IMPERATIV PRILAGOĐAVANJA U SVETU SVEKOLIKIH PROMENA
CHANGE AS A FORM OF EXISTENCE AND A CONDITION OF SURVIVAL

Summary/Abstract: Universality of change is a way of formulating the fact that all entities capable of being observed and even thought of – individuals, their variously formed groups, the society, the world of ideas and consciousness in maximally imaginable number of variegated forms and locations and the universe itself – are subject to change. Speaking of change is tantamount to speaking about all conceivable forms of existence and therefore about the universe of all things we encounter, create or imagine. These are the reasons because of which the subject of change – as a matter of principle – cannot ever be exhaustively treated.Because of their boundless variety and universality the comprehensively taken space of changes can bi classified in many different ways and, again, the set of classifications is infinite and inexhaustible. Hence only some classifications are singled out so that exogenous and endogenous changes are dealt with and then self-induced and externally imposed changes and changes at different levels of social organization focusing in particular to changes at the level of individual agents and variously defined systemic changes. Changes are widely interrelated so that any particular set of changes is as a rule both the consequence of some previous changes and the cause of the changes that are yet to come in the future. The causal relations among the changes depend upon how broadly the term itself is defined. One is inclined to venture the proposition that the effectual cause can be found for any change. A particularly important and widely discussed class of changes is economic adjustments. It is usually taken for granted that adjustments are a must and the failure to adjust is an attribute of bad management. An issue is taken with that view by arguing that adjustments themselves are costly, with a possibility of making partial adjustments, and that the idea of optimal – not necessarily maximal or complete – adjustment acquires full relevance in this context. To an economist the binary division of changes turns out to be of relevance: the changes at the level of autonomously functioning individuals and the systemic changes at various levels. The individual changes are reducible to purposeful reactions to external stimuli and therefore analytically determined by optimizing behavior of sorts and necessarily related to the underlying objective function. Systemic changes are determined by the specific structure of the system and in patterns reflecting the dynamic features of the underlying structure. The well known analytical formalization of the systemic changes is offered by the vast classes of models of economic growth and of equally diversified and in many senses rich models of cyclical fluctuations. The former are developed in the form of various ordinary and optimizing mathematical constructions including the calculus of variations and optimal control theory, while the latter come in the guise of difference equations of various orders. These considerations lead to the conclusion that change is in a way endemic to economic systems. Particularly marked endemicity of changes turns out in the field of technical progress as innovations become the key factor of competitiveness and successful growth. The question naturally arises as to whether changes are progressive and socially useful or regressive and damaging and costly to the society. Not all changes are favorable and socially useful. Technical progress is evidently a collection of useful changes because a newly discovered technique will only be accepted and applied if it clearly proves to be superior to the existing ones. That changes in science are necessarily progressive is proven in an analogous way by invoking the idea of refutability: the old scientific insights will be rejected only if and when refuted by a new result approximating the „truth“in a more satisfactory way.Along with such progressive and welfare advancing, hopefully dominating changes there are changes which constrain economic processes and slow down the rhythm of development. A number of forms of political intrusion into economy are discussed, particularly those widely redistributing income and divorcing individual rewards from the productive contributions to the society. Such redistributive measures are undertaken with the purpose to reduce the more marked income inequalities and to assist the strata with below average income. It is claimed that such policies reduce income across the board and worsen, usually in a somewhat longer perspective, economic position of all members of the society. Such damaging intrusions of political factors into the economy seem inevitable as they work as avenues to ever higher political support, reflecting the all-important set of circumstances in which politically optimal actions diverge widely from what is truly rational from an economic point of view. Such a political contamination of economic relations is, with reliance on „narrow economic criteria, characterized as a highly detrimental form of social pathology. The question of whether one could speak about the progress in the field of arts is raised in the last part of the paper. While admitting that the idea of a steady progress in arts cannot be proved or sustained – works of arts are incomparable and novels of contemporary writers cannot be demonstrated to be advances in any sense in relation to the great epics of the antiquity – it is argued that clear progress can be undoubtedly diagnosed in some specific segments of arts, in certain time intervals and relying on carefully chosen yet admissible criteria.

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