Unexpected Effects

Read a fascinating article in the N.Y.Times today, Perfect Vision Is Helping and Hurting Navy -- seems the Navy is providing laser eye surgery for about a third of all Naval Academy midshipmen. Sounds like a pretty good deal -- now sailors who previously were restricted in their career choices by virtue of bad vision have new options for becoming fighter pilots, special forces, things like that.

Not so fast -- there's a catch. Now apparently there aren't enough submarine officers in the Navy:

For generations, Academy graduates with high grades and bad eyes were funneled into the submarine service. But in the five years since the Naval Academy began offering free eye surgery to all midshipmen, it has missed its annual quota for supplying the Navy with submarine officers every year.

Officers involved say the failure to meet the quota is due to many factors, including the perception that submarines no longer play as vital a national security role as they once did. But the availability of eye surgery to any midshipman who wants it is also routinely cited.

Imagine that. Sailors are getting the chance to do something they want to do. That's certainly an unexpected effect of the treatment process.

Fast forward a few years. The general population is ageing. Life-extending medical and surgical treatments are improving. "Augmented health" procedures are improving as well. More people are going to be healthier longer, are going to have healthier children, are going to spawn longer-living, healthier interim generations. Is that an unexpected effect too?