The Cobra Cash Crop

Imagine it's colonial era India. The British Empire has taken over control of the subcontinent through the British owned East India Trading Company. It's not any easy time to be alive, you have to scrape by everyday doing whatever you can to make any form of a living. It's a time period where literally everything and anything can kill you, in a subcontinent full of some of the world's deadliest animals to walk, crawl, fly, or slither across the earth one of these such animals being the venomous cobra.

You live in Delhi the capital of British India. The capital is overcrowded and growing trade is booming bringing in merchants and others to the great city. But, as often is the way humanity wasn't the only immigrants to find Delhi to be a nice home or a chance at a new start you see during this time Cobra's began to move into the city at higher rates than average, growing fat from mice and other small animals that they would feed on and reproducing at an alarmingly fast rate. The Cobra problem has become so out of hand that to walk the streets day or night is to literally risk your life. You never know when walking around a corner or into a market area or down an alley when a venomous cobra could strike and medical attention at this time was just as likely to kill you as heal you, so seeing this as a major problem the British government then placed a bounty on the snakes paying handsomely for each cobra head turned into authorities.

So, you do what everyone else has decided to do, you become a cobra hunter and just like everyone else you start to get good at it and in a short time you along with the others begin to see that the number of cobras is beginning to decrease. For the British government this is a good thing, but for you not so much. If the decline is too great then the British will lift the bounty and if the bounty is lifted then how will you make money and put food on the table for your family.

After a short time of contemplating and doing the math over and over you along with many other hunters figure out that the cost of breeding cobras to kill and turn in for the bounty would be less than the bounty making it ultimately profitable in the long run to breed instead of hunt. So, with this knowledge you use money that you were able to save up, thanks to the bounty's you collected from the cobra hunting, to set up a breeding ring. Now that you are set up for breeding you need only to capture a few of the deadly snakes and make sure you have both male and female.

You were able to successfully capture yourself a couple of good strong healthy females along with a male and before long the snakes began to breed soon you had more than enough snakes to continue on this cycle making you richer and richer with each passing cycle. But this caused the number of snakes in the wild to start to grow again and the local British government has begun to notice that hunters are turning in more and more cobra heads collecting the bounties yet the number of snakes has stopped dropping.

Once the government took notice, they then launched an investigation into the matter thus discovering that many of the so-called cobra hunters were now in fact cobra breeders. This had actually grown so out of hand that it had begun to bankrupt the government so seeing that their good intentions had backfired on them the government then lifted the bounty on the venomous snake making your business obsolete so you along with many of the other breeders now had all these wild snakes and no way to turn a profit off of them so what do you do? Well, you along with everyone else set free your snakes greatly increasing the cobra population in the city making it in fact worse than it originally was.

This problem here became the namesake for the term cobra effect. A cobra effect is when incentives designed to fix a problem end up rewarding people for making them worse. A cobra effect can also be called a perverse incentive and is often used to show how incorrect stimulation in politics and economics can cause some very unintended outcomes. Other times that similar problems have happened was in 1902 in Hanoi Vietnam under French colonial rule. The government had put a bounty on rats as proof that you killed a rat and to collect the bounty one simply had to turn in a severed rat tail this led to a bunch of tailless rats running around the city.

This has also happened in more modern times when the UN in 2005 began an incentive program to cut down on greenhouse paying companies for disposing of polluting gases one of the best paying pollutants was HFC-23 a byproduct of a common coolant, thus companies began to produce more of the coolant to destroy the pollutant and collect the reward seeing this the program was suspended as of 2013. Then it happened again in October of 2020 with Hactoberfest 2020 when Digital Ocean came up with a free t-shirt incentive to the first 75000 participants to submit four or more pull requests to any public open-source repository on GitHub between 1 and 31 October. An Indian youtuber CodeWithHarry posted an instructional video on how to file a pull request to win the free t-shirt thus causing an over abundant amount of pull requests most with bad or wrong coding causing Digital Ocean to have to change the requirements for their incentive program.

Now you see Cobra Effects are an uncommon knowledge something not everyone knows about but that can happen around us every day without us realizing it until the damage is done. So, the next time you see an incentive program weigh the odds and think is this a possible Cobra Effect and if so, how do we not learn from our past mistakes? If you yourself sets up an incentive program of any kind, be it small or large think of every possible outcome or you to could fall victim to the Cobra Effect.