Unintended consequences, good and bad
Last night, we had Brian Micklethwait and Patrick Crozier around for supper. During the meal, Antoine mentioned something about how, in schools where teachers are given performance-related incentives, cheating is much more rife. After all, it’s not in those teachers’ interests to police such things very stringently. Then, after dinner, Patrick said that the ultimate aim of his wiki is to be able to respond to any news story with a link to a liberty-conscious take on the underlying issues. (The word he used was ‘libertarian,’ which is what he calls himself and is, er, free to…but I don’t, so I’m not.) For example, a story about immigration could link directly to the argument that the free movement of people is just as inalienable a right as freedom of speech and freedom of trade.
This all made me think that I’d like to start a blog or wiki which consists entirely of reasons why specific bright ideas (such as performance-related incentives for teachers) aren’t necessarily as bright as they appear. The flipside of that would be a collection of silver linings for every perceived tragedy. Leave it to Techdirt (whose incredibly high quality feed I hadn’t checked for 50 posts, hence my scouring it at 6.45AM before a three-day weekend) to provide a cracking example of the benefits of expensive fuel:
Last year, Wired ran an article claiming that expensive gas is good for America because it spurs innovation into alternative energy. The increased interest among VCs in green technology definitely backs this up. But that’s just one side of the coin; superior methods for recruiting and managing employees, originally induced by high energy costs, will stay with us even when gas goes back to $1.50. Over time, we’ll benefit from the energy constraints we face today.
UPDATE: I’m not saying (well, I don’t think I have said it anywhere in this post, but I am quite sleep-deprived) that these silver linings or clouds prove that any view is correct or incorrect…merely that I would like to collect the ones I find interesting or worth considering (similar to my criteria for posting to my blog - my space, my criteria based on my whims).
Filed under: Life