You mean the old woman I saw tonight wasn’t Mrs. Bates?
What are some actual examples of the law of unintended consequences in action?
American citizens often complain about how high CEO salaries are. The SEC attempted to mitigate this, and required CEO salaries to be publicly disclosed. As a result, they increased approximately three-fold between 1976 and 1993, going from 36 times the average worker pay to 131 times the average worker pay. “It encouraged other CEOs to demand higher pay, since now they had hard data telling them they were underpaid.”
When San Francisco banned giving away toys with happy meals that exceeded a certain percentage of fat, McDonald’s responded by offering the toys with purchase of a happy meal and a 10 cent contribution to charity. They also stopped selling the toys without happy meal purchase, meaning you now have to buy the meal to get the toy.
images { 1. Claudio Oliverio | 2 }
