"the law of unintended consequences"

[Wilson Gray]

How about this "law"?

Alice [Trillin]'s Law of Compensatory Cash Flow

"Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the
equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly."

 Calvin Trillin. 1978. Alice, Let's Eat

-Wilson
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain


On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This had been cited frequently in the news media for a number of years.
> Â Wacki even has an article on "unintended consequences" :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences It does not trace the
> phrase itself, however.
>
> Allegedly the longer phrase appears in Herbert Feis, Foreign Aid and
> American Foreign Policy_ (N.Y.: St. Martin's, 1964), but I can't confirm
> this. In fact, "search only" results from  Hathitrust make it seem
> doubtful. Â Someone needs to check the book itself. Â Page number? Can't help
> you.
>
> The earliest ex. I can confirm appears in Theodore H. White's _In Search of
> History_ (N.Y.: Harper, 1978), p. 304: Â Which brings me to the last and
> most unsettling lesson the Marshall Plan taught: a demonstration of what
> learned* *historians call the Law of Unintended Consequences."
>
> People have known about "unintended consequences" Â since Oedipus at least,
> but its stature as a "law" appears to be relatively recent.
>
> White, of course, was a very prominent American journalist, just the sort
> of writer to influence the "national conversation."

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