More
Solutions =
More
Problems

The cobra is not the problem. The cobra has never been the problem. In the summer of 1880, the British colonial administration in Delhi sat down to address what every administration before it had addressed without success: the city was full of venomous snakes, and people were dying of their bites. The administrators were modern men. They believed in incentives. They posted a bounty: one rupee for every dead cobra delivered to the office. The logic was unimpeachable.

What followed was, by any measure, an extraordinary collapse of competence. The cobras did not decrease. The cobras increased. The bounty turned out to be the most efficient program for breeding cobras the city had ever seen. When the administration discovered this and cancelled the bounty, the breeders released the now-worthless snakes into the streets — and the situation became, materially, worse than the day the policy began.

I have been thinking about this story for fifteen years.

I did not think about it the way an historian does. I am an engineer. I came to it from the other direction — through structural calculations, where a load applied here always shows up somewhere else, and the somewhere else is the part you didn't plan for. I came to it through software, where every feature added to a system creates new failure modes, and the failure modes you don't catch are the ones that hurt you.

The Delhi story is not a curiosity. It is a template.

This book is about the template. It is about the way that nearly every effort to solve something, in any sufficiently complex system, generates new problems whose shape, severity, and timing nobody predicted — and whose cost frequently exceeds the cost of the problem we were trying to solve in the first place.

It is about why this happens, why it has always happened, and why it now happens faster than it ever has.

It is also — and this matters — about what to do anyway.