alt Hacker News> Plain packaging — where you strip cigarette boxes of their attractive branding — seems like a no brainer, but in Australia, it looks like the policy caused smokers to switch to cheaper brands and to smoke more
This example provides an easily understood illustration of why so many social programs fail. Simply put, the people proposing and creating the programs have zero understanding of the people whose lives they are trying to influence and control. Like generals ensconced in their offices located not even on the same continent as the front line they study maps and tables and hear the advice of experts with even less direct experience than themselves and then dispatch orders that arrive too late and attempt to command a reality that does not exist. The reports they receive back show nothing has changed or the situation has got worse and yet they never adapt or see their own fault. Why should they? They've suffered no consequence.
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The irony here of course is that most comments on HN - including this one and the one it responds to - are arm-chair commentary on generals' actions, even less informed, even more disconnected.
Unintended consequences are inevitable. The danger isn't that they'll exist - it's that they'll be ignored entirely or ignored until they cannot be, that the desire for panacea produces a willful blindness to their existence or myopic fixation on their effects to the point where the value of the intended consequences are ignored.
Another relevant example here is vaping: an amazing win for harm reduction in existing smokers, but an attractive on-ramp to the addiction for some who would have avoided it otherwise. No panacea.
But this policy has been very successful ... Every policy has some unwanted side effects but smoking overall has seen large reductions since its introduction.
I think some "interventions" may also be the result of political compromises or "deals" where one side might want the intervention to be ineffective.
E.g. if the tobacco industry is forced to choose between either hard bans on smoking, or a highly visible but largely symbolic measure like changing the packaging, they will probably choose the latter.
Maybe we should save the anger for the rich and powerful people selling addictive cancer rather than the ones who need to find some way of reducing their harm without getting sued or voted out.
Take the taxes off cigarettes. Attach them to a tax stamp which has to be purchased separately and redeemed upon price of cigarettes. Make it a hassle on top of more expensive.
Those are inherent to complex systems.
You can still try and revert back if it fails.
>Simply put, the people proposing and creating the programs have zero understanding of the people whose lives they are trying to influence and control.
I mean I think that's definitely true in some cases but it's a wide wide world out there, and the universe of things that count as "social programs" is impossibly vast, and some of them are quite well researched and simply work when rolled out. Congestion pricing in NYC for instance was the product of policy nerds and seems like it simply worked.
I completely agree there's unintended consequences and regulation can make things worse but not to the point of a universal anti government ethos.
Software engineering, for all its faults as a field, figured this out a long time ago. The essence of agile (the good parts) is: the people doing the work understand it best, and the plan is wrong (and making the plan is a waste of time).
> it looks like the policy caused smokers to switch to cheaper brands
This is documented, but it is not clear how much this is due to packaging vs. Australia having the highest tobacco tax in the world.
> and to smoke more
{{Citation needed}}
This claim is directly contradicted by this Cochrane review. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
"Findings were mixed amongst the four studies assessing consumption, with some studies finding no difference and some studies finding evidence of a decrease."
This also ignores that the intervention was intended to reduce the number of people taking up smoking and to encourage current smokers to quit, which appears to have happened according to that same review.
Imagine if they had been able to take proper measures decades ago, bankrupting the tobacco companies and imprisoning their executives for covering up the damaging effects of their products and engaging in a massive campaign of false advertising. Maybe that would have moved the needle.
It is not a surprise that when people are given virtually no power to do anything, they have a hard time accomplishing very much.
If you read the report instead of a blog post with an agenda you will find out that the plain packaging accelerated decline in smoking by about 25% (p<0.01)
https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/study-of-the-i... (page 12)
They also tried quitting more often (p=0.013)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3710988/