Cobra Effect
The British paid a bounty for dead cobras to reduce the snake population. When it ended, the population was higher than before. What went wrong?
19008 min read
Type
Optimization
Maximising a target and what that target destroys.
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Beginner
Ages 8+, no background needed.
Intermediate
Curious teenagers and general adult readers.
Goodhart's Law
The moment you measure something and start rewarding the number, the number stops telling you what it used to.
1975 (Goodhart's formulation), 1997 (Strathern's phrasing)14 min read
The Tragedy of the Commons
Every herder gains by putting one more animal on the shared field. The field is destroyed by people behaving reasonably.
196815 min read
The Jevons Paradox
Build an engine that burns less coal and the country ends up burning more coal. This was noticed in 1865 and has not stopped.
186518 min read
Advanced
Undergraduate level in the relevant field.
Braess's Paradox
Add a new road to a congested city and every journey gets slower. Close the road again and the traffic speeds up.
196819 min read
Levinthal's Paradox
A protein has more possible shapes than the universe has atoms, yet it finds the right one in less than a thousandth of a second.
1968–196917 min read
The Giffen Paradox
Some things sell more as the price goes up, and the people buying them are behaving perfectly sensibly.
1895 (Marshall's third edition); 2008 (first credible field evidence)18 min read
The Productivity Paradox
Computers arrived in every office through the 1970s and 80s. Measured productivity did not move for two decades.
1987 (Solow's remark), debate ongoing17 min read