Cute and thus worthy of an upvote, but whenever I see scientists or economists refer to first or second order effects it pertains to things that are subsequent to each other in time, or at least intended vs. ancillary. I don't think anyone except for a Stafford "the purpose of a system is what it does" Beer acolyte would designate new demand of pill bottles as the first order effect of a new medication.

It's just something that statisticians have observed across many fields: you theorize about how potentially huge a particular interaction effect or knock-on effect could be relative to the main effect, you read about the Jevons Paradox and intuitively feel that it can explain so much of the world today... and then you get the data and it just almost never does. No reason why it couldn't, just empirically it rarely happens.