cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/54736
The modern iterations of perverse incentives and unintended consequences generally follow this line of development:
Massive new funding is made available to address a pressing problem: higher education, healthcare, homelessness, intelligence-gathering, national defense, etc.
This massive influx of new funding creates a new ecological niche free of predators and full of food, enabling the explosive growth of administrators, support staff, consultants and con-artists, all of whom have zero incentive to actually solve the problem and every incentive to expand the problem so their protected Paradise gets more funding.
This is higher education, healthcare, homelessness, intelligence gathering and national defense in a nutshell.