Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.
One critique of the United States’s drug policy is that it doesn’t halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
Regarding immigration from Mexico to the USA, Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to discourage illegal immigration into the USA near Tijuana. But it actually just caused immigrants to shift from from crossing the border in one place to crossing in a different place. It also may have increased the number of illegal immigrants in the USA, because previously people came and left cyclically, but with stricter border control people instead came and stayed. While we could certainly argue that this isn’t altruistic, the general idea of taking action to reduce/halt a behavior actually resulting in that behavior continuing elsewhere applies.
More mundane: a parent doesn’t want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven’t read the research on this).
Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.
One critique of the United States’s drug policy is that it doesn’t halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
When a jurisdiction bans chicken farmers from using small cages, (such as California’s Proposition 2 from 2008) then it might just shift production elsewhere.
Regarding immigration from Mexico to the USA, Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to discourage illegal immigration into the USA near Tijuana. But it actually just caused immigrants to shift from from crossing the border in one place to crossing in a different place. It also may have increased the number of illegal immigrants in the USA, because previously people came and left cyclically, but with stricter border control people instead came and stayed. While we could certainly argue that this isn’t altruistic, the general idea of taking action to reduce/halt a behavior actually resulting in that behavior continuing elsewhere applies.
More mundane: a parent doesn’t want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven’t read the research on this).
A little bit different, but a classic example of this kind of “poor reasoning about second order effects” is the cobra effect (or any similar incentive for extermination)
Welfare traps
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of list of examples I was looking for.