Time to focus on unintended consequences of Covid-19<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n CONTEXT<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The abrupt, unprecedented cessation of economic and public life to fight Covid-19 has been driven by necessity, but the Centre and state governments may need to urgently focus on the unintended side effects on public health and livelihoods too.<\/p>\n The first\u2014 and the most obvious \u2014 is the need to revive existing medical infrastructure to enable the treatment of non-Covid-19 medical conditions, which may worsen because the health care system is focused on the pandemic.<\/p>\n SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The concept \u201cunanticipated consequences,\u201d coined by Robert K. Merton (1936), has largely been replaced in current social science by its putative synonym, \u201cunintended consequences.\u201d This conflation suggests that \u201cunintended\u201d consequences are also \u201cunanticipated,\u201d effectively obscuring an interesting and real category of phenomena\u2014consequences that are both unintended and anticipated\u2014that warrant separate attention. The first part of this article traces the conflation of \u201cunintended\u201d and \u201cunanticipated,\u201d and explains why it occurred.<\/p>\n The second part argues the need for a clear distinction between what is unintended and what is unanticipated, and it illustrates the failure of the present concept of \u201cunintended consequences\u201d to do so and the consequences that has for social and political analysis.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cUnintended consequences\u201d remain a preoccupation in the social sciences, with its annals containing an ever-expanding collection of examples on the unwelcome side-effects of policy.<\/p>\n The idea that individual self-interested acts can produce benign aggregate outcomes that were neither intended nor foreseen is central to the spontaneous order tradition.<\/p>\n Merton\u2019s\u00a0\u00a0article \u201cUnanticipated Consequences of Purposive\u00a0Social Action\u201d builds on this tradition, but with an important difference. Merton was interested in the consequences of \u201cformally organized\u201d action, not the unorganized actions of \u201cindividuals considered distributively\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cUnanticipated consequences,\u201d Merton writes,<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n may, of course, follow both [unorganized and organized] action, though the second type would seem to afford a better opportunity for sociological analysis since the very process of formal organization ordinarily involves an explicit statement of purpose and procedure.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The literature on unintended consequences following Merton agrees, with most authors focusing on the unintended consequences of\u00a0organized action<\/em>, meaning the unwelcome outcomes of formal policy.<\/p>\n The distinction is important because the failure to anticipate outcomes is far from self-evident in organized action, whereas in a spontaneous order\u2014the aggregate outcome of numerous unorganized individual actions\u2014lack of anticipation is a given.<\/p>\n Anticipating the outcomes of purposive action is the core business of policy makers. They frequently fail, of course, and Merton aims to explain why.<\/strong><\/p>\n Merton\u2019s choice of terms (\u201cunanticipated\u201d rather than \u201cunintended\u201d) was by no means arbitrary; it clearly distinguishes unanticipated consequences from, say, those that are unintended but anticipated.<\/p>\n Unfortunately this clarity was obscured by the later conflation of \u201cunintended\u201d and \u201cunanticipated\u201d\u2014a development to which Merton himself contributed.<\/p>\n Disappearance of the unanticipated<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Social Theory and Social Structure<\/em>\u00a0used \u201cunintended consequences\u201d and \u201cunanticipated consequences\u201d as synonyms. While both were common terms in social science publications in the 1950s, references to \u201cunintended consequences\u201d began to outnumber \u201cunanticipated consequences\u201d in the early 1960s. \u201cunintended consequences\u201d is today the standard term while \u201cunanticipated consequences\u201d has all but fallen out of use.<\/p>\n True, unanticipated consequences can only be unintended, but unintended consequences can be either anticipated or unanticipated, a distinction lost in the single opposition of \u201cintended\u201d versus \u201cunintended. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For more such notes, Articles, News & Views Join our Telegram Channel.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n![\"Unintended](\"https:\/\/images.slideplayer.com\/26\/8464487\/slides\/slide_5.jpg\")
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