The Cobra Effect: Some Solutions Are Worse Than the Problem

When I was growing up in Woodlands District (St. Elizabeth, Jamaica) we got our drinking water from tanks.

The rainwater would drain from the roof of our houses by bamboo gutters to the collecting tank, except these tanks were breeding grounds for mosquitoes. To get rid of these pesty insects, one gentleman poured gasoline in his tank and sure enough got rid of the mosquitoes.

In 1958 Mao Zedong launched a campaign called "smash the sparrows." He felt that sparrows ate too much of the grain. Farmers were incentivized to kill sorrows by any means necessary. They successfully decimated the sparrow populations. Since there were no sparrows to eat the locusts, China suffered the worst crop failure, which led to the death of 15 million people from starvation.

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was an attempt to protect endangered species by placing severe restrictions on property owners of their habitats. The landowners merely killed any and all suspected endangered species, causing their further extinction.

When they were building the sewer system in Vietnam in 1906, it proved to be a haven for rats. As the rat population grew, the government got the citizens involved by paying a bounty for each rat tail they brought in which appeared to be successful, except the citizens didn't actually kill the rats, they merely severed their tails and let them go. In fact, some entrepreneurial citizens made a business out of raising rats and selling the tails to the government, all of which increased the rat population.

Along the same lines, In New Delhi (India), the government was trying to rid the city of the deadly cobra snakes and paid a bounty for every dead snake and the number of snakes increased as enterprising people bred the snakes in large numbers, killed them, and sold them at a premium.

When the government found out that people were doing this, they stopped the incentives and the cobra breeders set all the snakes free to terrorize the city. Hence the "cobra effect," meaning sometimes trying to fix a problem, can make it worse - the attempted solution results in unintended consequences. The incentive unintentionally rewarded people for making the problem worse.

"The best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to put a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them." (Mark Twain).

When the automobile became popular in the United States and Goodyear needed to manufacture more and more tires, they were limited by a shortage of rubber that came from the rubber trees in Brazil. The workers were non-productive, and the president ordered his supervisor to double the workers’ pay to motivate them to produce more rubber.

In fact, production was cut in half as the workers only wanted to make enough for that day and, since they could now take care of their family needs in half the time, they went home after working for half the day.

Start with the fact that Bogota (Columbia) had too many cars, pollution, and traffic jams, so the government decided to cut traffic by half by only allowing odd number license plates on odd number days and only even number license plates on even number days. The solution for citizens was just buy more cars and the traffic and pollution increased.

Does your solution cause another problem - one that is just as bad or worse than the problem you addressed? Maybe you should not act so impulsively and take a few minutes to discuss the ramifications with someone in the know, or maybe someone who had a similar problem. A forced or hasty solution may be worse than the problem.

Sometimes problems resolve themselves if you just leave well enough alone. A cold will last a week if you do nothing and seven days if you see a doctor about it. Be careful not to exaggerate your situation. It may help to stay focused and solicit feedback about your proposed course of action.

There are always multiple ways to address a problem; it is never just the first thing you think of. In the final analysis, this is just a part of living; we all make mistakes but, fortunately, most of us have the wherewithal to fix or live with the consequences.

In golf, sometimes we hit what appears to be a perfect shot that goes awry and sometimes we hit a horrible shot that turns out better than expected. We will live with it either way.

It is a common problem in medicine that we compartmentalize our maladies. A patient typically consults with several medical specialists that only tend focus on the organ related to their specialty. The right hand may not know what the left hand is doing, or the treatment may be helpful for the liver but devastating for the heart.

The Mayo Clinic uses an integrated approach - collegial, cooperative staff teamwork with multispecialty integration coupled with the availability of the most advanced, innovative diagnostic and therapeutic technology and techniques. This greatly reduces the possibility that a cure for one problem may be disastrous for other systems.

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