Cobra effect
The cobra effect describes the phenomenon that measures taken to solve a particular problem can also exacerbate it. He became known through the book of the same name by Horst Sieberts , in which the consequences of false incentives for the economy were presented. Colloquially, one also speaks of worsening improvements, which means the unintentional worsening of an initial situation through an attempt to improve it.
Origin of the term
The name goes back to an alleged historical event in British India : a British governor wanted to put a stop to a cobra plague by placing a bounty on every specimen shot. Apparently the concept worked well at first: more and more dead snakes were being delivered. However, their numbers were not reduced as the population began to breed and kill cobras in order to continue to benefit from the premium.
When the bounty was lifted after a certain period of time, the breeders released the animals because they no longer had any use for them - thanks to (indirect) government funding, the number of cobras had multiplied. A similar effect can be assumed for the tail bonus, the paying of a reward per delivered rat tail.
The cobra effect is an example of inadvertent misconduct due to evasive behavior , one of the types of state failure cited by Joseph Stiglitz .
A similar incident occurred in Hanoi, Vietnam, under French colonial rule. The regime started a bounty program for every rat killed. For the bounty, people had to hand over the severed rat tails. Of course, rats without tails were discovered at some point, because the Vietnamese pied pied rats caught the rats, cut off their tails and then released them again so that they could continue to reproduce, which gave the pied pied rats a greater income. The historian Michael Vann claims that there is no evidence for the cobra example, but that the events in Vietnam can be proven, which is why the term should actually be called "rat effect".
literature
- Horst Siebert: The cobra effect. How to avoid the wrong ways of economic policy . DVA, Stuttgart 2001; Piper, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-492-23690-1 .
supporting documents
- ^ A b Stephen J. Dubner: The Cobra Effect: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast. October 11, 2012, accessed December 7, 2015 (English, audio podcast).
- ^ Holger Rogall: Economics for social scientists . Springer, 2006, ISBN 3-531-14538-X , pp. 178 f .