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Musings Report 2022-36 9-3-22 The Very Instructive History of Rat Farms
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they're a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
The Very Instructive History of Rat Farms
The story of how the colonial authorities in Hanoi came to establish two kinds of rat farms is highly instructive.
The first rat farm was unintentional. French colonial authorities decided to modernize the French Quarter of Hanoi (where Westerners lived) by constructing a modern sewer system, the overall goal being to establish "a little Paris in the East."
Their understanding of sewers was limited to the first-order effects: sewers safely collected and disposed of human waste.
They did not anticipate the second-order effect: the sewer was Rat Paradise, as "the pipes offered rats a new ecological niche, free of predators and full of food."
Second-order effects generate unintended consequences. (First-order effects: actions have consequences. Second-order effects: consequences have their own consequences.)
Rats proliferated in the sewers and began roaming the streets of Hanoi--not exactly the results intended by the authorities.
Matters became worse when in 1902 a first case of bubonic plague was detected. Modernity had created a potential health crisis.
To combat the exploding rat population, authorities hired crews to enter the sewers and kill the rats--unpleasant and hazardous work.
Despite killing thousands of rats per day, the rats' tremendous fertility was more than a match for the extermination crews.
In an effort to recruit the local populace as rat-catchers / killers, the authorities offered the public a bounty for every dead rat, and later on for every rat-tail when the pile of rats waiting to be incinerated became too high.
Authorities then noticed tail-less rats around Hanoi: residents caught the rats, cut off their tails, and then freed them to continue breeding to insure a steady supply of profitable rat-tails.
Once again, authorities had failed to consider second-order effects.
The authorities soon discovered the ultimate manifestation of the perverse incentives the bounty had created: rat-farms had been established around Hanoi by private-sector entrepreneurs to maximize the harvesting of profitable rat-tails.
In effect, authorities created two rat farms, both unintended: the sewers, and the private-sector rat-farms.
Perverse incentives and unintended consequences are, like rats, ever-present.
In 1998, the Vietnamese authorities closed restaurants selling cat meat, which was marketed as "little tiger (tiểu hổ) meat", because they thought that if the cat population decreased, rats would invade the rice fields, showcasing a similar mentality to the French almost a century earlier.
The modern iterations of perverse incentives and unintended consequences generally follow this line of development:
1. Massive new funding is made available to address a pressing problem: higher education, healthcare, intelligence-gathering, national defense, etc..
2. This massive influx of new funding creates a new ecological niche free of predators and full of food, enabling the explosive growth of administrators, support staff, consultants and con-artists, all of whom have zero incentive to actually solve the problem and every incentive to expand the problem so their protected Paradise gets more funding.
This is higher education, healthcare, intelligence gathering and national defense in a nutshell.
Sources:
Great Hanoi Rat Hunt, The: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (book review)
Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (wikipedia)
Highlights of the Blog
The Global Energy Crunch 9/2/22
The System Is Busy Cannibalizing Itself 8/31/22
Make Sure You Download the Latest Ministry of Propaganda Updates 8/29/22
Podcast:
Charles Hugh Smith on the Insanity of Central Banks in Addressing Inflation (with Richard Bonugli)
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A very convivial visit from NYC friends.
On the food front, processing homegrown taro roots into poi. The corms (root bulbs) are trimmed and pressure-cooked to dissolve the calcium oxalate crystals, then cut into pieces and blenderized.
The slightly different color of the poi reflects the various varieties we have growing. Our taro is dry-land; the commercial poi is wetland, raised in semi-flooded fields / paddies.
Poi was a staple of the native Hawaiians, along with ulu (breadfruit). A useful principle: "Grow what grows easily, eat what grows easily."
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
'All of a sudden it's undrinkable': why an entire US city has no clean water
The US has ruled all taxpayer-funded research must be free to read. What’s the benefit of open access?
The Largest Study of Millionaires Ever Done — Here's What It Revealed
China's Growing Water Crisis: A Chinese Drought Would Be a Global Catastrophe (Foreign Affairs)
Dried-Out Farms From China to Iowa Will Pressure Food Prices
Drought Threatens China’s Harvest When World Can Least Afford It
Finland Braces For Rolling Blackouts This Winter
UK energy crisis is 'bigger than the pandemic'
The Economic Returns of Foreign Language Learning
The Origin of Student Debt -- not sure I buy the causality presented here... the financial incentives were far more consequential than the political incentives...
Roman ruins reappear from river in drought-stricken Europe almost 2,000 years later-- just one of many such forts.... construction on an impressive scale...
The initial interest rate on new Series I savings bonds is 9.62 percent
"All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance." Edward Gibbon
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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