Here’s an example that comes to mind of the same phenomenon but in the domain of economic policy rather than morals.
A government can choose to be somewhere along the line of more or less regulating the economy. On the far ends you have centrally planned economies where the government directs all economic activity and on the other you have a totally open market regulated only by contracts into which parties are willing to enter.
If you are a proponent of either extreme, you may actually regret small moves in the direction you prefer. For example, partial regulation/deregulation of an industry can screw up the incentives and be worse than when you had less/more regulation and is worse than having yet more/less regulation.
Consider housing. In the past, housing was basically unregulated, you could build whatever you wanted to live in on your land and that was the end of it. Now in most countries we having zoning laws and deed restrictions and various other things that restrict what can be built. This creates a world where things can be broken and it’s nobody’s fault, e.g. can’t build higher density housing because of regulations, can’t change the regulations because there’s too many people benefitting from the current environment in the short term, and can’t take direct action to just build more housing when needed because that’s more direct control than the relevant government bodies are permitted to take. Better options might exist for housing more people, like Soviet style apartment blocks or the free-for-all of the past, but instead we’re trapped in a state where the currently solution is worse than either of them.
And if we try to make nudges in one direction or another it can easily upset the balance and make things worse. For example, try to impose a little more regulation, like rent controls, and you decrease the profitability of building new housing so much that no one will build it even if you let them. On the other hand, relaxing zoning restrictions just a little and you get sprawl or gentrification that displaces people and also doesn’t offer the displaced people anywhere to move. In both cases small moves towards what might be a better system actually make things worse because the gradient between the extremes is nonmonotonic.
Here’s an example that comes to mind of the same phenomenon but in the domain of economic policy rather than morals.
A government can choose to be somewhere along the line of more or less regulating the economy. On the far ends you have centrally planned economies where the government directs all economic activity and on the other you have a totally open market regulated only by contracts into which parties are willing to enter.
If you are a proponent of either extreme, you may actually regret small moves in the direction you prefer. For example, partial regulation/deregulation of an industry can screw up the incentives and be worse than when you had less/more regulation and is worse than having yet more/less regulation.
Consider housing. In the past, housing was basically unregulated, you could build whatever you wanted to live in on your land and that was the end of it. Now in most countries we having zoning laws and deed restrictions and various other things that restrict what can be built. This creates a world where things can be broken and it’s nobody’s fault, e.g. can’t build higher density housing because of regulations, can’t change the regulations because there’s too many people benefitting from the current environment in the short term, and can’t take direct action to just build more housing when needed because that’s more direct control than the relevant government bodies are permitted to take. Better options might exist for housing more people, like Soviet style apartment blocks or the free-for-all of the past, but instead we’re trapped in a state where the currently solution is worse than either of them.
And if we try to make nudges in one direction or another it can easily upset the balance and make things worse. For example, try to impose a little more regulation, like rent controls, and you decrease the profitability of building new housing so much that no one will build it even if you let them. On the other hand, relaxing zoning restrictions just a little and you get sprawl or gentrification that displaces people and also doesn’t offer the displaced people anywhere to move. In both cases small moves towards what might be a better system actually make things worse because the gradient between the extremes is nonmonotonic.