You probably have a good sense of what makes a policy work.

After all, any policy would either help people, make things worse, or do nothing at all. Policymakers just have to pick the ones that help and avoid the ones that cause problems. Easy. Aasaan. Nissaaram!

But how well can you actually tell the difference?

Below is a small exercise. For each of these real policy interventions, your job is to decide whether it had a positive, negative, or neutral outcome.

Let’s see if your instincts match reality.

Complete the exercise to continue.

How was the quiz? What did you notice about the outcomes of these policies? Were you able to accurately pick the good policies from the bad?

All these policies had good intentions. No doubt. But if good intentions were enough, every policy intervention made by the government would be a success, unlike the glaring examples we saw before.

Most people, including policymakers, tend to make this mistake and evaluate policies by their intentions rather than their track record, even though history is littered with well-meaning policies that backfired spectacularly.

They forget that policies don't operate in a vacuum. Instead policies interact with markets and society, often leading to consequences nobody anticipated.

If we don’t train ourselves to think in terms of consequences rather than intentions, we risk endorsing policies that sound good but make problems worse. As the wise crow from The Nitopadesha says:

… in all matters of public interest, one must judge things from the calculation of consequences.