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Even modern medicine causes unintended consequences though. And with medicine, quantitative analysis can be used in a laboratory setting. With social engineering there are far many more variables that can come into play that can't be ferreted out in a laboratory setting. The problems cased can take years and years or even generations to manifest themselves and by then it's often to late to change things back to the way they were.

We need government to try to keep things fair and to protect us from each other and external forces. But we need to understand governments limitations. Government can't do everything, and the more they do the more they are likely to screw up. Governments are inherently inefficient and they are prone to corruption. These are facts you need to acknowledge. Our forefathers recognized this and that's why they drafted the Constitution to limit the power and scope of government, and included checks and balances to limit the power of each branch of government so none got too powerful.

I for one believe that our federal government in particular has already gotten too big and too powerful contrary to the intent of our forefathers. I don't see this as a good thing. I don't see them making great strides improving the lives of the people. In fact I see them doing the opposite in many ways. I do not have confidence that they could accomplish the things you believe them capable of.

Part of the "problem" is that we are a democracy. I used the quotation marks because I don't really look at it as a problem, but it is a major factor in our governments inability to be efficient. A totalitarian dictatorship could be streamlined and run much more efficiently, but then we are at the mercy of our leaders who may not have our best interests at heart. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. With a democracy, we are always going to have all of the competing interests struggling and fighting in government to do the things necessary to please their constituency and those who finance their political campaigns. This is just a fact of life in a democratic nation. It will never be a particularly efficient form of government, but it is preferable to the alternatives for people who wish to be free and who wish to have at least some control over those who govern them.

Part of the inefficiency of which you speak is because it is the job of government, as a deliberative body, to weigh competing interests and make necessary compromises. If it did not do so, it would not be representing us. So that is a good thing. As far as government being inherently inefficient and prone to corruption, I disagree. I think government is no worse in this regard than business. Government can be very efficient when it matters--disaster relief.

I think what you are saying about the complexity of society, and the number of variables, is true. But that doesn't make it impossible to study. We do have sociological and economic generalizations that hold up pretty well. And we have something called cognitive science that is showing great promise in unraveling the complexity of human perception, cognition and emotion. While you are right that in the past, we had very little control over social dynamics, and could do little better than simply observe after the fact how things went we may be able to do better than that in the future.

I agree with you that central control is not what we want. But rationality does not require big government. It simply requires (enforceable) ground rules that make social outcomes to some extent predictable and reliable. Innovation, important as it is, is not always desirable. Just as fire is useful in the right place, it can be dangerous in the wrong place. Social norms set the boundaries of acceptable deviation. In social interactions with strangers, we want to be able to count on a certain predictability of response--otherwise we find the encounter threatening. Any innovation in those encounters needs to take place within a framework of acceptable social boundaries.

Rationality and reliability, control, predictability, are desirable things. We can't control everything. But insofar as we can cointrol some things, we can bring about the things we desire more reliably. We are not stuck in trail and error. Just as we want machines to work in a predictable way, we want institutions to work in a predictable way. We want our legal system to give similar sentences for similar crimes. We want our educational institutions to reliably graduate students who have achieved a certain level of competence. Industry counts on that. So do all our institutions that accept graduates from our schools. Think of it like money in the economy: graduation, or a certain GPA, or a certain set of scores of standardized achievement tests, should represent an comparable range of skills, knowledge and aptitudes. Now, performance can always be improved. So we can't make do without innovation. But all innovation involves risk, and too much risk is counterproductive: one cannot count on the results. So, reliability is valuable. A near guaranteed delivery of a particular good is better than a much greater good that never materializes. Still, it makes sense to set aside some investment in research and development on the possible good, or to let some individuals try to produce it at their own risk.