Name for phenomenon in which attempting to solve a problem locally can seemingly fail because they absorb the problem from elsewhere?

Question

Examples:

• City has a homelessness problem. They increase services for the homeless, but because all the surrounding cities also have homelessness problems, homeless people from those cities move in until services are at or above capacity again. Although net good was done in the world (more homeless people fed / treated), from the perspective of a local voter who wants to see less tents in their parks, the program was a failure.
• City has a housing crisis. They implement a simple solution of building more housing. But because the entire country has a housing crisis, people from outside the city move in, and the housing will first go to those who can pay more, ie tech workers. As a result, the cost of housing does not notably improve for service workers, and there is even more demand for services.
• Edit: Another example - climate action. It's in everyone's best interest to reduce emissions, as climate change causes worldwide economic damage. However, if one country takes significantly more costly climate action that its neighbors, businesses will likely move production into countries with more permissive emissions laws, and our example country will take that economic hit and still suffer the consequences of those emissions, as greenhouse gases do not respect borders.

I feel like this dynamic pops up a lot in many of the problems we face today, but I don't have a good way to express it or talk about it. I've heard the term induced demand for housing specifically, but I'm reaching for something more general.

Answer 1

While these examples may seem like the same phenomenon, they're meaningfully distinct. That said, there's a whole slew of terms that cover a variety of cases including these and others.

In order of the examples:

1 & 2 are forms of the Rebound Effect, where efforts to improve a system have reduced benefits because use of that system now increases.

Case #1 is also a matter of Perverse Incentives, wherein the needed solution has a powerful negative feedback against whoever implements it.

As mentioned in another answer, Case #2 is classic Induced Demand, a special case of Rebound Effect which is due to an increase in supply lowering the marginal cost of the product and thereby attracting more consumers.

Case #3 (Climate) is broad enough that numerous terms could apply, depending on the specific mechanisms you wanted to examine. Some good candidates:

If you're the country who wants to implement strict climate policy and thus face emigration of businesses to less restrictive countries, we're back at Perverse Incentives. If you're the country seeing this and hoping to boost your economy by eliminating your climate policy, committing the world to more severe climate change, you're participating in the Race To The Bottom

Generally it's a matter of non-rival, non-excludable, public goods which are chronically afflicted by the free-rider problem where if one person solves the issue, all benefit even if they don't contribute to the solution (more perverse incentives). In NR/NE Public Goods this is frequently described under the umbrella term Tragedy of the Commons.

From @CanadianFriendly: Another thing all the examples have in common is a "parochial" mindset. Parochialism is the political tendency to look to collaboration within rather than collaboration without to solve problems. It can describe this tendency at a city, province/state, or national scale. It's a thinking of, "We'll look after our own, and they can look after theirs."

Answer 2

Induced Demand works for the homelessness example and may well be a general answer.

Is there a third example where you think it doesn't fit?

Answer 3

Perhaps you are referring to the Free Rider problem? A free rider, most broadly speaking, is a person who receives a benefit without contributing towards the cost of its production.

Answer 4

Perhaps Global problems need global solutions. This phrase has been repeatedly repeated.

Answer 5

In Spanish it is common the use of the efecto llamada, by which some event causes people or resources to move (I have seen used for the examples that you post, but also for people investing into some market that is becoming "hot").

I have seen it translated as:

• call effect, which is the most direct translation
• pull/pulling effect
• beacon effect

Answer 6

What you describe essentially fits in the phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons: users of a shared resource will act in their own self interest until the resource is fully depleted, way beyond the point where the resource utilisation is optimal. This happens because the actions of a single user are not sufficient to preserve the resource, but can be sufficient to harm that user by depriving them from the resource they need.

Notably, this situation is impossible if the resource has a single user, who has all the interest to optimize its use and has effective means for its preservation.

In the first example, the resource is the budget that is ought to be spent to help the homeless, and users are cities. Indeed a city cannot take other cities' budgets, but it can take money away from its own homeless relief program and spend it on something else, even though a nation-wide homeless relief program would have improved the quality of life for every citizen.

Similarly, in the second example the common resource is the budget for affordable housing subventions, and in the third example it's the budget on air purification or green energy programs.

Answer 7

An alternative answer is that these are all examples of the prisoner's dilemma. In all cases the expenditure of political capital produces no effect for those spending it unless everyone does this.

To explain, if you have city A and city B, if only one city attempts a program then both cities slightly improve. But the politicians who implemented the program spent all their effort for only a little improvement, not a positive trade off for them. From this you can see that unless cities A and B have a reason to trust each other (or a reason for the politicians to trust each other to commit) then it may always be a better payoff for any politician to defect and not commit to the program. Leading to a Nash equilibrium that nobody approaches the problem.

You can resolve this problem with several strategies, but when you have more than two players it becomes vastly more complicated to get cooperation unless there are some players (or subgroups of players) who benefit for one reason or another without anyone else contributing.

Answer 8

If the a problem is solved locally, only to be redistributed to surrounding areas, this is called the Waterbed Effect. The analogy is clear: if you push down on one spot on a waterbed, the water moves away to other parts. The one spot becomes lower, but the amount of water remains the same.

What you're describing seems akin to that, but not quite. If I were to translate from Dutch ("aanzuigende werking"), I'd say it is an Attracting Effect.

Answer 9

In a more general sense, the program backfired.

A problem was identified. Someone came up with a solution. The solution was implemented. The problem got worse. The solution backfired (etymology: if a gun "backfires" it shoots you in the face - think of Bugs Bunny plugging Elmer Fudd's shotgun and it exploding in his face)