ABSTRACT
Institutionalists, like Marxists, are committed to progressive social change. Their view of the economic life process of a community is such that progressive social change is the successful application of organized human intelligence to social and economic problems. There is no preconceived end or goal to be attained. The objective is progress in the sense of solving today's problems and improving on our ability to solve tomorrow's problems. Moreover, there is no inevitability built into the Institutionalists' view of the economy. A society may progress or decline, a policy may succeed or fail, the life process is just one problem after another, the goal is to "keep the machines (and the community) running" (Ayres, The Theory of Economic Progress , p. 233)
