Life is a trade-off. A companion rule is the “Law of Unintended Consequences”.

According to an article in WSJ in Dec. 2008: “Over the past 30 years, improved automobile and motorcycle safety has affected the supply of healthy donated kidneys by reducing fatalities. Instead, more donated organs come from older donors who died of diseases. Such kidneys are more likely to fail or be rejected.”

The U.S. is in the process of implementing a number of policies that will affect all of us. Here’s an exercise: Pick a proposed policy you agree with and try to imagine the unintended consequences of enacting that policy. Then, do the same with a policy you don’t agree with.

In future blogs, I will look at some policies of the last few decades and their unintended consequences.