Back in the 1800s (or so the possibly apocryphal story goes), the British government in India was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi.
What to do about these snakes who were causing such havoc on the city, the Brits thought. Hey, how about we offer a bounty for each dead cobra that is brought in.
The program seemed to be working well, as large numbers of snakes were brought in for the bounty.
The trouble was, that instead of fewer snakes being turned in as time went on, the number of snakes was increasing.
Which seemed…wrong to the British government, so they started to make inquiries. Turns out that, because the snakes were now valuable, a number of people had started breeding cobras to ensure that they could get the reward.
That didn’t sit very well with the British, so they scrapped the reward program.
The snake breeders, now stuck with bucket loads of worthless snakes, just set the snakes free. You know, out onto the streets of Delhi, and so the population of cobras in the city increased.
By trying to solve a problem, they actually made it worse.
Now that story is probably not true. However in 1902, the French government of Vietnam created a bounty program for rats that were infesting Hanoi. In order to prove the rats had been killed, people would have to bring in the rat tail. Of course, enterprising locals started catching rats, cutting off their tails, and letting them free to go breed more rats. However, the economist who decided to name this phenomena decided that “the Cobra effect” was cooler than “The rat tail con”, and so picked the ahistorical and unprovable cobra example, as opposed to the well-known, but ill-named “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre.”
Ironically, the reason why the French were trying to eliminate the rats was due to an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague. And yes, while we think of the plague as a middle-ages disease, the disease hasn’t disappeared, it’s just that we’ve found a way to treat it, so modern day outbreaks are generally limited to one or two cases. While we don’t hear much about it, it actually hit North America, with the last outbreak happening in 1924, a part of the third great wave of the plague.
Part of the reason we don’t hear much about the third wave is because it mostly affected East Asia, killing 80,000 in the Chinese city of Canton in the first six months of 1894.
But for now, back to Hanoi, and their great rat massacre. This was, if you remember, 1902. Eight years earlier, Alexandre Yersin had identified the bacteria that caused the Bubonic plague and—even more remarkably for the time—was able to show that, most likely, the bacteria that caused the plague was the same as was found in rats. (To be fair, the rats were victims, too; turns out it was the ticks that were the real culprit here, not the rats or, as had been earlier suspected, the Chinese.)
Yersin was, unfortunately, unable to come up with any sort of treatment for the plague, though he tried. Instead, the best way to avoid the plague at the time was to avoid transmission vectors: ie, rats and their associated ticks.
So it seemed fairly important to the French to get rid of the rats. But, their efforts backfired. This is known in economics as “a perverse incentive”, which is an incentive which leads to an outcome that is unintended, usually undesirable, and typically contrary to the outcome the designers were looking for. Instead of “kill more rats to prevent the spread of disease,” the people of Hanoi heard “if we have more rats, we can make more money!” So instead of getting rid of rats, the French government’s efforts led to more rats.
And as a result of that, it led to more people dying of the plague. 159 people are known to have contracted the plague that year, 110 died, nearly all of them Vietnamese. Only six French colonists were infected, and only two died.
The total number of people who contracted the plague is unknown. That’s because of another unforeseen consequence of French colonial rule: the Vietnamese feared telling the French that they had a sick family member, because they didn’t want the authorities to come and “interfere.”
So the plague spread throughout Hanoi and Vietnam. People would leave their home towns and head to the city, and wound up living as beggars.
Death rates climbed. Officially, there were 263 people who died of the plague over the next few years, though, as mentioned before, people would hide their sick and dead so exact numbers will never be known.
Because of this, French authorities imposed stricter health guidelines, which included burning the homes and belongings of those who had died from the plague and seizing the bodies of those who died of the plague.
It didn’t engender good feelings amongst the local population, who got upset that the French colonists were imposing their foreign ways on them. But the measures also worked, finally helping stop the spread of the plague.
The ratcatchers, trying to stick it to the man, came up with a cunning plan that did more harm to their people, and were more at risk of catching the plague. The Vietnamese people, trying to protect their culture from the colonizing French (which most people these days think is a good thing) harmed themselves by trying to hide their sick and dying, and in turn caused more people to die.
The French imposed medical sanctions and took drastic steps to prevent the spread of the disease, saving lives, but causing the Vietnamese people to hate them.
All these things were done for objectively “good” reasons, yet the all lead to harmful outcomes. How does one then pick any course of action? More on that (maybe) next week.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
