Unintents

 Niall Ferguson continues to bug me, but he did point out some interesting economic/political history in a piece on Unitended Consequences for Bloomberg. I label this for both Finance and Horse Playing. The story highlights John Locke as well.

In “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (American Sociological Review, 1936), Robert K. Merton proposed five possible reasons why the best-laid schemes of politicians and planners so often go awry:

1. Partial knowledge — “the paradox that, whereas past experience is the sole guide to our expectations on the assumption that certain past, present and future acts are sufficiently alike to be grouped in the same category, these experiences are in fact different.”

2. Error — “the too-ready assumption that actions which have in the past led to the desired outcome will continue to do so.”

3. The “imperious immediacy of interest” — “instances where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes the consideration of further or other consequences of the same act.”

4. “Basic values” — “instances where there is no consideration of further consequences because of the felt necessity of certain action enjoined by certain fundamental values.” The example Merton gives is Max Weber’s Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, where deferred gratification had the unintended consequence of accumulating capital and ultimately eroding Calvinist asceticism.

5. Self-defeating prophecy — “Public predictions of future social developments are frequently not sustained precisely because the prediction has become a new element in the concrete situation … [so that] the ‘other-things-being-equal’ condition tacitly assumed in all forecasting is not fulfilled.”