The programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.

Good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes

We've all seen this play out. A city puts rent controls in place to help low-income renters, and suddenly landlords stop maintaining buildings or converting old warehouses to apartments—so housing gets scarcer, not more available. A well-meaning program meant to help ends up hurting the exact people it aimed to protect. The gap between what we intend and what actually happens can be enormous.

What makes this particularly tricky is that the intentions really are good. Nobody's designing these programs hoping they'll backfire. But here's the non-obvious part: good intentions can actually make the problem harder to fix. When something isn't working, we're less likely to question a program we believe in deeply. We assume we just need more funding, more rules, more oversight—when sometimes the whole approach needs rethinking.

This doesn't mean we should stop trying to help. It means staying genuinely curious about whether our solutions are working in practice, not just in theory. It means being willing to notice when a program isn't delivering what it promised—and being brave enough to admit it, even when we deeply care about the goal.