From the Vault: The Cobra Effect

of of of putting value on certain things. What we're referencing with the title, of course, is what happens if you say, all right, we want to deal with the cobra problem, so we're gonna put a price on bringing in cobra's or in the one of the more you know, horrific stories of of American colonialism putting a price on the scalps of Native people. But then what happens when you do that? What kind of how does that shift the quota of violence? What do people start doing then

to cheat the system? And in both of these cases you see people doing things to cheat the system. Well, it's sort of In the episode, we explore the nature of incentives and what what incentives due to address problems people think they're trying to address and then to create other problems people don't predict. Yeah. I can't remember if I've discussed this example uh in the episode, but it reminds me of when we're trying to potty train our child and we know you give did I give this

this explanation? All right? Save it for the episode? Okay, alright, but it involves I'll just say it involves peepy nuts and poop candy and uh and and everyone can enjoy the either enjoy it a second time or you can enjoy it for the first time. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In this episode, we're gonna we're gonna be talking about some darker content towards the end, as the time all the episode implies, and indeed even the darker the less dark elements that we're going to talk about are kind of a crash course in the the the Misadventures of colonialism. But before we get into all of that, we thought we'd we'd kick off with maybe some lighter content. Yeah, Robert, I understand

that you want to tell me about peep nuts. Yes, I would love to tell you about not only peep nuts, Joe, but poop candy as well. Poop candy that's what the dog believes comes out of the cats. But oh, now you've taken into darker territory, Joe. But no I'm not. I'm talking about the rearing of human children as opposed to dogs here. Um, and this ties into the overall theme here, the use of the often the use of bounties and bribes, and then what happens when the economics

of that spirals out of control. So my son is for now, but there was a time not too long ago when we were trying to potty train him, to get him to actually um urinate and aivocate in the toilet when he needed to go to listen to his body and follow up. So it's apparently not enough just to say that is where you go do such business and point to the toilet. You actually you need to introduce some incentives to motivate this behavior, right and there.

There there are as many different schools of parenting as there are parents. So some some people have a real problem with using bribes in any situation. But hey, that's what we did in work for us. Then you've also got the poop anywhere parents, who I hear a real trouble. Well that's now I know people who are using that technique and that that seems to work for them. But I was just kidding. Wait, that's a real parenting philosopher.

I thought you were anywhere. Well, there's there are different toilet training techniques that imply it's not so much a poop anywhere. Um, what it means is like the kid will go around without pants on and then when they need to go, you scoop them up. Um, that's sort of thing. So that's what I thought you were, ok there, believe me, there are a lot of different techniques there. And uh, and and that one in particularly, I know some people have used that and it made work for them.

In our case, though, we we issued a strict bounty for every successful urination in the potty. Um, he would get one honey sesame nut from this little bag honey sesame. Yeah, like you buy a Trader Joe's and they had that. Oh they're they're delicious. Um. I had to stop eating them for a while when they were when they became peepy nuts for me and kind of there by association.

But they're great. Uh And on the other hand, for every successful poop in the toilet, which is was even more important to us at the time, he would get a single fruit gummy and that was the poop candy.

So the policy proved effective for us, but it also led to a period during which he began to make a case that each piece of feces was surely a separate poop and should then result in additional poop candies as well as the is any interruption in the stream of urine would result in two or more instances of urination, and each would require a separate reward. Okay, well, this

this is smart bargaining. Actually yeah, yeah, and it's I mean, it's it's crazy too when I look back and realize that he hadn't and he still hasn't really discovered the power of lying. Uh So, but there was still this tendency to bend the rule and even break the spirit of the rule for greater rewards. Now, after that we clarified the policy and then luckily we were able to

phase it out shortly after that. But how might things have escalated if if we hadn't you know, that's that's something to think about, and I've been thinking about in researching this topic. Well, Robert, I want to tell you a story. It might not be a true story, but but it's an interesting story with some very true analogs about the power of incentives and the sometimes unintended consequences

of incentives, and about serpents of course, asps very dangerous. Now, the story goes something like this, In colonial India, you had a British colonial administrator who decided there were too many cobras in the city of Delhi. You know, I got cobra's coming out of my ears. We gotta get rid of all these things. Though I wonder what that

actually looked like. I mean, if this really happened. I imagine we're all picturing that scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc exactly, but it was probably more like, I saw one cobra and that was too many. We've got a cobra problem in the city. But anyway, so he wanted to get rid of the cobras in the city, kill them all, get him out of here. So he came up with a solution. Put a bounty on the cobras.

That makes sense, So if you kill a cobra, just bring the dead snake to the government office and receive a cash award. Yeah. They're making it worth your while to take time out of your day to kill a snake or two. Yeah. And at first it seemed like this was working great. They're collecting plenty of cobras. But before long the local administrators discovered a problem. The people have figured out a way to game the system and turn the snake bounty into free money. They weren't catching

cobras from the city and killing them. They were farming cobras at home, killing them once they were mature, and then bringing them in to get the bounty. Now, obviously they couldn't allow this kind of mischief to continue, so the administrators ended the cobra bounty. But now you had all these snake breeders who had been farming cobras in order to get the bounty, and they're they're stuck with hundreds of worthless snakes. So what do you do with them.

We'll just release them so they have no incidive for keeping them. They release them into the streets, and the cobra population in the city drastically increases. This leads to the principle that's now known to economists as the cobra effect, and it's when a strategy implemented to solve a problem directly makes the problem worse. And the story about cobras and Delhi, as I mentioned, might be nothing more than

a modern folk tale. I haven't come across any evidence that it actually happened, But there are plenty of examples where exactly this type of thing has definitely occurred in the real world, that's right. And one of them occurs with another colonial situation, another infestation in Hanoi, Vietnam. Al right,

this would have been the nineteenth century. So you have French colonial authorities in Vietnam, and you know, there are various problems to focus in on, but the one they choose to really apply their attention to is the city's rat problem. Now, I can imagine the rat problem was probably a real problem, probably a real problem that you know,

like the cobra thing. You can imagine a colonial administrator sees one cobra and decides that there's a cobra problem in the city, right, Yeah, because I can't think of a situation where another city has had a had a snake infestation problem off hand. But rats. Of course, rat problems have been an issue throughout human history. Yeah, it's quite common to have rat problems in any large population center.

People produce a lot of garbage. Garbage is tasty. They have sewers that are great places to to dwell in and have your little breeding grounds. Yeah, they're smart and they're successful. And as was learned, and this is the other key thing, this is one of the reasons that they focused in on rats so much, is that in eighteen nine four, that's when Alexandra Yearson discovered that debonic plague was caused caused by little fleas that wrote on rats. So that so you can see why they were concerned.

So what did they do. Well, they did what what often happens in these cases. They assigned some professional rat catchers to take care of everything. But then that's not enough, so they turned to volunteers. They turned to two mercenary rat catchers, and they offer a bounty of one cent per rat tail. And the idea here was that, especially since the disease was an issue, asking the rat catchers to handle the body was going to be too much to ask would be a burden and just a little

growth right from what I've read. You know, they'd catch thousands of rats in the sewer in in a very short period of time. Lugging all those dead rat bodies would actually be really heavy, yeah, and then discussing, so just to prove how many you killed, really, just take the tail, right, So that's yeah, that's exactly what they did, brought in the tail, and it seemed to be working at first, But then the authorities began to notice something curious in the streets. They noticed a bunch of rats

running around without tails. So they quickly realized that some of those enterprising rat catchers out there were simply lopping the tails off of the wild rats when they caught them, perhaps out of laziness, but more likely so that tail is rats could go forth breed and produce more rat tails to harvest. Yah know, they were being economically smart, they were they were trying to you know, if you are living off the land, you don't want to destroy all of the vegetation in the land, so you only

pick from some of the plants. You don't kill every plant. Right. It's like the policy or the policy that's supposed to be in place with stone crabs. You harvest one of the of the clause and then you let the each your good. You don't harvest them both. So that that was one of the ramifications of the bounty. But much like our cobra example, this the exact same thing took place. Um others took advantage of the law by establishing rat farms. Yeah, because rats are are easy to breed. I mean, you

don't even have to try. I really don't have to try. Just to collect some rats and let them do their thing, and you're gonna have more rats, which you can then lock their tails off and collect your bounty. So the French were horrified that their efforts to curb the rat population was actually increasing it, and they scrapped the bounty program entirely, and in bubonic plague broke out in Annoy. So no, yeah, so there's there's a lot more there are. There are a number of more angles to this story.

There's a great paper out there that ties all of this in with this sort of the doom nature of French rule in Vietnam, and it's titled of Rats, Rice and Race. The Great Annoying Rat Massacre, An episode in French colonial History by Michael G. Van yeah, And there's an older episode of Freakonomics Radio actually the deals exactly with the Cobra effect that I listened to, and it's a good episode. It's worth checking out. So we won't rehash everything they cover in their show, but just to

mention a couple other interesting examples they bring up. One is a very similar situation to the rats in Hanoi, but this is with Ferrell pigs in Fort Benning, Georgia. So it's a local tale. Right. Have you been to Fort Benning. I've been through there, I believe yeeah, did you see any pigs? No? No, I saw. I saw an interesting overpass, and I believe that's that's the extent of it. Okay, Well, anyway, it's in I think southwest Georgia's right. Yeah, So there are a lot of wild

pigs in this area. They're they're invasive Ferrell pigs, and they do a lot of damage. They dig everything up, they get into your garbage, they eat everything. They cause damage to government property and buildings. So people wanted to do something about this Ferrell pig problem. So there was a cash bounty exchange program or pigtails established to fight the feral pig problem, but same problems we've encountered before.

There's a lot of suspicion that some of these pigtails people were turning in for a cash reward came from illicit sources, maybe some meat processing, We're not exactly sure. And then in the end it looks like baiting practices established by the pig bounty hunters actually probably increased the number of wild pigs in the area. So people claim all these cash rewards because they put out a bunch of food to attract pigs and then they shoot some

of them. But you know, you were feeding the pigs, fattening them up for breeding and producing more pigs, because you're you're trying to put a value on the elimination of the animal, but in doing so, you've put a

value on the continued life of the animal. Exactly. Yes, it's interesting how that how that plays out, And this brings me to a thought about the nature of incentives, because it's sort of highlights that you can't have an incentive that's just sort of logically associated with the outcome you want. In order to try to prevent the gaming of the system, you really need to make incentives as

closely aligned to the actual desired outcome as possible. So what I mean by that is, if you want to eliminate cobras from the city, don't offer cash rewards for dead cobras because you don't want dead cobras. That's not the outcome you're looking for. You want an absence of cobras. So ind but that's a lot harder to incentivize, right, Yeah, you have to somebody come along and investigate for cobra free spaces exactly. Yeah, you need more complex systems to

try to incentivize that. So for example, maybe you could establish a cobra control authority and then the employees of this organization are given a cash bonus that's proportional to how few cobra bytes are reported in local hospitals in

a given year. But even with that, you run into some some problems, right like without strict controls on that, what if you have members of the cobra control authority intimidating people not to report their cobra bites or not to go to the hospital, or intimidating people at hospitals not to report them to the government. Uh So, it just seems like whenever you introduce incentive programs to to a wide ranging you know, a group of participants to

the public. Essentially, you you introduce the problem that people are going to find ways to access the reward without helping you achieve your goal. It's it seems like it should be a Doctor Seuss book or kind of um, a Sourcer's Apprentice kind of tail, right, just as it spirals out of control on these examples, UM, I can't help but think of quotas that are set forth for

law enforcements. Sometimes, you know, like you know, you've got to get so many speeding tickets out there, and so you end up having a police officers setting up and speed traps to to hit those quotas, which in that case, I guess it's not a clear it's not necessarily making the problem worse, but it's also just kind of like we're not really stopping it. We're just kind of like

setting up a system to continually collect the bounty on speeding. Yeah, Like, I guess I can see where there's a balance there, right, So if if it depends on how the quota is and how aggressive you are and carrying it out, because if there's a balance to where all right, You're just people know not to go above a certain speed or they should know and and if they don't, they get a ticket. So like both in that is going to

make the roads safer. But I guess the more the focus is on hitting the quota, getting the essentially the bounty, and losing sight of the purpose of the law entirely, that's where things get out of whacking, you end up

with like notorious speed traps, right. And I think this gets into a concept that's very closely related to the Cobra effect, though I think technically the Cobra effect wouldn't have to be just in incentives and economics if you're talking more generally about anything where an attempt to solve a problem makes the problem worse. You can even go

to the example of of like aka Homo. You know that that great story of the person who is trying to touch up this this classic painting of Christ in his passion moment had some damage to it over the years trying to touch it up, and he ends up having this kind of wailing monkey face. Yes, which is

one of my favorite images from the whole Internet. Yes, but and she wasn't working for a bounty, but imagine if there was a bounty out there on restoring old works of art, right, you could end up with with However, many of these strange little monkey faces just completely obliterating art history. Yeah. I guess the problem there is that you are you are giving people who don't have proper training in an area and incentive to participate in the area,

and thus they're probably going to make things worse. But another way of framing the issue is just the concept of perverse incentives, meaning, specifically, in the Cobra effect, you're the intended solution to a problem makes that problem worse. Perverse incentives can just mean incentives that cause unintended negative outcomes, especially if they're contrary to the benefit of the people who offer the incentives. This all also reminds me of a moment in one of my favorite books, uh Cornman

McCarthy's sentry. Oh yeah, we talked about this the other day where there's a bounty on I think rabies bats in that book in there, Yeah, like the local university there there they want to or is it the health department, I can't remember. It's been amber there, but interested official parties would like to see the bodies of local bats. Uh, you know, I think it's because of rabies. Yeah, there's a very enterprising young character in the book named Harrogate.

At the beginning of the book is a tested for having illicit relations with watermelons that did not belong to him. But then later on he comes up with some just ingenious schemes for collecting bats. I think far more bats than was really than he was intended to collect. Yeah, he ends up strolling into town. Was just a sack

of dead bats, which he gets. But I believe he buys some poison and he poisons little pieces of meat and slingshots them into the air because the bats are accustomed to praying on insects that are flying through the air. I believe that's the scheme. That's a great book. It is this is that makes me want to read it again.

But at any rate, they end up kind of the doctor, the scientists confronting him when he brings this bag in and he's says, look, we know you you did not just find these bats, but we can't figure out how you did it. You've got to tell us how you actually killed these bats. And then he he relates the story of the slingshot Oh, yeah, that's it. He was supposed to be collecting dead bats. When I said he

was killing, he was making dead bats. So you know, in a sense they were I guess the effort here was to protect humans, protect health, but also you know, not eradicate bats. That was not the intended outcome, but Harrogate did his best to do just that in order to get the sweet bounty. But of course that is not the only book by our great brutal novelist Cormick McCarthy to feature bounties. That's right, there's also Blood Meridian, great novel, horrific novel um in large ways I think

unfilmable novel, and I kind of hope it's unfilmable. It is, uh would you would you call it nihilistic? Yes, it is. Uh yeah, there's just not much redeemable in the world. And it is a book of uh, brutal and cruel

people doing brutal and cruel things. Yeah. And one individual who might not be a person at all, who might be an embodiment of of awfulness, Judge Judge Holden, who himself is probably based very loosely on a real individual who was in a gang of scalp hunters led by an actual historic individual, one John Galton, who was indeed a superstar in the vile trade of scalp hunting um harvesting.

By some accounts that two and fifty scalps in a single raid once, and fittingly, his group was eventually ambushed and scalped by a band of Quichian tribes people. So um, so we shouldn't dwell too much on the nasty details, but we do need to discuss what scalping is and and scalp hunting, what what this practice consists of, and where it came from? Yeah? So uh, I mean, most of you probably don't even need to be told, especially if you've consumed much in the way of American Western

history or fiction. Not only Blood Meridian, but Larry mcmurtry' is a Lonesome Dove novels instantly come to mind as well, but actually never read Lonesome Dove. Oh it's it's quite it's quite good. Uh. Comanche Moon is another one in that series that I read that was really good and really bizarre in many ways. But both of these authors really really gaze deep into the gruesome spectacle of the act.

It entails the slicing, fling, ripping away of a portion or all of the human scalp um and then then then you have this resulting trophy. The victim can be living or dead. And there are plenty of tales of scalping survivors, including in eighteen sixty four. Probably the most famous is a thirteen year old Robert McGee UM. And he's famous because there's a wonderful, gruesome photograph of him as an adult showing off his scalping scars scars so um. And in this case, he was scalped by a band

of uh Sue Indians. So I look up that photo online if you really want to see it. Um. But where did the act come from? That's actually something that has been uh there's been a kind of a debate on that over the years, right, because we definitely do see it practiced by by both sides in the American frontier, right. Yeah. So it's it comes down to, is this uh an ancient Native American act that various cultural groups took part in, or is this something that Westerners introduced, that the colonists

introduced to the New World. Um. Now, certainly scalping was long attributed as a purely Native American act, and indeed we see plenty of examples of of scalping, both between tribes and against the colonial invaders. Yeah, and that that's something I think even when I was a kid. Just

my idea of where this came from. I guess if you watch old cartoons or something like that, you get the idea that this is something that Native American tribes, that their warriors would do to the enemies, not something that was done by European settlers. But in fact, it was done by European settlers. Yeah. Yeah, and we'll see some plenty of examples of that to come here. But it was I think it is often presented as this kind of savage thing that savage tribes people do. Um

eurocentric view of it. Yeah, Now, there was certainly a backlash against that view has pointed out in a wonderful article titled The Unkindest cut Or Who Invented Scalping by James Axtell and William C. Struvan in Night and if you want to blow by bloody blow account of the history of scalping, that's a good article to seek out.

But they say that the the quote unquote savage Indian take on scalping was replaced during the twentieth century for a spell there by Native American activists who who really pushed for the view that all that it was basically bloodthirsty colonials who introduced the practice to the native peoples of the America's by encouraging them to do so by instituting bounties on on other on other tribes people and

essentially teaching them to take these head skins from others. So, under this revisionist view, the scalping practice came from the European settlers and was transferred to the frontier tribes correct time. However, after this a lot of you know, a lot of people on the other side of the the issue they

waged in. And really, when you do look at the history and look at the historical accounts, you see that the practice of taking scalps goes back way through colonial invasion to pre Columbian times, okay, and it was quite widespread through North America even parts of South America. There's there's archaeological evidence that shows evidence of postmortem scalpings and skulls that showed evidence that the victim survived the mutilation

long enough for the bone tissue to regenerate. And another point it's often brought up is that certainly Europeans had had plenty of ways to torment and torture and mutilate the body, trying to make them look good by comparison, right, But for all their drawing and quartering and hanging and hacking and what have you, you really don't see much in the way of scalp taking in European tradition prior to this point, and even in even language itself, um

So scalping as a word. The word itself scalp predates the seventeenth century. It arises from a Scandi Navian route and uh, and it was featured in a in a sixteen o one edition of Plenty of the Elder's Natural History, though the explorers in the New World tended to be unversed in Latin classics, so they probably weren't exposed to it now. Instead, such trophies were described as head skins

or hair scalps. They just talked about skinning and flying um until scalps and scalping became a popular term in sixteen seventy six, during King Phillip's War between Uh Native American tribes and the English colonists and their Native American allies. And meanwhile there's a On the other hand, though there's a fairly robust vocabulary for scalps in many of the native tongues. The the Ojibwa language distinguishes between scalp and

sioux scalp. There's a separate word for each, while Eastern Abenaki language has special terminology for enemy scalps that are already taken as trop thieves, for scalps that could be taken, and scalps from the living and the dead. So it's kind of like those uh the Old World where the old saying that Inuits have all these different words for

snow because there's so much of it. You could make the argument that the scalping was enough of a practice that there were uh specific terms that were used in some of these cultures for specific types of scalps. Yes, but of course, as we see with the European invaders of the American continents, Uh, they they had all of their own barbaric and violent practices, and even though scalping doesn't traditionally appear to be strongly represented among them, they

took to it quite rapidly. Yeah, you could definitely say that. I mean, they were kind of like, well, the way we did it back home is we just tore a person into four pieces with horses. But hey, if you

want to just take the scalp, we can do that too. Um. And that's the crazy part, because it's one thing to to look at these native tribes who had who had this in their culture and their tradition, and there may even be certain, you know, supernatural role elements that are factored into it, but the columnists had none of that. You just had a bunch of in most cases Protestants showing up in the New World and and readily getting into the act. Right, It's not a part of their

traditional cultural war practice. It's more just sort of an adopted act of violence, and violence, of course, becomes a standard in relations between columnists and the native inhabitants of the America's pretty much pretty much from inception, pretty much from that first outside context event when the two met, violence just continues to be a part of their history. Um and uh. And that's where the scalping really begins

to to pick up. So it seems, based on most accounts, all right, it's a pre existing thing that happens between tribe members in their tribal wars, often as as a way to take a trophy and then travel a long distance back with it, kind of getting back to the

idea of taking the tail of a rat, right. But then the Protestants, the Colonials here they begin um, they begin to perpetuate the practice by putting putting a bounty, say ten shillings worth of truck cloth on native scalps, uh, that are taken by your native ally, So take the scalps from the enemy tribes people to people that we don't have alliances with, and we will pay you in

some cloth, all right. But then in the midst of kings King Philip's war, which we mentioned earlier, which went from about six to seventy eight, they extended the bounty to mercenaries thirty shillings per scalp um. And you you end up with plenty of horrific cases. There's there's this

case of Puritan kidnappy Hannah Dustin Uh. She and her fellow kidnappies, they were held by by by a band of tribespeople, and then they escaped and they went on to execute two men to women in six children and they received fifty pounds as a as a reward for that act. And there's actually a statue of this woman in uh Boscowen, New Hampshire, just a statue of a murderer. Yeah, I mean, because that's it really kind of sums up the weird ways we we have historically made sense of

this violence between these two people. Well, yeah, I mean talk about perverse incentives. So so you've got a rat bounty system where you assume, well, there's a rat problem, so we need to do something about it. So let's just collect rat tails and that will let us know there's at least some significant amount of rat killing going on. This seems like exactly the same principle being applied to

human beings. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the thing. We see this this bounty system spiral ever more out of control. Um the French engaged in it, the English engaged in it, and it eventually becomes not only this thing that you're asking other tribes people to do, like hey, you guys, take scalps, right, take the scalps of our enemies and we'll pay you. Scalps become the become a valuable item

for for colonial individuals as well, hunters and trappers, etcetera. Yeah, it's just evidence that you are carrying out the genocide that we're encouraging. Yeah, the first Massachusetts Act of sixteen ninety four encouraged a bounty for Indie any Indian life, while a seventeen or four renewal of that act amended it so you only got a hundred pounds for adults, ten pounds for children ten and older, and nothing for

kids under ten, which sounds semi decent at first. And to realize that those children would be sold as slaves or transported out of the country. Now, as early as seventeen twelve, some folks were uneasy about that, And this is this is kind of a sobering thought to realize that not everybody was just completely on board with this. Yeah,

I would hope not. I mean, this is straightforwardly encouraging a bounty for murder, right, I mean though, at the same point, you have to acknowledge that, like this was a this was a tough time to be alive, Like it's there's a lot of fear going on in these communities and among these lawmakers. But but even even then there were people who said, I'm not sure about this.

Massachusetts Judge Samuel Sewell spoken a session of the Massachusetts General Court, and he said he he laid out that he really thought that that this was it was only okay. It should only be done if you're doing it to protict your family, and if it's becoming something that you're doing for commerce, then that's that's bad. Wait, so it's okay to murder a Native American, collect their scalp and turn it in for money, as long as the reason you did it wasn't the money so much that it

was out of love for family. Yeah. I mean, that's just the basic Protestant ethos, right, that's the that's the I'm kidding. Yeah, but I mean, obviously that's the horrible situation here is that you have it becomes the practice, and then people have to people in positions of power and authority have to find ways to support it and rationalize it in their own mind. Yeah, but these rationalizations seem to be coming indirect conflict with the economic incentives

being offered. If that's the case, why are you still offering the bounty? Yeah? Yeah, I agree, Um, and then it, uh, it gets ever more out of control there, especially when ministers are are speaking about it, and they're not condemning it. There's this wonderful quote here from actual Instruments Peace it goes when ministers not only look the other way but shared in the profits from Indian deaths, the moral barometer

of America dipped dangerously low. At the bottom, however, lay the American Revolution, in which Englishmen scalped Englishmen in the name of liberty. Scalping and other techniques of Indian warfare placed in the hands of a larger European population eventually sealed the Indian's fate in North America, but not before wreaking upon the white man a subtle form of moral vengeance.

At this point, I think when we think about the Cobra effect in relation to scalping, is this an example of the Cobra effects, right, Because on one hand, it's kind of doing exactly what the bounty is supposed to do, just bringing about genocidal violence against the native population. Then again, I guess if you interpret the purpose of such a bounty on on Indian scalps as to be, I don't know, to pacify the border, you know, to make the frontier

less bloody, you're obviously having a perverse incentive there. I mean, you're you're causing murderous havoc, right, And there are plenty of examples to where the scalp trade just intensifies the violence. Uh. And you end up with with with various native chiefs in some cases who are putting bounties then for their own people upon the white man. And and so you have this this kind of a war of extern a

nation from both sides. There are examples, um, some of the like in the Mexican examples will get to in a second, where Galton and his gang in that specifically, they would roll into an area and violence would just intensify because they're just stirring up all of this hatred. So, of course scalp hunting continued, um and uh. And falsified

scalping also pops up as an inevitability weight. So maybe just like collecting pigtails from a meat processing plan saying yeah, I shot all these pigs, you might have people getting scalps or parts of scalps from illicit sources, a sort of yeah, there's a there's a quote that I ran across these materials from nineteenth century American historian Francis Parkman, and he said the hunting of humans would constitute a profitable occupation if only the prey was not so shy

and nimble. So I mean, well, you can't just with the rats. You can just raise them, right, and rats are everywhere. People are can prove a little harder to kill, even if you're a ruthless gang of mercenaries roving about. And people are gonna inevitably to figure out how can I get the most out of this kill? Uh? If you would read this next quote for us. It comes

from twentieth century German ethnologist of European colonization George FREDERICI. Okay, it says this, along with the high profits of the fatal business, soon taught the shrewd tribes people and their quick learning students, the lawless backwoodsmen and hunters the art of skillfully making two, three, or even more scalps from

one scalp and selling them. People were not always very particular about where the scalp came from, because it was difficult or impossible to distinguish between a French scalp and an English one. Members of friendly tribes and even fellow countrymen fell victim to greed and the scalping knife. Not even the dead were spared. Yeah, so you could This

is interesting. It goes even beyond what what what Farci was talking about here, because you could apparently take a single adult scalp, you could stretch it as you dried it out, and you could cut it into a dozen different things that you could pass off or try to pass off as scalps, which is is quite You can see the financial possibilities there. This is one of those

moments where it comes up every now and then. You just imagine aliens coming in and observing our behavior and they're seeing somebody take the skin off the top of another human's head and stretch it and cut it into a bunch of pieces. Yeah. Yeah. And it became such a problem in Mexico where you had the Mexican States, they're paying mercenaries to go around and hunt for scalps um. They had to demand that scalps include one or both ears or the crown, and they even set up regulatory committees.

But the thing here is that and I guess you kind of have to put yourself in their their their shoes, or try to imagine the kind of individual who ends up take from the job as a scalp inspector. Uh, your job is to inspect these grizzly trophies of of human murder and genocide. Uh, and then uh, you know, reject it if it's the wrong type of scalp, or if it's been falsified. Apparently they were easily bought off and you could so you just bribe them, and then

they'll accept a child scalp as an adult. And therefore, you know, there's even more incentive to kill a bunch of children. And that's exactly the type of behavior you saw from individuals such as John Glanton earlier. Yeah, we said Galton, but it was Glanton, the Glanton Gang. I think I had him confused with the The Eagles song about the Dalton's very different view of the American West.

But still, the scalp trade continued, and in many cases it seemed to escalate and uh so like July four, eight sixty three, in response to raids by Dakota in southern Minnesota, the state issued twenty five dollar bonus pavements to scalps who brought back a scalp, a hundred dollars for non soldiers, and this later hit two dred Bucks. So,

needless to say, a lot of scalping ensued. Uh And in between eighteen thirty five and the eighteen eighties, Mexican authorities, as we already mentioned, they paid private armies to hunt Native Americans, specifically targeting apaches and comanches. And I always find the inclusion of comanches, um and stuff like this to be interesting because the Comanches in large part were um you know, there were the people of the horse. And where did they get this horse technology, this biotechnology?

They got it from the Spanish who introduced the horse in North America. Yeah, so you you know, they encountered this this outside context problem. They survived it and and really became the the notorious uh warring people of the horse because of our interference. Um. But that's kind of a that's kind of a separate tangent. But Commanche history

is very, very fascinating. But wherever these uh these bounties persisted, you just saw genocidal violence persist and it really really continue you until the balance was successfully tipped completely in favor of the colonials and then was replaced by new uh Anti native activities such as relocation programs and re education centers. Yeah, so that the horrible history um did not stop there by any means. So in one sense, this might not be an example of cobra effect at all.

If you, just as we said, think of the the ultimate goal of the scalp bounty as being, well, just where we want to exterminate the people who live here so we can make room to uh to occupy the

land ourselves. It seems like that's sort of worked. Yeah, I mean, the the unintended consequence, if there is one here, aside from having to deal with with individuals who are falsifying scalps and and getting more money than they should have, UM, is just the like the backwash of bloodshed and the fact that we just the idea that that the colonists bloodied themselves, bloodied their souls and really just created this

this stain of shame for all time. Yeah. Well, perhaps we should leave the realm of scalp hunting, human bounties and genocide and and uh come back to the idea of uh backfiring incentives in general. Yeah, it's on a lighter note. All right now, Robert, I want to talk about the idea of negative incentives. So we've seen the idea that positive incentives can backfire. Sometimes they backfire in

just ways that produce unintended negative consequences. Sometimes they backfire in a way that completely contradicts your intention setting out, you know, makes the problem worse. But there are also negative incentives. Sometimes you want to take steps to prevent something from happening and discourage it. But what about when that makes the thing you're trying to discourage more likely

to happen. Here's one model. What if a punishment for a discouraged behavior itself becomes desirable in some way, especially like a symbol of coolness. So I can think of one good potential example of this, And there's a New York Times article from two thousand and seven I came across describing a problem within the Bangkok Police Department at the time. So department officials were, according to this article, trying to put a stop to misbehavior among the rank

and file officers. So if you park in the wrong spot, if you show up for work late, if you get caught littering, etcetera. You know, there's some bad behavior among the cops and they're trying to disincentivize it. And the disincentive they came up with to stop this behavior was a form of a badge of shame, you know, like the red letter. You get to wear something that lets people know that you have behaved badly, and what they

chose was a Tartan arm band. Unfortunately, this policy seemed to backfire and the officers ended up regarding the disciplinary arm band as collectible souvenirs to take home with them, So the badge of shame became a minor badge of honor.

And in in trying to work around this problem, They're there chief of the crime Suppression division at the time, came up with Instead of Tartan arm bands, they used these Hello Kitty arm bands, hoping this would be seen as sort of a humiliating affront to the officer's sense

of power and masculinity. I'm not sure how well that worked out in the end, but anyway, this one very small example illustrates the principle that a poorly conceived disincentive can not only fail to provide discouragement of a target behavior, it could potentially even increase the behavior if the disincentive comes to be seen as having some kind of value. Now, maybe that could be some kind of monetary or material value, or maybe it could just be some kind of cred

or social capital coolness. There's certainly a sense of countercultural coolness, right, you know, like if if a certain kind of shaming can be taken with pride. Yeah, like, oh it's too extreme for TV, too hot for for prime time. If it's too hot for prime time, I've got to see it. How hot could this be? Right? But then, of course there are also examples where you could maybe have a

material advantage. For example, I think I think about supposed tax schemes that reward people for making failed business investments, you know, supposedly like you can you can if you finance a really bad movie that bombs or something, you can end up manipulating your taxes in such a way that you end up with more money because the thing you financed bombed. Kind of a producer's scenario, right, yeah, exactly.

I don't know if that's really the case in any country today, but I've at least heard accusations that that is how some very bad films of the past few decades got financing. Don't know whether it's true. But there's another version of this I want to talk about, and that is the case of censorship. I think censorship is a classic example of attempts to stop a problem causing

the opposite of the intended effect of the problem. Is there is a message or a meme or an idea or you know, anything that is spreading content that you don't want disseminated, and attempting to stop the dissemination of that content very very often seems to have the opposite of the intended effect. Yeah, it just makes you want to see it or hear it or read it. If the man's telling me not to consume it, I kind of want to consume it, at least to see what

the fuss is all about exactly. So there is a I found a Mercury News article from way back in two thousand three describing the event that inspired what's now known as the Streisand Effect. I assume you've heard of this, Robberty. I had not. Actually I'm familiar with Barbara Streisand, but I wasn't familiar with the streisand effec. Well, that is indeed the title celebrity behind this effect. So here's how

the story went. So there's an environmentalist photographer named Ken Edelman, not the same as the political operative, but he was operating a website that I think at the time was called California Coastline dot org. California coastline dot org dot org is still up, I checked. And the purpose of this was to photograph many, many miles of the California coast to have before and after pictures of coastal development projects, to tract sort of coastline erosion and other potentially destructive

effects of building projects along the coast. So it's almost kind of like a Google Maps scenario where they're just gonna take a whole bunch of pictures to give an overall visual impression of something. Yeah, And I think the reasoning was that, so if you know you have a project come in build a bunch of stuff on the coast, you might think that they have been destructive to the coastal ecosystem, but you don't exactly no, because you don't have a picture of what it looked like before they build.

But now you've got before and after photos. But apparently in two thousand three, the actress Barbara Streisand discovered that the site featured a photograph of her ocean front home in Malibu, and she felt this was an invasion of her privacy and filed a ten million dollar lawsuit to to have the photograph and references to her removed from the site or taken down. And before her lawsuit, it appears that the photo of her home was not not a big hit. It was accessed by only a handful

of site visitors. But in the month after the suit was filed, according to this two thousand three article, more than four hundred and twenty thousand people visited the California coast Line site, presumably to see what all the fuss was about. Now, I I don't know what their traffic was before that month. It was a you know, coastal Coastal Photographs project in two thousand three, I can guess that it was not anywhere near fo any thousand visitors. Yeah,

probably only the hottest websites out there, right. So, Yeah, that's one example. But are there any other examples of this strisand effect where the attempt to shut down discussion or or to hide evidence of something just draws more and more attention to it. I can definitely think of

the example of Boycott's movie. Boycott's So, let's say we've got a new awesome demonic Possession movie coming out, and it's got tons of graphics, sex and violence and blasphemy, just wall to wall, and you get a bunch of church groups who call for a boycott of the film. They go stand outside theaters to protest it. Does this end up hurting the film's ticket sales or discouraging filmmakers

from making movies like this in the future. Well, it's almost impossible to say, because you can't go back in time and compare the film success under a boycott and protest with the success of the same film under normal conditions. Like you can't run the experiment with a control It happened in reality, um, and there's no way to control

the experiment, but it is widely speculated. And I'm quite sure I'd agree that these kinds of responses more often have the opposite of the intended effect, generating more publicity for an interest in the movie. Yeah, Like, I can definitely think of films that were considered video nasties in the UK that we became underground hits, and we're the kind of things you go to kind of great links to get on video casset back in the day. Uh, And you look at them today now that kind of

the you know, you can get anything. You can actually find these films that you heard about and having such notorious histories, and you you watch them. In many cases they're just they're they're horrible. There's just nothing. They're not even that shocking. But the mere fact that they were labeled as such, that they were banned, that they were prohibited and made this video nasties list, they they end up surviving, end up becoming far more famous than they

had any right to be. Yeah. Uh yeah, the insistence that you must not look at a thing really increases your curiosity. Yeah. I mean there's plenty of people today who are seeking out and watching some really terrible, low budget Italian horror films and finding themselves very disappointed because they don't match up to the reputation they had acquired over the years. So here's the idea I have about

how to how to turn the strisand effect into money. Okay, uh, if there aren't marketing and pr firms that already specialize in this, I suspect actually maybe there are, we just

don't know about them. There should be, and what they should do is you come to them with a movie or you know, any kind of media property that you're trying to generate interest in, and what they do is put that thing in front of people who they know will hate it, and our activist in nature who start to generate a boycotting or censoring, calling for censorship kind of reaction to it. And then that of course draws in you know, all this curiosity. Oh, people are saying, well,

I shouldn't look at this thing. I wonder what it is. So you're saying, send out screeners of the Exorcism film. You're talking about two church groups. Yeah, to to whoever is the most conservative and censorious person who would hate it? Or you could do it the other way around. Really you could be uh, I guess use using something that would be offensive to any group, and almost anything might be offensive to somebody, right, Yeah, I mean I can.

I can think of several cases, none of I'm not going to mention any of their names because they don't deserve any more publicity. But there are several individuals who have who you know, continue to seek out that notoriety for their creations, to create things purely to just sicken and piss people off. And that that's there the whole appeal like that there's thinking about a film about a

mini segmented creature. Uh, yeah, that's one that comes to mind, Like that's I think that's a clear case of a guy who like, there's nothing at the heart of anything. There's nothing artistically pure, there's nothing creative, there's nothing nothing even fun, not nothing fun or even all that shocking

per se. In a grander scheme, there's certainly more shocking pieces of cinema out there that have been created by by by actual artists, but it's just the storm that they're able to to to raise up around those creations and then make it like a part of our culture, you know, just empty cynical bids for attention. Yeah, exactly.

But yeah, so I think the takeaway from this is that there does seem to be almost no surer way to draw attention to something than to try to prevent people from seeing it, almost like any attempt to manipulate the attention that we give to something, be it negative or positive, Like it's just it's so easy, Like we think that it's going to be easy to economically manipulate something or even you know, through censorship, manipulate the scenario,

manipulate the way we interact with something. But it's just such a complicated affair. It's just we're gonna, we're gonna over flow the tub either way. I think people do just have a sort of contrarian they tore where we want to try to uh upset the narrative of the institutional authority. I think about this with so the strisand

effect definitely occurs with brands. You know, you'll have a an article or a meme or something like that that makes Coca Cola or Pepsi or McDonald's or something look bad, and they'll they'll try to shut it down, you know, no more than this, and that just doesn't work, right. Yeah,

it just draws more attention to it. And it especially happens when you see these uh you know these like social media crowdsourcing message campaigns, like I can't remember what any of these hashtags are, but you know what I'm talking about. It will be like hashtag uh coke feelings, and Coca Cola is trying to get you to do free advertising for them on your social media page. But of course people respond to it with stuff, you know,

diabetes or whatever. And I can just tell any time a brand tries to shut down those sort of mischievous responses to their campaign. They're just gonna make people want to do it more. Yeah. Indeed, you see that almost on a weekly basis these days. Yeah. All right, so there you have it. We went from cobras and rats and pigs to the horrors of scalp hunting, and then back into the world of censorship. Um. So hopefully we gave you a lot to consider in terms of the

cobra effect here. I think this makes me want to hear what your thoughts are you out there, the listener, What what your thoughts are about the nature of incentives? How do you actually guide people's behavior in a reliable way that doesn't produce these unintended and perverse consequences? Yeah? I mean really, we can hear from just about anybody on this. Are you a pet owner? Are you a parent? Are you a boss? Are you at all involved in or at least a close follower of politics? Are you

a government policymaker? Yeah? Yeah, what happens when you start trying to push an issue with a you know, stick with some money stuck on the end of it to get the results you need? YEA, let us know I'm sure some carrots work better than others. Yeah. Yeah, there's so many different types of carrots, so many different types of sticks. Sometimes you just end up with no carrots or a horse that likes to be poked with the stick. I don't know how do we get there? Okay? Sorry, alright?

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