Gradual: The case for incremental change in a radical age

A new book, Gradual, puts into words some things I've long felt but haven't come up with the right way to explain them. I have lived a life of grand dreams and incremental causes. For example, I became an activist in the civil rights movement by taking part in a DC Transit fare increase protest. I wrote the first article explaining why DC should become a state yet spent much time on issues involving incremental changes in what was known as "home rule."  There are more than a few activists who dismiss or disparage incremental improvements but I have learned that the grand and the gradual rightly share the role of change - Sam  Smith

Greg Berman & Aubrey Fox, Gradual - There are numerous advantages to gradual reform, in contrast to utopianism and comprehensive planning. Instead of pursuing broad, revolutionary change in a single master stroke, incrementalism focuses on addressing concrete problems in a piecemeal fashion. Following the scientific method, incremental reform allows for new ideas to be tested, evaluated, and honed over time. Learning by trial and error is essential because the world is complex and full of conflicting interests. Crucially, gradualists know how little they know. Anyone trying to understand a given problem these days is necessarily missing crucial information because there is simply too much information to process effectively. Gradualists acknowledge that, inevitably, errors happen. Building on this insight, an iterative, incremental process allows for each successive generation of reformers to learn from, and improve upon, their predecessors’ efforts. Critics of incrementalism often argue that it is timid or slow or a de facto endorsement of the status quo. But experience indicates that small changes, compounded over time, can add up to something significant. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has highlighted, modest improvements, accumulating over many generations, have led to dramatic reductions in the rates of global violence, poverty, and mortality, improving the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.