Now I Know (10 page)

Unfortunately, the Four Pests Campaign was also a wonderful example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The sparrows did not just eat grains. They also ate insects—specifically, locusts. Locusts, like sparrows, also ate grains, and now, without a natural predator to keep their population in check, the insects thrived beyond expectation. The swarms of locusts ate a lot more grain than the sparrows ever could.

By the time Mao’s government noticed and could react, two years had passed, and the damage was already done. The ecological imbalance caused by the Four Pests Campaign helped spur on massive food shortages and, in turn, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

If you want to get something done, it probably makes sense to ask people to provide the service, and, in most cases, pay them for doing so. Give a proper incentive and people will rise to the call of duty—or, at least, that’s what we hope will happen. Sometimes, though, things go wrong because the incentive accidentally makes the problem worse. Enter the Cobra Effect.

Vikas Mehrotra is a professor of finance at the University of Alberta. In 2012, he joined Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of the best-selling book
Freakonomics
, on their podcast. He recounted an incident from India, back when it was still under control of the British crown. At the time, according to Mehrotra’s anecdote, Delhi had a problem—lots of venomous cobras were roaming the streets, putting the lives of people at risk. The government’s solution? Kill all the cobras.

To accomplish this goal, the government employed a pretty straightforward strategy—institute a bounty. If a person killed a cobra, the government would reward him or her with some money. The more cobras you killed, the more money you got, so people sharpened their knives and broke out their clubs.

The problem? Catching and killing a wild cobra is hard, as it should be, in order to justify the bounty system in the first place. But capturing a few cobras and starting your own breed of the snakes is not much harder—and then, you’re left with a perpetually self-replenishing supply of cobras that you don’t have to chase down. An enterprising would-be cobra killer can simply grow his own cobra clan, kill some, collect the reward, rinse, repeat.

When news of the scheme hit the government, as Mehrotra’s story goes, they did the only thing they could and ended the bounty program. Unfortunately, the cobra farmers now had piles of venomous, worthless cobras and no incentive to kill them (and risk being bitten). So they didn’t. Instead, the cobra farmers released their hordes of contraband creatures into the streets, redoubling the problem.

Today, the term “Cobra Effect” is used to describe such an unintended outcome of an otherwise straightforward plan.

On the coast of Sao Paolo, Brazil sits Ilha de Queimada Grande, or as it is known colloquially in English, Snake Island. The island, roughly 110 acres of trees, is uninhabited, with only one building—a lighthouse—abandoned for years. Despite the tropical nature of the Queimada Grande, travel to the island is expressly forbidden by the Brazilian navy. Why? Because Queimada Grande is home to hundreds of thousands of golden lanceheads, a snake you probably don’t want to get too close to.

Golden lanceheads are unique to Queimada Grande. The snake typically grows to be about two feet long but can at extremes grow to nearly double that length. And it is venomous—very, very venomous.

Generally lanceheads (that is, the more common cousins of the golden lancehead) are responsible for 90 percent of snake bite-related fatalities in Brazil. The mortality rate from a lancehead bite is 7 percent if the wound goes untreated, and even treatment doesn’t guarantee survival. Roughly 3 percent of those who are bitten by lanceheads and treated with antivenom still end up dying from the bite. The venom causes a grab bag of symptoms, including kidney failure, necrosis of muscular tissue, brain hemorrhaging, and intestinal bleeding. Scary stuff, to be sure.

No official records tell of a person being bitten by a snake, let alone a golden lancehead-caused fatality, because the
de facto
quarantine on the island has successfully kept humans separated from these deadly beasts. In fact, there is reason to believe that snakes of the golden variety are much more dangerous than their continental cousins. A chemical analysis of golden lancehead venom suggests that it is faster acting and more powerful—perhaps five times more powerful. Surviving a golden lancehead attack, especially when on an otherwise isolated island, is a tall order.

The only way to guarantee survival is to avoid these two-foot-long monsters altogether, which is primarily why Snake Island is closed to tourists—encountering a golden lancehead there is an all-but-certain fate. Even the most conservative estimate suggests that the golden lancehead population density on Queimada Grande is one per square meter; others suggest the population is as high as
five
per square meter. Regardless, as Atlas Obscura points out, even at the lower estimate, “you’re never more than three feet away from death.”

Roughly 7 million people live in New York City, and, like everywhere else in the world, some of them die. Sometimes, they die with no family and/or no money. In New York, a few thousand such people die each year in the city’s hospitals alone. But these people’s stories do not end with their deaths. What does the city do with the bodies?

The answer? They’re buried on Hart Island.

Hart Island is located in the western part of Long Island Sound, a few miles offshore from the Bronx and only a bit farther from Queens. This tiny island—131 acres—has been uninhabited for years, at least by the living. Since 1869, the city of New York has used the island as a potter’s field, a burial ground for those who could not afford burial elsewhere. The potter’s field now takes up roughly 101 of the island’s 131 acres and is the largest tax-supported graveyard in the world.

More than 850,000 people have been buried on Hart’s Island, and roughly 2,000 more burials occur each year. Dismembered body parts constitute a small minority of the burials. An estimated one-third of the burials are of very young children. With one exception—“special child baby 1 1985,” the first child to die of AIDS in New York City—the bodies are buried in mass graves. Children are buried in trenches numbering as many as 1,000 each, whereas adults—whose bodies are often disinterred when relatives later claim them—are buried in three sections of roughly fifty each.

What to see if you know anyone buried there? To find out, you need to peruse the records, which are maintained by the city’s Department of Correction—a strange quirk of how the island is administered. Because of the cost of burying 2,000 or so bodies (or parts thereof) each year, the city uses prison labor for the job. Inmates from Rikers Island, New York City’s jail, are ferried over to Hart’s Island and paid 50 cents per hour to stack coffins for burial. Since the 1950s, the burials occur without any sort of ceremony; grave sites are not even outfitted with markers indicating those buried.

The city, generally, does not allow visitors, press, or tourists to see some still-present historical landmarks on the island, citing security concerns due to the fact that prisoners work there. The only exceptions made are to family members of the deceased who may be buried there, and even in that case, the visits must be scheduled with the Department of Correction and the visitors are not allowed to visit the gravesites unaccompanied.

Fiorello LaGuardia was elected mayor of New York City in 1933, and, on January 1 of the following year, took office. One of his first acts as mayor was to crack down on mafia activity, especially mob-owned slot machines, seeing them as a direct line into the coffers of organized crime. LaGuardia paid personal attention to the confiscation and destruction of the machines, taking a sledgehammer along with the media in tow to snap pictures.

But with this one income source down, the mafia was not about to give up on gambling altogether. As
Mental Floss
magazine noted, the mobsters turned to something else: pinball machines. LaGuardia’s ire refocused on pinball as well.

LaGuardia was already anything but fond of pinball; according to
Popular Mechanics
, he stated in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court that pinball hit the “pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money.” And he was probably correct. Pinball operators were known to allow players to exchange the replays and extra balls they earned for cash. This effectively turned the machines into complicated slot machines, especially in cases where these bonuses were awarded randomly, and not due to player skill. Over time, he succeeded in getting the game declared an illegal game of chance, and in 1940, New York City banned pinball within its borders.

Like most contraband, this simply pushed pinball underground, into seedy parlors and strip joints in Greenwich Village and Harlem. Popular disdain for pinball did not approach that for slot machines, making it hard for LaGuardia to muster up support for raids on illegal pinball establishments—until December 1941. That year, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thrusting the United States into World War II. In January 1942, the Federal government established the “Salvage for Victory” campaign, calling on Americans to turn in scrap metal to be used in the war effort. As reported by
The
New York Times
, LaGuardia and team went on a hunt for pinball machines to further these efforts. By February, they confiscated (and again, sledgehammered) more than 3,000 machines, turning roughly 2,500 of them into one ton of metal for the war. The pinball ban in New York lasted for decades, outliving LaGuardia (who died in 1947).

Music may have been the driving force behind the reintroduction of pinball into New York and other cities. In 1969, The Who released the album
Tommy
, which told the story of a “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who became a superstar pinball player despite his apparent disabilities. The album hit number four on the
Billboard
pop charts and the song “Pinball Wizard” peaked at number nineteen on the U.S.
Billboard
charts that year. In 1975,
Tommy
was adapted as a film, further reinvigorating demand and interest in pinball.

In 1976, New York City reinstated pinball—but perhaps only due to a stroke of luck. Roger Sharpe, a magazine editor in his mid-twenties, testified in front of the city council that pinball was a game of skill, not luck, and therefore shouldn’t be regulated as a game of chance. The city council required more convincing. So Sharpe took to the machine, pulled back the plunger, and told the council members that he’d skillfully drop the ball into the middle slot, in what he’d later admit was a bluff. The ball went exactly where he said it would, and the council voted to allow pinball back into the city.