In many cases a big concern with systemic change is that, especially when political, it involves playing zero-sum, or negative-sum games. For example, if I think that some international legal reform X is useful, but you think it would be detrimental, we might both donate money to campaigns fighting for our side of the issue and cancel each other out, meaning the money is wasted. It would have been better for us to realise this before donating to the political campaigns and give our money elsewhere.
Note this is not the same as just saying that people might ...
I agree that the 'people counteract your action' vs 'people don't' axis and the 'systemic' vs 'atomic' axis are different - but I think that there's a strong correlation between the two. Of course any intervention could have people working to counteract it, but I think these counter-actions are much more likely for systemic-type interventions.
This is because many systemic interventions have the property that, if a large majority of people agreed the intervention was a good idea, it would be easy to accomplish, or would have already been accomplished. This ... (read more)