Why more makes less

At the far end of the Counterfoil catalogue’s scale, tools and technological systems turn against most people. They enter the realm of self-sabotage, counterproductivity, iatrogenesis, and nemesis. On the front page I’ve compressed all these concepts as “actively harmful.” All four describe one pattern. Past a certain scale, a tool stops doing what it was built for and starts doing the opposite. This note sets out what Ivan Illich meant by the last three, which are his words, and then the work of others who found the same pattern and gave it the name of a natural law or property of systems.

Illich’s three words

Illich’s general term was counterproductivity: a tool that defeats its own purpose. Fast transport that leaves people with less time is his standard case, worked out in Energy and Equity (1974), tested with French figures by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert in La Trahison de l’opulence (1976), and summarized in the record for the bicycle.

Iatrogenesis is the medical version. The word means something that is “brought about by the healer.” In Medical Nemesis (1975), which began as an article in The Lancet the year before, Illich used it for illness caused by treatment, and then stretched it to cover a society made dependent on care, and a culture that had lost its own ways of dealing with pain and death. See Hospital medicine since the 1950s.

Nemesis is the oldest of the three. In Greek stories she is the goddess who punishes people who reach past their mortal limits for what belongs only to the gods. Illich took the name for what happens when an institution will not accept a limit: the damage is not an accident or a side effect, but the direct result of the overreach.

The same pattern, found by others

Engineers and economists have met this pattern many times, usually in one field at a time.

• Roads. In 1962 the economist Anthony Downs stated what he called the law of peak-hour expressway congestion: on urban commuter roads, rush-hour traffic rises to fill the capacity provided. In 2011 Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner tested it on American cities and found that driving grows in step with the lane-kilometres built. They called it the fundamental law of road congestion. The general name is induced demand. In Britain it is known as the Lewis–Mogridge position, after Martin Mogridge’s 1990 study of London: traffic expands to meet the available road space.
• Networks. In 1968 the mathematician Dietrich Braess showed that adding a link to a road network can make every trip slower, when each driver chooses the route that is best for them. The same result has been found in other networks where traffic routes itself. It is called Braess’s paradox; his paper was translated into English in 2005.
• Fuel. In 1865 William Stanley Jevons argued in The Coal Question that more efficient steam engines would raise Britain’s use of coal, not lower it, because cheaper power finds more uses. This is the Jevons paradox.
• Software. In 1975 Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that adding people to a late software project makes it later, because the cost of coordinating them grows faster than the work they do. This is Brooks’s law.

Each of these describes a system that adjusts to added capacity, so that the gain is used up or reversed. Illich’s speed calculation belongs with them. So does the rule in A group is its own worst enemy.

What Illich adds

The laws are about a mechanism, and they stay inside one field. Illich made two larger claims. The first is that the pattern is general: any tool, grown past a threshold, turns on its purpose. The second is that the worst cost is not the lost time or the wasted fuel. It is what happens to the people who can no longer do without the tool, which he called radical monopoly in Tools for Conviviality. A congested road is a nuisance. A town where nothing can be reached without a car is a different kind of harm.

That second claim is why the catalogue scores six balances and not one. A tool can pass the narrow test, moving more cars or treating more patients, and still be past the second watershed. How the scoring works is set out in How we evaluate tools.