Ethics, Worldview & Influence

Second-Order Effects

In the early 2000s, an MIT economist named Esther Duflo wanted to know something that sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to answer: if you want more families in rural Kenya to sleep under mosquito nets (which prevent malaria), should you give the nets away for free or sell them at a small price? The obvious answers were both wrong, and the real answer only showed up when she looked at the second-order effects. In this lesson you will learn to see past the first-order consequences, map ripples, forecast wider effects, and build a personal checklist for longer-view thinking.