The line that separates intended and unintended consequences is only as clear as the intentions and the consequences are. Both forms of clarity ought to ideally be satisfied for the cause-effect of actions and reactions to flow as though in controlled lab conditions. But there is no lab per se in economics, it’s all an open field of influence and noise that makes the separating line in question rigorously delicate.
There are plenty of intentions, goodness knows – some clear, many approximately so, and some just vague and loose enough to be distorted – the lot of them could probably be plotted on a chart that would describe a bell-curve, where the horizontal axis runs the clarity continuum. The same type of statistical representation could probably be drawn for consequence, and in both cases the little subsets that are close enough to clarity may or may not overlap with one another in the underlying data set.
Which is to say, the ideal case of perfect clarity – in both intention and desired outcome – is theoretically, and very likely, minuscule. The vast majority, the dominant activity by far, is thus a matter of degree, a question only of how unclear or how far from perfection is the particular case, as measured by the combined consequence and its original intention.
The market is a voting mechanism, it is said, that bases its decisions on perceptions shaped by much of the above. Whether the market is right or wrong – and it is strictly speaking almost always wrong, as evidenced by perpetual price movement – is additionally complicated by the interconnection between its individual subjects: companies, industries, financial instruments, trends, themes and etc..
The degree of uncertainty, the magnitude of imperfection as contemplated in the (un)intended consequence environment described, is the degree of risk, on one hand, and optionality, on the other. Many refer to the latter as opportunity, but the choice of words can be deceptive – diminishing, as it does, the element of chance in the equation.
At the levels down below the market and the big economy – the micro levels of the enterprise, technology, product, customer base, social group, and individual – which are all influenced by and also shape the macro picture, the described elements are more or less the same. There is an important difference though, I believe, in that the macro set tends to be more aware of these things than the micro set tends to be. This is an added element of risk (and all of its assorted flip-sides) because the macro is almost always a diversified portfolio, while the micro almost never is.
Speculative Fiction 