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In the late 1800s, British colonial administrators in Delhi faced a genuine public health crisis: venomous cobras slithered through streets, gardens, and homes, killing dozens of residents each year. The colonial government devised what seemed like an elegant solution — a bounty program. Any person who brought a dead cobra to a government office would receive a cash reward of several annas per snake. At first, the program worked beautifully. Hunters fanned out across Delhi, killing cobras and collecting payments. Dead snake tallies climbed. Officials congratulated themselves on a policy success. But within months, something unexpected emerged. Enterprising residents of Delhi realized that hunting wild cobras was dangerous and unpredictable. Breeding them, however, was simple and safe. S...
Popular framing: Stupid colonial officials offered cash for snakes and got scammed.
Structural analysis: The bounty measured a proxy (dead cobras turned in) for the goal (live cobras eliminated), and once payment was tied to the proxy, entrepreneurs optimized the proxy by breeding cobras for slaughter. Cancelling the program then created a worse equilibrium than the starting point: hundreds of farmed cobras with no economic value were released into the city. The mechanism design failed twice — first by misaligning incentives, then by ignoring the disposal phase of the supply chain it had created.
The popular framing locates agency and blame in individuals, which implies the fix is better policing of actors. The structural framing locates the failure in the system's feedback architecture, which implies the fix requires redesigning the measurement-reward loop and modeling exit dynamics before launch. Missing the structural gap leads policymakers to repeat the same class of error with new actors and new metrics.
