Unintended Consequences

There was an interesting slip in the language. Robert Merton, who's an amazing thinker, he originally wrote about unanticipated consequences and then over time, he and other people used to say unintended consequences instead. Unintended is like, well, we didn't mean to do it, but maybe you could have foreseen that it would have happened. So lead petrol is not unanticipated. The idea that if you put lead, which is a known toxin in fuel and it's coming out of the exhaust, that that might be a problem. I mean, that was known. But it's not true to say that it was unanticipated.