Trust
A theoretical framework of public action must start from the general context dominated by uncertainty and from the state of operators’ confidence. Economic decisions are not taken on strong anchors by operators, and those concerning demand are different from those concerning supply.
Rationality in decisions is limited, and the knowledge of reality that individuals have is imperfect. In few areas can expectations about the future be traced to probabilistic schemes (if not subjective ones) or calculable risk; the majority are dominated by uncertainty (see Roncaglia, 2012). Depending on the case, exploratory, irrational, and imitative behaviors as well as routines and (partly) social and behavioral conventions have a role in the analysis. It is not just the type of behavior that is indefinable. The perception of a situation as a basis for decisions is weak (only the reductive idea about information and rationality that mainstream economics maintains can avoid these problems).6 * [7]If the above is true, the system is somewhat dominated by collective confidence, which influences the attitude and behavior of operators. Such confidence may depend on many exogenous factors. Today, for example, new elements of the economy have a negative effect on confidence [as, for example, globalization itself, the complexity of new technologies, the shortness of required reaction time, the weight of finance (involving more risk), the speed of technical progress, the rapidity of changes in the labor market, the fall in the quality of international governance, and more]. However, it is public action and the institutional structure that—by socializing many variables and providing the necessary anchoring—are decisive. They ultimately allow operators to deal with these aspects with more or less optimism and to make operators’ confidence higher or lower and their way of looking at the future more open and less uncertain or, on the contrary, more dense with insecurity and more labile. Since the degree of confidence is the frame in which the whole economic process evolves, it follows that the task of the normative and operative aspects of public action is to turn economic policy in the direction of strengthening trust itself, dominating the complexity and reducing uncertainty. This is the key factor that governs growth and stabilization.
does not occur with the participation of culturally committed political forces that feel this reconstruction is an integral part of their process of definition of their cultural identity.