I was reading the Economist the other day, and an item in the back pages got me thinking about the Law of Unintended Consequences. The LUC is pervasive and profoundly important, yet I know of not a single scholarly treatment of this subject. Of course,if such a treatment did exist, it would be a litany of sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and often perverse failures, a gloomy, but instructive tome replete with hubris and the comeuppance of overly-ambitious social engineers. Sounds like my kind of subject, so let me explain what I mean by the LUC and why [...]