Somebody else's problem

Somebody else's problem (also known as someone else's problem or SEP) is a phrase coined comedically by Douglas Adams, which has passed into the vernacular.

Origin

Within Template:H2G2 of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy science fiction series, his character Ford Prefect describes somebody else's problem as:

The narration then explains:

This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

In popular culture

French president Nicolas Sarkozy warned the U.S. Congress that "The [decline of the] dollar cannot remain someone else's problem. If we are not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be victims."

The New York Times said that when the Shah of Iran was exiled in 1979 he became "someone else's problem" from the point of view of President Carter's administration.

In the election of 2006, the Swedish Centre Party used the phrase "nånannanism" (someone-else-ism) as a catchword for their campaign.

The sub-goals of programmers working on a shared artifact "can be deferred to the degree that they become what is known amongst professional programmers as an 'S.E.P.' – somebody else's problem." This can be considered an aspect of social loafing where, in some instances while working as a team, individuals become less productive because they feel less responsible for the final product.

Unix became popular because it was developed at Bell Labs where "profits were somebody else's problem," so there was no reason not to share the source code with universities. This means that Bell Labs were not concerned with making Unix a profitable computer operating system, instead making it conveniently accessible to university campuses.

See also

• Buck passing
• Bystander effect
• Externality
• First they came ...
• Global issue
• Inattentional blindness
• NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)
• Other people's money
• Sheeple