Hack Your Bureaucracy

Economist Horst Siebert coined the term “cobra effect” to describe perverse system incentives, based on a true story from Delhi, India. (It’s also known as Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) The city was overrun with dangerous cobra snakes, and the local government sought to solve this problem by paying for every dead cobra someone brought in. But instead of diminishing the cobra population, this incentive scheme caused an explosion in the cobra population—because people started breeding cobras to earn the incentive payments.