'.

You want rat tails? Then rat tails you get.

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nateabele
See also: nearly every agency of the US government.

~~~
jfoutz
I know right? Can you imagine how bad it would be if the department of defense
wanted some sort of packet switched communication system that would survive a
nuclear war? Geez, we really got lucky there.

~~~
nateabele
No... not exactly. It's interesting that you pick that one, because Alan Kay
talks at length about this subject (poke around YouTube and you can find clips
if you're interested). Most of that tech came about because there was a lot of
paranoia, a lot of money, and not a lot of good ideas. So they took the money
and threw it at universities and research labs, without very many strings
attached. Once it started to look like we were winning, all the funding dried
up.

~~~
setpatchaddress
I know, right? Can you imagine how bad it would be if the department of
defense blew a big wad of cash for a limited period of time on some sort of
packet switched communication system that would survive a nuclear war? Geez,
we really got lucky there.

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greatthanks
NRA requesting to equip more people with weapons to prevent shootings.

