Tilted

There is a certain amount of controversy over whether people are products of their environments, their own "characters," or some combination of the two. I tend to be of the opinion that people commit acts that their society considers criminal, or at least undesirable, because those actions are rational responses to perverse incentives. And there are always perverse incentives; food that one person has stolen from another is just as nutritious and satiating as food acquired by more honest means.

But just because humanity inhabits a world where perverse incentives come with the territory doesn't mean that people have to create more. And it's there where I wonder if people are perhaps looking in the wrong places when it comes to attempting to regulate the behavior of others. Because perhaps it does more good to understand the perverse incentives that surround a person, and see if they can be changed, than it does to simply decry the fact that people respond to those incentives.

Part of the problem, I suspect is that it's easier (or at least less expensive) to create bad options than good ones, and so people who see themselves as social engineers, often having a series of constraints to live within, tend to focus more making behaviors they don't want difficult and expensive, rather than actively making the behavior they do want easy and cheaper.