Good Things Taken Too Far

Jul 22, 2020 by Morgan Housel

Penicillin is probably the most important discovery of the last 100 years. It’s saved somewhere between 80 million and 200 million lives. Your great grandparents would have found it indistinguishable from sorcery. But when it first came to use its discoverer, Alexander Fleming, saw a problem: Antibiotics were so good that people would want to take them all the time, and taking them all the time could backfire as drug-resistant bacteria adapted and proliferated. He said in 1946:

the public will demand [the drug and] … then will begin an era … of abuses. The microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms .. can be passed to other individuals to others until they reach someone who gets septicemia or pneumonia which penicillin cannot save. In such a case the thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope the evil can be averted.

It wasn’t averted. It’s exactly what’s happened.

Drug-resistant bacteria have surged so much that the U.K. has revised down future life expectancy. The U.N. thinks drug-resistant bacteria caused by the overuse of antibiotics could kill 10 million people a year by 2050, reversing the lives saved since penicillin came into use in 1945.

Good things can be taken too far – helpful at one level and destructive at another.

They can be more dangerous than bad things, because the fact that they’re good at one level makes them easier to rationalize at a dangerous level. Doctors who overprescribe antibiotics think they’re doing good in a way people selling meth don’t.

A lot of things work like that, don’t they?

Good things – praise-worthy things – that in a high enough dosage backfire and become anchors?

A few I see in investing:

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