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There is another story I have heard many times about how the Vietnam government paid local people to kill rats. To prove they killed a rat, the locals had to cu

There is another story I have heard many times about how the Vietnam government paid local people to kill rats. To prove they killed a rat, the locals had to cut its tail off and bring it in to collect payment. The locals decided it was getting harder and harder to find rats to get paid to capture. They started to cut the tails off and release the rats back into the sewers so that they could procreate. So the government's attempt to kill all rats ended in rats being bred and eventually an increase in rat population. Here is one link that tells some of the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

Anthony-G 4y ago
> The French thought that this was a good idea because they had a policy of trying to encourage entrepreneurialism in Vietnam. It seems that the natives were already a lot more enterprising than the French had thought. I had heard of the story of the Cobra Effect[1] but the Hanoi Rat Masscacre is a much better documented example of the Perverse Incentive phenomenon. It also strikes me as an example of Goodhart's Law[2] in effect. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_original_cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law