In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: “You can never merely do one thing.”
We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.
He developed second-order thinking into a tool, showing that if you don't consider “the effects of the effects,” you can't really claim to be doing any thinking at all.
In a complex system there are always unintended consequences.
