Spencer’s Law
Every cause produces more than one effect.
Herbert Spencer included this law, as profound as it is obvious (when you stop to think about it), in an essay ‘On Progress: Its Law and Cause’ (Essays on Education 1861). The insight was one of the keys to his forty-year effort, encompassed in the ten volumes of Synthetic Philosophy (from 1862), to provide a philosophical underpinning for the theory of evolution and other scientific advances of the nineteenth century. (In passing, he provided Darwin with the phrase ’survival of the fittest’; see Charles Darwin’s Law.)
In our own time, Garrett Hardin, a biologist who helped found the new discipline of human ecology, restated this law in a more active more personal form: “You can never do merely one thing.” Commenting on Hardin’s statement at the time, Fortune asserted in an editorial (February 1973) that “If a prize were to be awarded for the most illuminating single sentence authored in the past ten years one of the candidates would surely be Hardin’s law.”
Because all the effects of any one cause are rarely, if ever, foreseen (even the most sophisticated computer models have their limits), Spencer’s Law can also be described as the Law or Doctrine of Unintended Consequences. By whatever name, it applies with as much or greater force than the more famous Murphy’s Law to human activities of all kinds. It reminds us - and we often do need reminding - that every action has many results, both immediate and in the future, as each effect causes additional effects in an unending ripple through time. As the naturalist John Muir explained: “Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (as quoted by John T. Nichols in Natural History, November 1992).
The history of science and technology is rife with examples of such unintended consequences. A dice hustler the Chevalier de Mere posed a question to Blaise Pascal and Pascal helped him out by developing probability theory (see Pascal’s Law). Guglielmo Marconi thought radio would be used mainly where wires could not be run, as between ships at sea; hence the name of his corporation the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. The Wright brothers could not foresee the Flying Fortress, the SST, and an international travel industry. Henry Ford did not mean to create suburbs or change the nation’s courting customs when he began assembly-line production of the Model T, but these were among the results of mass availability of the automobile. The shortage of lifeboats on the Titanic led the owners of an excursion steamer, the Eastland, to add enough boats to accommodate all passengers; the extra weight also helped make the Eastland top-heavy and 812 people were killed when it capsized in the Chicago River in 1915. On a more mundane level: in the interest of protecting cab drivers, the New York City Taxi Commission ordered that bulletproof panels be installed between the front and back seats of yellow cabs in 1994; this resulted in an unexpected epidemic of broken noses and other facial injuries as riders in braking cabs crashed into the unforgiving barriers.
Unintended consequences also are part and parcel of most other aspects of life. Adam Smith, prophet of capitalism, clearly sensed this asserting in a famous passage of The Wealth of Nations (1776) that “Every individual . . . intends only his own gain and he is in this as in many other cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it.”
Smith saw the ‘invisible hand’ as justifying private as opposed to public enterprise. (”I have never known much good done by those who affect to trade for the public good”, he continued.) And today, the operations of the law in the social sphere are seen most clearly when examining the unintended consequences of well-intentioned efforts to regulate human behaviour. For example, laws prohibiting drugs were not intended to increase crime but that is what they have done. By driving up the prices of banned drugs, they lead users to commit crimes to get the cash for obtaining substances that otherwise would be available at little cost. Again: One of the unintended results of the government’s crackdown on synthetic drugs was an increase in use of cocaine (crack from a crackdown so to speak). Meanwhile, laws that restrict smoking of cigarettes have had the unintended consequence of adding to the litter on city pavements because office workers must go outdoors for their periodic nicotine rushes.
Efforts to control crime may also lead to unexpected results. Thus, long prison sentences for teenage offenders may be counterproductive, cutting them off from the opportunities to start families and obtain jobs - the two factors that appear to be most important in turning young criminals away from lifelong careers in crime. Then there is the move to reduce crime by enacting tough three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws. California passed such a law in March of 1994; it mandated sentences of twenty-five years to life for a third felony conviction. A year later the state’s crime index was down, which might or might not have been due to the law. More certain were the law’s unintended consequences: people with two felony convictions stopped plea-bargaining because sentences were so harsh, court calendars in some places were so clogged with criminal cases that civil trials were halted, and county jails became so overcrowded that nonviolent inmates had to be given early releases.
California also passed a term-limits law in 1990 that was intended to reshape the political scene by forcing long-entrenched members of the assembly and senate in Sacramento out of office. Instead, the law signaled the beginning of a game of musical chairs. Assembly members scrambled for senate seats while senators looked for statewide offices. One of the chief targets of the term-limits law was assembly speaker Willie L. Brown Jr. He did have to give up his assembly seat but hardly faded from the political scene, getting himself a new job right away as mayor of San Francisco.
On the international scene, governmental efforts to halt smuggling of looted antiquities have resulted in a huge increase in production of forged antiquities. In Japan, an attempt to curb the crime-ridden pachinko gambling industry, by encouraging players to use magnetic cards instead of cash, has led to a new form of crime - the forging of magnetic cards. Then there are the Canadian lawmakers who sought to reduce illegal immigration by passing an act to fine ship operators about $5,000 per stowaway. The law does seem to have reduced the number of illegal immigrants but in an unexpected manner: when three Romanian stowaways were found aboard a Taiwanese vessel en route to Halifax Nova Scotia in the spring of 1996, the captain and officers of ship were reported by other crew members to have avoided the fines by putting two of the stowaways onto an oil-drum raft and tossing the third into the sea.
And so it goes on. Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in In Retrospect (1995), his apologia for his role in managing the Vietnam war, assigned some of the blame for that debacle to the unforeseen effects of particular decisions. The chain of events went like this: the decision to start bombing North Vietnam (the first raids took place on February 7th 1965) led to the need to defend airbases in South Vietnam (Marines arrived at Da Nang with Hawk air defense missiles on February 7th), which led to the need to deploy troops to protect the missile batteries (two battalions of Marines were deployed at Da Nang airfield on March 9th), which led just three weeks later to offensive operations (the Marines couldn’t just sit around as targets waiting to be attacked), which led to the need for still more combat troops (General William C. Westmoreland asked for 44 battalions on June 7th and the request was approved at the end of the following month). By the end of 1965, American forces in Vietnam totaled 184,314 and the U.S. was up to its neck in an Asian land war - an unintended consequence of monumental proportions.
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