ESF 10A: Education as Self-Fashioning: Unintended Consequences

Course Description

Unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and/or intended by a new product, action or decision. Some unintended outcomes are very surprising, and would have been hard to predict. Others seem completely logical in hindsight and leaves people wondering why they were not anticipated. For instance, when the first biofuel mandates were imposed in the EU, little did policy makers realize it would lead to a strong rise in palm oil production, which in turn led to tropical deforestation, undoing any of the possible positive impacts of increased biofuels use. In hindsight it is easy to see this potential negative impact, yet at the time the decision was made the EU leadership was blind to it. Not all unintended consequences are negative. Aspirin, for example, was developed to relieve pain, but was found to also be an anticoagulant that can lower the risk of heart attacks. As another example, the setting up of large hunting reserves for nobility in the medieval period preserved green areas, which later could be converted to large parks.