New Year’s Day is fodder for commentators. It is their peg for reflection and prognosis. Whether it be the international affairs specialist, the political correspondent, the social theorist or the pink pages business journalist, the theme of these commentaries will most likely revolve around the questions, ‘What has altered over the past 12 months?’, ‘What is most likely to change in the foreseeable future?’. Change will be the buzzword. This is of course not surprising. Our middle class lives have been overwhelmed by political, social, economic, cultural and technological change. Wherever we turn, we see the collapsing shadows of convention and precedent and the unfolding of new paradigms. It is as if the past has lost its moorings. Or at least this is what today’s commentaries would have us conclude. I would suggest that this relentless focus on change runs the risk of distracting decision-makers from seeing the wood for the trees.

I would suggest that two supplementary questions need also to be addressed: ‘What has not changed?’ and more pertinently, ‘what will not change over the next 5 to 10 years’.

I make this suggestion for essentially two reasons.

One, it is important to remind oneself that amid the clutter and noise of change, policy and strategy are the result of human effort and that this effort is ultimately bounded by the limiting attributes of human nature. Adam Smith wrote more than 200 years back in The Wealth of Nations that individuals are driven by self-interest. He added that if this drive was unencumbered by external constraints like government regulation then the collective impact of such individual pursuit would lead to a strong and stable economy and contribute positively to the public interest. The latter conclusion was an unalloyed endorsement of capitalism and it has been the subject of fierce debate ever since. The former comment, however, is generally unchallenged. And justifiably so. For it is this attribute of human nature that provides the root explanation for the perennial contradictions between intent and practice.

... contd.