Unintended Consequences

Great Moments in Unintended Consequences: Fossils, Price Controls, and Traffic Lights (Vol. 17)

Good intentions, bad results.

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Great moments in unintended consequences—when something that sounds like a great idea goes horribly wrong. Watch the whole series.

Part One: Beef Grief

The Year: 1946

The Problem: The price of beef is skyrocketing! And voters are angry! And it's an election year!

The Solution: Reinstitute federal war-time price controls.

Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, artificially low prices are harder to swallow when you're the one selling. Angry farmers, unwilling to sell their meat at government-mandated prices, refused to bring their cattle to market. Meat production plummeted. Now everyone was angry. Miners went on strike. Butchers closed. Hospitals complained they'd have to serve horse meat. With voters up in arms and an election weeks away, President Harry Truman lifted the restrictions. But not soon enough: in what's been called "The Beefsteak Election," Democrats were slaughtered at the polls, losing Congress for the first time in 16 years. 

But at least that meat shortage was cured.

Part Two: Reaching New Lights

The Year: 2010-ish

The Problem: Traffic lights in Japan use up too much energy!

The Solution: Replace the incandescent bulbs with energy efficient LEDs that last longer and cost less to operate!

Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, it gets cold! And since LED bulbs don't radiate enough heat to melt snow and ice, the signals became obscured, resulting in numerous traffic accidents and workers being sent out to clean the signals with brooms. And it wasn't just Japan—in Green Bay, maintenance crews in bucket lifts scraped their new lights by hand, St. Paul used air compressors, and Newark even employed Super Soakers filled with anti-freeze. 

Various solutions are in the works, but until they get it all figured out just treat it like a four-way stop, OK? That's snow joke.

Part Three: Keeping Up With The Boneses 

The Year: 1937

The Problem: Finding early human fossils is hard, especially in Indonesia!

The Solution: Pay locals for every fragment they can find!

Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, it worked like a charm! Paleontologist and Awesome Name Club member Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald was delighted to find that enterprising locals were bringing him useful fossils. Even better, the small fragments fit together to create a virtually complete hominid skull. They fit together so well, in fact, that he realized the helpful locals "were breaking up the larger pieces behind my back, in order to get a bigger bonus."

That's one way to get ahead.

Do you know a great moment in unintended consequences? Email us at comedy@reason.com.