Shankar Vedantam on the problems of “social” governmental intervention, including increased moral hazard (HT: Arts and Letters Daily):

While it seems mon sense to pump money into an economy that is pulling the bedcovers over its head, the problem with most social interventions is that they target not robots and machines but human beings — who regularly respond to interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways.

Too true. So much for homo economicus. I might also add that the unpredictability, or should I say spontaneity, of human reactions in all kinds of situations is pretty strong evidence for the reality of free choice and against mechanical determinism.