I'm trouble by the example the review gives (about Norman Borlaug's green revolution having unanticipated side effects). I think they're tryting to make the po

I'm trouble by the example the review gives (about Norman Borlaug's green revolution having unanticipated side effects). I think they're tryting to make the point that in optimizing yield, Borlaug caused a whole bunch of secondary side effects (family farms going away, massive monoculture and pesticide). And the conclusion they want you to reach is that by optimizing yield, they left out variables like "social and other effects on the commons". It wasn't Borlaug's job as an optimizer to consider those downstream effects. If he had, and hadn't done his research, billions of people would not be alive today (having starved to death or not being born in the first place). Good luck working out the utility function around that! I'm sure there are better examples. Maybe antibiotics, whose discovery saved millions of lives, but also helped bacteria evolve defenses, thus making some antibiotics useless due to overprescription?