Posted by Marc Hodak on April 19, 2007 under Unintended consequences | 
I’m certainly not claiming this is the intent of the mass media in response to the Virginia Tech shootings, but consider the following. The shooter, apparently between murders, sent out a media packet to NBC. The packet included his rambling, twisted fantasies, including his view of the Columbine killers as “martyrs.” It had a video and digital album showing in Rambo-like posturing. If, as the media says, a picture is worth a thousand words, then what are they doing posting the contents of this killer’s media kit?
I could forgive NBC if I took their response to incentives at face value. Murder stories sell, especially if gun play is involved, and NBC is in it for the money. But not all gun stories seem to be created equal. Consider the story of a similar shooting that happened just down the road at Appalachian Law School.
There, a former student went into the school building and shot six people, killing three. Two students, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, independently ran to retrieve their personal weapons from their vehicles. They approached the shooter from different positions, and when Bridges yelled to the shooter to put down his weapon, the killer promptly complied, and was then tackled by a couple other students who were near by. You’d think this was a good story. It’s got violence, a villain, and heroes.
Here’s how the Associated Press State & Local Wire reported the incident that day:
A law school student upset about his grades went on a shooting spree Wednesday, killing three people and critically wounding three others before he was wrestled to the ground by students, officials said…
He said the gunman then went downstairs into a common area and opened fire on a crowd of students, killing one and wounding three others. He was tackled by four male students as he left the building.
“They just wanted the guy,” Briggs said. “They weren’t worried about their own personal safety.”
Gee, tackling an armed shooter sounds insanely heroic, if not suicidal�Ķunless you have that little extra piece of information that the shooter had already been immobilized by armed citizens.
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Posted by Marc Hodak on April 5, 2007 under Unintended consequences |
The “war on drugs” is a fount of unintended consequences, on steroids. One example of the pain this war is causing us all is the literal pain it is causing millions of Americans who are having trouble getting proper treatment. Drug laws penalize doctors for prescribing high doses of medication to certain patients. The theory is that some patients are really addicts (making it illegal to treat addicts who happen to be in pain) or dealers who are just taking advantage of the medical system to make a buck. The problem is, doctors have a notoriously difficult time telling real patients from fake ones. That wasn’t a big section on the board exam. Listening to patients and caring for them was. Do such laws really chill the treatment of pain? Ask Dr. Hurwitz. As reported in the New York Times:
Dr. Hurwitz, depending on which side you listen to, is either the most infamous doctor-turned-drug-trafficker in America or a compassionate physician being persecuted because a few patients duped him.
When Dr. Hurwitz, who is now 62, was sent to prison in 2004 for 25 years on drug trafficking and other charges, the United States attorney for Eastern Virginia, Paul J. McNulty, called the conviction ���a major achievement in the government���s efforts to rid the pain management community of the tiny percentage of doctors who fail to follow the law and prescribe to known drug dealers and abusers.���
Yes, that was 25 years. For a doctor who didn’t directly profit from the sale of the drugs.
Dr. James N. Campbell, a Johns Hopkins University neurosurgeon specializing in pain, has this to say about this prosecution:
���Opioids were a revolution in pain treatment during the 1990s, but doctors are now more reluctant to use them,��� Dr. Campbell says. ���If a doctor perceives there���s a 1 in 5,000 chance that a prescription will lead to a D.E.A. inquiry ��� just an inquiry, not even an arrest ��� he���s not going to take the chance. So the victims are the patients.���
OK, let’s say that the actual deterrence threshold was a one-in-50 chance; this is still far from theoretical problem…
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Posted by Marc Hodak on March 29, 2007 under Unintended consequences |
Given the ongoing insurance issues related to Katrina, Mississippi seems like a good place to visit in search of that twilight zone we like to call “the land of unintended consequences.”
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coast in 2005, another storm engulfed the insurers. Apparently, they were refusing to pay hurricane victims for flood damage. Why would they do such a callous thing? Because flood damage is excluded from coverage by property and casualty insurers. In other words, insurers never promised to pay for flooding, and never collected premiums to compensate them for such coverage.
Nevertheless, politicians and lawyers in Mississippi, acting as “defenders of the people,” pressured the insurance companies into paying more than they contractually owed. These defenders said they were watching out for the welfare of their constituents. Yet, the main effect of going the extra mile to squeeze out the extra payments was to substantially reduce their constituents’ welfare by chasing away some of the biggest insurers in the state, and leaving their people with fewer insurers charging higher rates.
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Posted by Marc Hodak on March 28, 2007 under Unintended consequences |
In this day, even cigarette companies wouldn’t actually provide financial incentives to get people to start smoking. No, only people bent on helping smokers quit could come up with incentives like that. From today’s WSJ, we have the example of Rockford Acromatic Products:
The Illinois auto-parts maker used to offer $250 to employees who would stay smoke-free for several months. But some workers took up smoking just so they could quit and qualify for the reward. The company stopped offering the incentive.
“It was not our intention to encourage people to start smoking. It was aimed at people who already had a bad habit.”
That’s the way it is with incentives. People getting into the incentives game tend to have bad aim, like beginners in any sport. Even experienced incentive experts can’t always account for all of the secondary effects of their schemes.
For me, a key element in this note was that the company “stopped offering the incentive.” It’s not surprising that they stopped, of course, once they saw the perverse effect it was having. It was the speed with which they recognized this effect, and how quickly and completely they were able to change course. A more bureaucratic environment may have taken much longer to recognize the problem or deal with it. A more politicized environment, where the program was the pet project of a powerful manager, may have attempted to bury the potentially embarrassing glitch in the program, or even taken the higher numbers of people accepting the reward as proof of their program’s efficacy. I’ll leave it to the imagination of the reader to figure what a politicized bureaucracy would have done with such a program.
Posted by Marc Hodak on March 22, 2007 under Unintended consequences |
Teach for America is a group that takes kids just out of college and gives them the opportunity, if you could call it that, to teach in inner city schools for a couple of years. I came across two articles on this venture. One is the harrowing story of a real person’s experience trying to serve his “strong sense of social justice.” The other article is from the Onion. Normally, the Onion presents the more absurd version of reality. I think this is an excellent example of how reality ultimately trumps idealism…or of life imitating art.
