I received the following email:

**, Co-Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer of **, wants to use the following quote in his upcoming presentation:

“The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.”

** would like to attribute the quote to the rightful author but is having difficulties in locating its origin. Can you please clarify if this is something that you said, and if so, where and when you said it? If you did not say this, then can you please tell us who was its original author? Thank you in advance for your help.

I replied:

What I wrote about the law of unintended consequences is here and here. The paragraph you give below is from Alex Tabarrok and is given in the first link above.

It’s a little scary that the most famous thing I ever wrote was actually written by someone else!