Unintended Consequences

Kudzu was planted to hold the soil together. Cane toads were shipped to Australia to eat beetles. A surgery that won a Nobel Prize was meant to cure despair.

Seventy-three true, carefully reconstructed stories of policies, inventions and plans that achieved the exact opposite of what their designers intended, each traced from the good intention, through the mechanism that turned it inside out, to the lesson that travels.

Inside: the housing project demolished nineteen years after it opened. The open-plan office that cut face-to-face conversation by roughly seventy percent. The anti-drug programme a landmark study found made no measurable difference. The dam that stopped the floods and started the landslides. The password rules that made passwords easier to guess.

Organised into eight thematic parts, with a sources section listing what was checked and where.

Compiled from the Unintended Consequences podcast, part of the Nerra Network.