INTERVENING WITHOUT MECHANISMS. THE CASE OF SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES

Abstract

Much of the economic thought presupposes that the discovery of invariant regularities - often provoked by the operation of mechanisms - is possible in the domain of socio-economic phenomena. Think in terms of mechanisms is suggestive, as they can be used – among other things – for interventionist  purposes. Nevertheless, it will be argued that socioeconomic processes are not mechanistics. On the contrary, they are processes in which people’s actions are very volatile. And this is because such actions depend on different structural conditions and a collection of signals they interpret from the world. Such volatility makes that two mechanisms requirements - stability and automaticity - are not met. Two implications are inferred from this: on the one hand, the  ontology of socioeconomic processes is reconsidered, and on the other hand, a shift in the relationship "invariance for intervention" to "intervene in
order to achieve invariance ".