The law of unintended consequences

There's an old saying that I've mentioned a few times in previous posts (see, for example, "Past is prologue").  I like Winston Churchill's version the best.  Churchill said, "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."  

It seems that the local government leaders in the Chicago suburb of Lincoln Park have forgotten their history, or at the very least, they've forgotten about the law of unintended consequences.  Apparently, 43rd Ward Alderperson Timmy Knudsen recently introduced a resolution for a privately funded pilot ("Rat Contraceptive Pilot") that will introduce non-toxic contraceptive pellets to reduce the rat population.  The pilot is being coordinated with the local government, the Chicago Bird Alliance, the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Lincoln Park Conservancy, and the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation.

Similar pilot programs in other suburbs of Chicago (Wicker Park and Bucktown) have been reasonably successful, at least so far.  The contraceptive agent is cottonseed oil, which renders both male and female rats infertile.  Importantly, cottonseed oil is not toxic to other species, at least based on our current knowledge.  Previous attempts to control the rat population have used poisonous substances that have killed other species as collateral damage or as an unintended consequence.  In Lincoln Park's case, a species of horned owl was the collateral damage.

It's virtually guaranteed that when some change is introduced into a complex system, there will be an unanticipated or unintended consequence.  The American sociologist Robert K. Merton conducted the first and perhaps most complete analysis of the law of unintended consequences in a 1936 paper entitled "The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action".  He identified five potential causes of unintended consequences:

1. Ignorance of how complex systems actually work

2. Errors of analysis or failure to use Bayes theorem (not updating our beliefs in light of new information)

3. Focusing on short-term gains while forgetting long-term consequences (perhaps willful ignorance, in which an individual chooses to ignore the unintended effects because he or she desires the intended effects so much) - Merton called this "imperious immediacy of interest"

4. The requirement for or prohibition of certain actions

5. Creation of self-defeating prophecies 

Merton says, "Most unintended consequences are just unanticipated consequences", largely due to ignorance or errors of analysis (the first two causes above).  One wonders whether the local authorities could have predicted the risk of an alternative species, such as the horned owl, ingesting rat toxin and dying as a result.  Perhaps they were so focused on the short-term gain of reducing the rat population, that they neglected or even forgot the potential long-term consequences of killing other species (Merton's third cause above).

I can't help but wonder what the unintended consequences that cottonseed oil will have on the local community.  It seems like it would be safe to place rat pellets containing that substance in areas where rats congregate.  But, you just never know.  I can't help but think of the case I described in my post "Is this another April Fool's joke?" of mice armed with Tylenol parachuting into the jungles of Guam in an attempt to control the Brown Tree Snake population.  The mere fact that the Brown Tree Snake, a non-native species, is even on the island of Guam is yet another unintended consequence.

Health care is the nation's top employer!

The journalists Lydia DePillis and Christine Zhang wrote an article for The New York Times last month that I found very interesting ("How Health Care Remade the U.S. Economy").  I actually saw the article appear on my daily newsfeed when the article had first appeared and marked it to be read later, and I finally was able to read it.  The main theme of the article is that the health care industry has become America's top employer!

According to DePillis and Zhang, health care has been responsible for about one-third of the growth in employment in the past year and has more than replaced the loss of jobs in the manufacturing and retail sectors (see also the working paper by the health economists, Joshua Gottlieb, Neale Mahoney, Kevin Rinz, and Victoria Udalova "The Rise of Healthcare Jobs").  Today, health care workers account for approximately 13% of the total workforce in the United States, up from 9% in 2000.  Certainly the changing demographics in the U.S. have played a role here - as Americans age, they will require more care.  However, these trends could change in the next few years.  Given the recent cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, health care organizations are looking for ways to cut costs, and cutting labor costs could be one lever to pull.

DePillis and Zhang cite three factors at play here.  First, more Americans are getting access to care as the uninsured rate declined significantly following passage of the Affordable Care Act.  Second, as access to care has increased, people are using more of it.  Again, the aging U.S. population is a factor here, as chronic conditions (that require more care) increase with age.  Third, Americans are spending more on health care because they have more money to spend.  Americans now spend more on health care than either groceries or housing.

What I found most interesting about the article was the fact that the health care industry is the biggest employer in 38 out of 50 states!  Just look at the graphic below, again from data obtained by DePillis and Zhang and published in The New York Times:

The article also mentions the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the U.S. healthcare workforce (I've mentioned this a few times in recent posts, see "Will we get replaced by AI?").  What's also mentioned is the fact that health care is not efficient.  Many times, but not always, efficiency is equated, rightly or wrongly, with being smaller.  It will be interesting to monitor these health care workforce trends as artificial intelligence, the aging U.S. population, and the looming cuts to Medicare and Medicaid all converge at the same time.

Take a break...

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a book that the American entrepreneur, author, ultramarathoner, former rapper (under the name "Jesse Jaymes"), and co-owner of the professional basketball team Atlanta Hawks Jesse Itzler wrote about his month-long experience of living and training with former Navy SEAL David Goggins.  The book is called Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet.  For his next project, Itzler decided to work on his spiritual health by living in a monastery and going "off the grid" for a month (see Living with the Monks).  Itzler apparently gave up all access to social media and his smart phone during his time with the monks.

While I haven't read Itzler's latest book about giving up access to information technology, I have read a recent study (see "Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being") published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus journal.  An investigative team conducted a study in which they blocked all mobile internet access for a two-week period.  They used a cross-over design in which study participants served as their own controls, i.e. they participated for a full two-week period without mobile Internet access as well as an additional two-week period with full mobile Internet access.  During the intervention period (no mobile Internet access), study participants were able to call and/or text message on their smartphone and use the Internet via desktop computers.

Simply blocking access on the study participants' smartphones significantly improved objective measures of mental health and the ability to sustain attention, as well as subjective measures of well-being.  These effects occurred because blocking mobile Internet access increased social connection, feelings of self-control, and sleep.  As participants spent less time on the Internet, they spent more time in the "offline world" (socializing in person, exercising, being in nature, pursuing a hobby, or reading a book) and less time in the "digital world".  The investigators emphasized, "the change in objectively measured sustained attention ability is about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline and about a quarter of the difference between healthy adults and those with ADHD."  Just as powerful, the observed improvements in symptoms of depression (one of the objective measures of well-being) was larger than what would be typical for individuals on anti-depressant medications and similar to the improvement observed with cognitive behavioral therapy.

I can remember a time when I went on vacation and somehow lost access to the Internet and email on my smartphone.  There was some glitch with our mobile service provider, which I couldn't address until we got back home.  I have to say that while losing mobile Internet access was certainly a change, I actually didn't miss it!  I spent more quality time on vacation, which certainly improved my subjective well-being.

Studies have suggested that more than 90% of American adults own a smartphone, and the average user spends up to 4.6 hours per day on their device.  Just as important, survey data suggests that half of all smartphone users in America worry that they use their device too much.  I've already mentioned in previous posts that experts worry that smartphones "hijack our minds" or that they've "destroyed a generation" (see in particular my posts, "Are smartphones making us dumb?" and "Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid...").  

Unfortunately, not all of us have the ability to put work aside and spend a month in a monastery like Jess Itzler did for his book.  However, all of us do have the ability to forego using our smartphones as frequently as we do currently.  Perhaps we could set a certain amount of time aside every day in which we refrain from using our smartphones (there is a way to do just that)?  I've already talked about how I deleted the Facebook and Twitter/X apps on my smartphone and deleted my accounts to both sites (see my post "Liberation").  I can already tell a difference.  Regardless of how we do it, the data strongly suggests that spending less time on our mobile Internet devices will make all of us feel a lot better!