Noem’s Razor and why I think the concept of “unintended consequences” is overrated

I was thinking more about Noem’s Razor (“Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice”) and it reminded me of that “Unintended consequences” often were actually intended, a principle that I discussed back in 2008 in the context of Freakonomics, that reliable purveyor of conventional wisdom; see also here and here. One of my general problems with the concept of “unintended consequences” is that it so often seems to be used either as an argument against a proposed reform (recommending to not do this seemingly good thing because of its unintended consequences; what Albert Hirschman called the “perversity thesis” in his classic book, The Rhetoric of Reaction) or as a way to get evildoers off the hook by arguing that their bad actions were actually the unintended consequences of somebody’s good intentions. I have a similar problem with Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”). Often Hanlon’s Razor applies,…