Don’t Just Decide, Anticipate: Feast or Famine Can be on the Other Side of this Decision

45 Million People died.

Wait let me start at the beginning.

As part of the Great Leap Forward, The Chinese Communist Party led by Chairman Mao Zedong, in 1958 created the Four Evils campaign.

This was to get rid of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. These four pests were seen as impediments to the rapid industrialisation of China which the Great Leap Forward was trying to achieve.

To move the country into the modern era, China wanted to conquer nature and riding the country of these pests would make the place cleaner and more hygienic.

Going To The Birds

The sparrows were targeted because it was believed they ate the grain and fruit crops.

To incentivise people to kill the birds, Chinese officials held competitions and gave away prizes for those who brought in the most dead sparrows.

People would try to find and destroy the nests, they would shoot birds in trees and out of the air. Other people would make loud noises to keep the birds flying and eventually, they would die from exhaustion.

And a wonderful thing happened, it worked perfectly. The crops were protected and everyone went home happy.

Excerpt for it didn’t. The crops started to produce less food.

Nature Strikes Back

Even though the sparrow is tiny, the effect of less of them was dramatic.

The Chinese government was correct, the sparrows did eat some of the crops, but they also ate the pests that ate the crops. One of the big things they ate was crop-damaging locusts.

These were not high on Mao’s list of pests because the sparrows kept their numbers low. And now with the sparrows away, the locusts did play.

In 1960, the locusts started consuming all of the rice crops. Having no rice immediately reduced the calories available and started the famine.

Then extreme weather hit, droughts in some areas and flooding in others pushed up the food shortages and the famine was in full effect.

45 million people died.

If It Is Not One Thing, It Is Another

You can understand what the Government was thinking. It seems somewhat logical. The issue is that it is fatally short-sighted.

The ecosystem is a wildly complex system. It is also a system of systems. The interplay and interconnection between all of these parts is wildly complex.

The audacity to think that you could change one single variable in a system as complex as this, which is also constantly adapting to what is happening to it, and get a specific outcome is madness.

Adding further to that, ignoring all other variables in that system as if they meant nothing gives us, as you can see, disastrous results.

Order of Effects

There are different orders of effects. The first thing that happened was that they got rid of the sparrows. This creates second-order effects.

In this case, there were no birds to eat the insects. This caused a third-order effect, that the insects ate more of the crops.

And you can go over for a while like that.

The lesson we all can take from this is that optimizing for one single variable is often fraught with danger.

And ignoring the additional order effects is just plain stupid.

Your sales team is killing it and is getting all of these new clients. Things are looking great.

But you can’t hire fast enough to complete the work because you only care about sales.

Now your employees have to work long hours to do the work, which is ruining their lives and it doesn’t really put a dent in the client’s workload.

Now some clients are annoyed because of delays.

Staff are leaving because they don’t like the work conditions.

Now clients are leaving because you can’t complete their work.

So now you have fewer employees, fewer clients, unhappier clients, unhappier employees and a smaller business, all because you thought sales was the only thing you needed to care about.

We live and operate in an ever-changing world, make sure you are thinking more than one move at a time.

In the end, China had to import over 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to attempt to halt the destruction destruction to the crops. This was successful and the sparrows got the locusts and insect populations under control.

They then went in at trying to erdicate bed bugs.