It’s hard to pin down exactly how many revolutions have happened in Afghanistan since Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, was deposed in a bloodless coup in 1973. There was the Saur Revolution of April 1978, another mini-revolution in October of that year in response to a moderation of marriage laws, the Parchami coup of 1979, the assassination of President Taraki in 1979, the Soviet assassination of President Amin in December of that same year, a ten-year war with the Soviet Union, the rise of the mujahideen, various failed puppet regimes led by a collapsing Soviet Union, complete chaos and lawlessness between 1992 and 1996, when the country was ruled by various warlords, followed by the takeover of the Taliban in 1996. At that point, the story becomes more familiar to most westerners, but, as the events of 9/11 and the subsequent 17-year war (and counting) in Afghanistan have aptly demonstrated, the situation has not improved.
Afghanistan is good at fomenting revolutions, bad at stable governance.
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My spine tingles whenever I hear someone arguing for a “need for radical change” or a “revolution in X.”
Most of the time, attempted revolutions fail, and things end badly for the revolutionaries. And when revolutions succeed, at least in the short term, most people are far worse off than before the revolution started.
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Democracy, peace, and stability are historical anomalies. If you turn on your faucet and clean, potable water magically appears, if you take your trash to a location in front of or near your home and people reliably pick up that trash and take it somewhere safe, if you never (or almost never) have to look at or smell your sewage again after you flush your toilet, then your life is good. If all of the above circumstances apply to you, then your life is top-notch, by historical standards.
My philosophy is that people who have won this historical lottery should be cautious about insisting on the need for radical change, lest they get what they ask for. Radical change usually leads to more radical change and that radical change tends to end badly, or worse still, to never end.
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Of course, sometimes revolutions work. Nearly every nation is where it is today because some revolution took place at some point in its history.
But nearly all revolutions were followed by a period of instability or complete chaos. In the American Revolution, the government of the Articles of Confederation would have collapsed were it not for the many compromises (many of which now seem horribly fraught) agreed to by the US Constitution. And the US Constitution set up a government that wasn’t all that different from the constitutional monarchy that the United States had previously taken great pains to escape.
The French Revolution was followed by the reign of terror, and then the reign of Napoleon, which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of French (and many more English, Prussian, Russian, and Egyptian soldiers). The Irish Revolution was followed by a civil war. The Russian Revolution was followed by a 70-year murderous, autocratic state, which included the purges of an estimated 30 million people and the brutal forced starvation of many millions more in the Ukraine. The Cultural Revolution in China might have been the worst of them all.
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Incrementalism is a modest hypothesis with the following tenets:
- For any existing system, the best way to improve the system is to make small changes to the system, assess their impact, and then re-evaluate.
- The fact that a system exists at all is a good indication that is a better than average or random system—by the simple virtue that it has survived, adapted, and evolved for some period of time.
- The longer the system has existed, the more likely it is to be better than average or random.
- Radical change that forces the system to change more than in maintains is likely to have a net negative impact on the system.
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Imagine a 22-year-old novice runner that gets inspired around New Year’s Eve and decides that she wants to run in the Olympics some day. That runner might read that to get to the Olympics, a marathon runner typically runs 120 miles a week with three hard workouts each week, and tries to replicate that strategy. But without 7-10 years of running to build up to that workload, that strategy will invariably result in injury, illness, and breakdown. A novice runner attempting a quarter of that workload would likely implode.
To anyone with any knowledge of running, this observation is obvious and un-insightful.
But for something much more involved or complex than becoming a good runner, such as creating a new system for health care distribution in this country, there are some reasonably intelligent people that think that a complete overhaul to the system could work out.
That’s far less likely, in my opinion, than someone jumping off the couch and making an Olympic team.
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I am not a health care expert. But I know that health care in the United States is expensive and flawed. It’s almost certainly true that we could do better. But the process of doing better is path dependent and will always be challenged by inertia.
Even if our government representatives agreed on what the best system of health care was (which they don’t), and even if there were the political will and resources to implement such a change (which there isn’t), it would still take time and incremental steps to make it happen.
Let’s say the US decided tomorrow that the best health care system in the world was Australia’s. That’s great. Could we just copy Australia’s laws and implement Australia’s health care system tomorrow, or even next year?
Absolutely not. Without the institutional knowledge of all the hospital administrators, doctors, nurses, insurers, governmental officials, and other people who know and can implement the system, we couldn’t just switch over. We’d have to hire thousands of Australians as consultants and develop a plan over a decade or two to try to switch from our current system to the new one. And even then, there would be inertia and resistance, even if we all agreed that we were switching to a better system (and, right now, it’s hard to imagine the US ever coming close to unanimity on such a change).
Humans just don’t do radical change well. Not on New Years’ Day. Not in politics. Not in our day-to-day lives. The best predictor of what we’ll do tomorrow is what happened yesterday.
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Of course, there are moments in history when only a dramatic change will do. An easy example of this is human slavery in the United States before 1865. There was no step-by-step, incrementalist way to make that go away. It had to be done in one fell swoop.
That’s what happened, starting with the most violent and deadly war in American history, which was then followed by a more than 100-year period of violence and struggle, the remnants of which are still around today.
Even when dramatic change needs to happen, history tells us it won’t come easy.
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People crave simple solutions. There is much empirical evidence for this. (Thagard 1989; Read and Marcus-Newhall 1993). And incrementalism isn’t the simplest or sexiest solution. But it has the benefit of being time tested and true.
For institutions to get better, they must work to solve the hard problems that they have not yet solved. If they’ve been around for a while, the solutions to those hard problems will likely be hard, technocratic, complex, and dull.
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To me, it seems obvious that getting better as a person or as an organization is something that requires diligence, patience, and consistent effort. And, most importantly, it requires building on the lessons we have learned in the past.
But I get the feeling that more people, on the right and the left, are calling for radical solutions to our problems, ones that discard the lessons we have learned from the past. I see people saying that our society is going to hell and that we need something other than incremental change to get better. Reasonably intelligent people are claiming that our society is in collapse. That we need to throw out everything and try something new.
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Right now, I’m reading a book called Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum.
I’ve read a lot of depressing books about horrible things that have happened in history, but man, this one is truly brutal.
If you do not know about the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s (I was only vaguely familiar before reading the book), you could be forgiven. It’s not something that gets much press. Stalin and the Soviet Union pretended it didn’t happen for 50 years. And the Western press (and Walter Duranty of the New York Times, in particular) was complicit in covering it up.
The short version is that the Soviet Union’s policy of collective farming in the early 1930s was a disaster. And because it was a disaster, and a decision made by Stalin, it wasn’t possible to admit it was a disaster. Instead, someone had to be blamed. The Soviets blamed Ukrainians, the biggest farming community within the Soviet Union, for hoarding food and refusing to produce enough bread. And the decision was made to actively rob and steal any food possessed by these Ukrainian farmers and give it to the rest of the country (and those loyal to the party, in particular).
In the words of Applebaum:
The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger—holod—and extermination—mor.
Examples of how this was enforced are truly horrific.
Our father hid three buckets of barley in the attic and our mother stealthily made porridge in the evening to keep us alive. Then somebody must have denounced us, they took everything and brutally beat our father for not giving up that barley during the searches…they held his fingers and slammed the door to break them, they swore at him and kicked him on the floor. It left us numb to see him beaten and sworn at like that, we were a proper family, always spoke quietly in our father’s presence…
A brigade searching through the roof thatch at the home of Hryhorii Moroz in Sumy province failed to find any food and demanded to know: “With the help of what do you live?” With each passing day, demands became angrier, the language ruder: Why haven’t you disappeared yet? Why haven’t you dropped dead yet? Why are you alive at all?
The effects this had on the population were predictable.
One railway employee, Oleksandr Honcharenko, remembered “walking along the railroad tracks every morning on the way to work, I would come upon two or three corpses daily, but I would step over them and continue walking. The famine had robbed me of my conscience, human soul and feelings. Stepping over corpses I felt absolutely nothing, as if I were stepping over logs.” Petro Mostovyi remembered the beggars who came to his village seemed “like ghosts,” sat down beside roads or under fences—and died.
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Often, in politics, “the simple solution to our problem” is to get rid of a scapegoat.
It’s much easier to blame an outsider for our problems than it is to actually solve a problem. Immigrants. Tech magnates. Conservatives. Liberals. Capitalists. Socialists.
In a pluralistic society, it’s almost never true that one sector of society is responsible for all of our problems. That’s a simple solution to our problems; it’s just not a real solution to our problems.
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Another factor that weighs in favor of incrementalism, regardless of whether you like the idea, is the critical role of habits and inertia in human activity.
As philosopher John Dewey wrote nearly 100 years ago. “[H]abits of thought outlive modifications in habits of overt action,” he said.
Dewey was skeptical of rapid-scale transformation of the “short-cut revolutionist”who did not appreciate the power of habit:
Any one with knowledge of the stability and force of habit will hesitate to propose or prophesy rapid and sweeping social changes. A social revolution may effect abrupt and deep alterations in external customs, in legal and political institutions. But the habits that are behind these institutions … are not so easily modified.
This is why attempts to impose Western-style or Western-like institutions in countries that have no history of such institutions invariably fail. Our institutions have evolved over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. From the Magna Carta to the UK Constitution of 1689 to the US Constitution of 1789, followed by 230 years of judicial precedent. We have habits and inertia behind these institutions. You can’t just drop that history on to a country that has no experience of it and expect them to replicate what we have. A place like Afghanistan or Iraq cannot just wake up from a history of autocracy and transition to representative democracy overnight. Whatever systems of law and justice existed before, however brutal they might seem to us, will persist. You can’t just get rid of that history and expect things to work.
Stalin may have wanted to implement collectivism in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, but farmers in the Soviet Union were unable to overcome the deeply held belief that workers should reap the benefits of their own hard work. When farmers were asked to produce grain, and were asked to do so without any food being given to their own families, they simply stopped working. Which led to less grain being produced, and a deeper famine. Instead of working on collective farms, peasants moved to cities or took to the countryside scrounging for food.
You can’t just undo the way people have always done things in a single action and expect it to go well.
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I think a major issue today is that many people lack real perspective on what collapse, injustice, and tragedy really are—on how bad institutions can be.
The suffering from Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, was not just preventable: Stalin and the Soviet Union made conscious decisions that killed millions of people, with full knowledge that those decisions would kill many people. The Soviets actively engaged in systematic practices of theft, arrest, murder, and torture to ensure that poor peasants starved to death. The famine was caused by a government that thought it could throw out the way things have always been done and make things better. When they didn’t get better, the government doubled down on their bad decisions and tried to force-feed radical change on to people who weren’t ready for it. As a result, millions starved to death.
Our system of government is imperfect. But by historical standards, our institutions are excellent. We should not forget that fact. We have more privilege, luxury, and good fortune than any other society in human history. Throwing it all away, simply because it isn’t perfect, is as bad of an idea as could be proposed.
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Incremental improvement isn’t sexy. It doesn’t do well on a meme or at a protest march. It probably won’t get you clicks. It’s technocratic and tedious. But alas, it works.
Incrementalism is not about inventing the wheel. It’s about building a better wheel. And not convincing ourselves that to build a better wheel, we first have to destroy all existing wheels.