Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox
Review via The Economist
Revolutionaries have the best slogans. The Bolsheviks shouted “Peace! Land! Bread!” Mao Zedong promised a “Great Leap Forward”. Che Guevara claimed to “tremble with indignation at every injustice”. Advocates of gradual change, by contrast, find it hard to compose a good rallying cry. No crowd ever worked itself into a frenzy chanting: “What do we want? Incremental reform! When do we want it? When budgetary conditions allow!”
But as Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue in “Gradual”, incrementalism works. Revolutionaries promise paradise but often bring about bloodshed, bread lines and book-banning. Humanity has grown more prosperous by making a long series of often modest improvements to an unsatisfactory status quo. The Industrial Revolution, despite its name, was not a single, sudden event but thousands of cumulative innovations spread across nearly a century. “Over time, incremental reforms can add up to something truly transformative,” note the authors.
