Good things often get taken too far.
They can take on a life of their own through self-perpetuation, get over-zealously applied, or become hijacked.
This often turns good things into mixed things and sometimes even corrupts them into bad things.
Here are four interesting examples:
(1) Zoning laws in the U.S. helped solve problems (like keeping pollution-spewing factories away from people’s homes and helping keep cities pleasant). Later, they got used in a way that increased race-based segregation, and they also contributed to excessive housing prices.
(2) Anti-nuclear advocates pushed for improved nuclear safety standards, aiming to prevent nuclear disasters and reduce nuclear proliferation. Now, extreme safety standards make it ridiculously expensive, and society has mostly lost out on a powerful tool to combat climate change
(3) Drug oversight (as from the FDA) protects us from harmful and useless drugs. In a free-for-all market of dangerous chemicals, this is valuable. But it’s also developed into a huge bureaucracy that makes it extremely expensive and slow to get drugs to market. Many die waiting.
(4) To protect patients, U.S. psychologists must be licensed by their state to do therapy. This leads to better-trained therapists. It also sometimes makes it a nightmare for therapists to move states and makes it harder for patients to find a therapist and to do remote therapy.
What’s the takeaway here? Systems that are good still need to be checked and re-analyzed; otherwise, they may start doing some harm.
And if you take a good thing too far, it may become bad.
This piece was first written on August 5, 2023, and first appeared on this site on September 14, 2023.
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