I have a passion for learning names of social phenomena that are fairly obscure and relatively unknown. Famous examples of this would be Murphy’s Law or the Streisand effect. However it’s the lesser known terms that I adore hearing about, because I love having that “Man, I never thought about that, but it makes sense!” moment.
The cobra effect sparked that reaction in me when I first heard of it. Stealing the definition from its Wikipedia page, it “occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse, as a type of unintended consequence.” Just like the time I sat down to write a FFITHW post because it would be quick, but then spent hours rewriting it to fit into the word limit, the cobra effect means your plans backfired horribly.
The term was coined by an economist named Horst Siebert, probably because he thought it sounded better than “perverse incentive” which means the same thing. He used it to describe the bad things that can happen when someone incentivizes groups or individuals to perform tasks for them. Case in point:
When the British Empire ruled India in the 1800’s, the country was overrun by deadly cobras. Deciding that the local population would handle this problem with efficiency, the government offered a bounty on each dead cobra that was brought to them. It seemed like a good plan. Unfortunately, some crafty individuals began breeding cobras in order to maximize their profits, causing a large upswing in the cobra population. Once the government caught on and reacted by ending the rewards, the breeders simply released the snakes, resulting in a cobra problem much worse than at the start.
The moral of that story? Don’t pay other people to do work for you – they’ll scam you.
Cineri Gloria Sera Venit 
Does the one child policy of China qualify as a cobra effect?
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I don’t know if it would be strictly speaking. I doubt the result was really an unintended consequence, the government knew what it was doing and the murders that would result, that was kind of the point.
On the other hand other unforseen issues like the 4-2-1 problem could probably count. The point of the cobra effect though is an incentive going horribly wrong and exacerbating the original problem, not necessarily creating new problems. It’s probably a grey area though, that’s just my interpretation.
I’d ask Horst but he’s dead.
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I get you…I was thinking of the dearth-of-females-in-the-population aspect of the situation. But I see I was confusing the cobra effect with a simple unintended consequence. Then again, people were given incentives to contraception/abort…but there is no scamming of the system so you are right. Very interesting post.
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