“How to breed mosquitos” rising as a Philippine search inquiry
Incentives matter. No, really, a very basic law of life - incentives matter:
Village officials in the Philippines are handing out cash rewards to residents who capture mosquitoes in a bid to combat an outbreak of dengue.
At the Wednesday launch, residents from the village of Addition Hills in metropolitan Manila lined up with plastic cups and bags containing their captures as they waited to receive their bounty: one Philippine peso (1.7 US cents) for every five mosquitoes.
Organisers handed out coins to participants and used an ultraviolet mosquito zapper to kill off live mosquitoes. One resident walked away with nine pesos, worth approximately 15 US cents, for the 45 larvae he turned over.
Fifteen cents is not very much but on the other hand fifteen cents is fifteen cents.
We can now guess what’s going to happen next. As with the Cobra Effect a perverse incentive has now been created which will make the problem worse. Or rather, will, in the future make it worse. For we can all grasp that some will start breeding mosquitos to gain their fifteen cents (hey, it’s fifteen cents!) and that’s fine. But when the incentive ends then those mosquito farms will be left derelict, raising the local population of mosquitos larger than at the start.
At which point we can all chortle, chortle. But there’s more:
However, there are concerns the village bounty programme may inadvertently backfire, if people start propagating mosquitoes to reap the rewards, department spokesperson Albert Domingo told the Philippine outlet The Inquirer.
Exactly so. It is possible for people to learn that perverse incentives can be created and therefore we don’t want to do that. In fact, we need to work really quite hard to make sure we’re not creating such perverse incentives.
No, this is important. So, perhaps stop importing beavers to make ague ridden swamps of every stream in the country, maybe don’t return Athelney to an island in that Somerset swamp by not pumping the Levels. Or possibly don’t pay for a taxi to get a SEND child to school - at a cost higher than the actual school they’ll attend - for fear of rising numbers of parents seeking that SEND designation. Or, say, if getting signed off with stress leads to a higher income than working perhaps some will seek to be signed off for stress? Or, if doctors are paid for not seeing patients then patients will not be seen?
That is, while we can chortle chortle at mosquito breeding that is just an example of the more general concept. A general concept we’re really not doing all that well at ourselves. And given that we know about cobra effects, as we originated them, perhaps we should be doing better at this?
Tim Worstall