The law of unintended consequences is often associated with American sociologist Robert Merton, though its general spirit appears in many forms. Not least in Adam Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand”.
The idea is that when people intervene in systems with a lot of moving parts, especially ecologies and economies, the intervention, because of the complex interrelationships among the system’s parts, will have effects beyond those intended. Including many that were unforeseen or unforeseeable.
