Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention

From Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World by Megan T. Stevenson.  From the Abstract:  

This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another.

This has a variety of implications. It suggests that a dominant perspective on social change—one that forms a pervasive background for academic research and policymaking—is at least partially a myth. Understanding this shifts how we should think about social change and raises important questions about the process of knowledge generation.

Mirrors findings in public policy and developmental economics.  Social and Cultural systems are deeply grounded and self-correcting.  Nudges and interventions can have some effect at the margin and temporarily but they also usually have unintended negative side effects which frequently outweigh any sort of temporary benefit.

It does suggest an additional possibility.  Stevenson sort of opens the door.

I would put it this way:  There are systems so complex, interdependent, chaotic, and loosely coupled in unpredictable ways that they are too delicate to be discovered by the heavy hand of gold standard studies (such as RCT).  The fault is not in the method of study but in the delicacy of that which is being studied.  Perhaps there is a form of Heisenberg Uncertainty at play.

Possibly there are useful ways of studying system effects this diaphanous in a way which is convincing to all participants.  I am unaware of any and I don't think that we are there yet.

In the meantime, it seems to me, that this is where wisdom comes in.  There are things we know and there are things we choose to believe.  In between are potentially useful suppositions which are true under particular conditions for discreet periods of time and to a limited extent.  

We want certainty but we can make progress with wisdom but only when there is shared trust in whatever the source of wisdom might be (an individual, a tradition, a culture, a religion, a book, etc.)