Some other examples of unintended consequences, compliments of Wikipedia, to assist with Bek’s reading comprehension issues:
In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.
Funding fire departments by the number of fire calls made is intended to reward the fire departments that do the most work. However, it may discourage them from fire-prevention activities, which reduce the number of fires.
19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximize their payments.
Paying architects and engineers according to what is spent on a project leads to excessively costly projects.
Paying medical professionals and reimbursing insured patients for treatment but not for prevention.
The NFL Draft gives the earliest draft picks to the teams with the worst records in the previous season, encouraging teams no longer eligible for the playoffs in a given season to lose as many games as possible so that they can obtain better draft picks the following season.
Last edited by High Roller; 07-01-10 at 09:10 AM.