Too often we seek big, dramatic and comprehensive change when the far more common and effective way to make change in a democratic system is through a grinding and collaborative approach.
One way that’s the case is because making real change requires three stages (the politics, the policy and implementing the practice) but we commonly forget that third step. All told, incrementalism gets a bad rap. Nearly all lasting change has happened gradually, not boldly. The world is complex, no coalition is ideologically cohesive and those implementing change are flawed.
That’s the case made in the 2023 book “Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age,” written by two longtime advocates in criminal justice reform, Aubrey Fox and Greg Berman. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “Society is seen in ahistorical terms” Daniel Patrick Moynihan
- Hamilton: “wise and good men” are found on both sides of every issue ; make policy by how people are, not how you with they would be
- Book argues in Spirit of Federalist #1 by Hamilton “ we seek to follow Hamilton’s lead by making a forceful and unapologetic argument that a gradual and incremental approach to public policy is not only the best way to describe how the government actually works, but (almost always) a more effective way of making change happen – even large scale change”
- Mychal Denzel Smith The Atlantic: “incremental change is a moral failure”
- Martin Gurri The Revolt of the Public: in 2001, doubled the amount of generation ever created
- Giuseppe Lampedusa: if we want things to stay the same they’ll have to change
- Charles Lindblom argues against “synoptic” solutions, with centralized planning that requires complete information and agreement (it doesn’t exist)
- The polarizing professor-author Steven Pinker is named for his writing on incremental change over time. (His popular reference that a newspaper isn’t likely to publish a story about “no airplanes crashed today.”
- Adam Goonik: “a thousand small sanities” reduced NYC jail population, not radical change
- Amara’s law: we overestimate what happens in the short term and underestimate long term
- Ridley in Radical Optimist: we believe “many dire things about the world that are in fact untrue” — worse than ignorant. But bad news is “sudden,” which captures attention in the news cycle
- 2016 toxic substances act: example of obscure policy that has been effective, example of how policy does quietly move forward despite reputation for gridlock
- Postal service too; these below fold issues are what Matthew Yglesias calls “secret congress”
- Divided We Govern influential book by David Mayhew inspired Lee and James M Curry to assess how often we bipartisan legislate
- The 1950s “strong party theory” advised the pursuit of more party purity to give voters clearer ideological choice and for majorities to get more done. This didn’t prove true. But only because big grand sweeping radical change doesn’t often come (civil rights and Reagan revolution being exceptions)
- Mayhew: some congressional inaction is the point, grinding to a halt until consensus is built on less partisan issues
- Madison in 51: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition
- Albert Hirschman: “ it is the poverty of imagination that paradoxically produces images of total change in lieu of more modest expectations”
- Charles lindblom 1959: the science of muddling through
- Lawrence rothenberg : policy success in an age of gridlock
- Michael Oakeshott: ideas are like reading a cookbook without cooking, no “tastes in our mouth”
- Without the relationships to create incremental change you’re left with “shift points,” as Wildavsky put it — swinging between points
- Hemingway’s quote about going bankrupt gradually then suddenly, Which chuck klosterman notes describes most change
- Paul Samuelson: stock market predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions
- Michael Lipsky Street Level Bureaucrats have a “practitioner veto” (as author calls it) this slows and is a strength of the system
- Alfred Korzbyski “the map is not the territory”
- Politics, policy and practice (the last is least thought of, but that’s how something is implemented)
- Implementation science
- Robert Granger in an analysis of 1960s-1980s efforts to scale up pilots that tested well: “despite the research community’s ability to identify promising pilots, there is almost no evidence that it is possible to take search programs to scale in a way that maintains their effectiveness”
- Fidelity and adaptability
- Charles Morris: the cost of good intentions
- Policy-implementation gap
- Russakoff’s book on Newark education reform “ education reform, is too important to be left to reformers alone” Zuckerberg, Christie and Cory Booker
- “By many measures, political polarization in the United States has increased in recent years. For example, a 2017 report by the Pew Research Center documented that divisions between Republicans and Democrats on a host of issues, including race, immigration, and aid to the needy, have widened considerably since 1994. In 1994, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to agree with the statement that “immigrants strengthen the country with their hard work and talents” 32 percent of Democrats agreed with that statement, compared to 30 percent of Republicans. By 2017, the gap had become a gulf 84 percent of Democrats agreed, compared to 42 percent of Republicans.”
- Affective polarization
- Jeff Plaut: when we asked if the country was on track it was once personal, now most just answer about whether their team is in office
- 2021 Yale study: Twitter users expressed more outrage over time
- 1964 Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message
- Daniel Yankelovich: public judgement and public opinion
- James Madison: seasoned majority
- In 60 years of a Gallup poll, Americans have never been more than 4% interested in more taxes (a true signal of socialism)
- 2018 Yougov Hidden Tribes “exhausted majority”
- “Inspired by Shor’s analysis, we went looking to see if there was any survey data to support our argument that the American public is not in a revolutionary mood. We found lots of polls that kind of/sort of touched on this question, but nothing that hit the nail on the head. (It may be out there, of course. We just didn’t find it.). Sensing a gap in knowledge, we reached out to the friendly pollsters at YouGov and asked them to help us. After some back and forth, they agreed to perform a survey with a representative sample of more than 1,000 registered voters. Respondents were asked the following: Which of the following statements best describes how you would like American government to work:
- I would generally prefer that government make big, bold changes quickly;
- I would generally prefer that government make small, gradual changes over time
- I would generally prefer that government not change things.
- The results will come as little surprise to anyone who has read this far. Only 34 percent of the respondents said that they would prefer bold change. Forty-five percent favored incrementalism, and 21 percent wanted government not to change things. One of the more striking results of our survey was the consistency of views about gradualism: Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all approved of incrementalism at roughly the same rate. In all three groups, between 44 and 46 percent of respondents favored gradual change. The same consistency of views about gradualism held true by gender (47 percent of men and 44 percent of women supported the gradual approach), education, and family income. In cachrt for gradualism ranged from 40 to 51 percent, no matter how you cut the data.
- More democrats (49) wanted radical change than republicans (18) but still not majority ; 52% black va 31% white wanted radical change; very liberal at 72% by far highest in favor of radical (very liberal are about 15% of electorate)
- Nobody wanted defund the police including black Americans
- Witte and Altmeyer shaped social security as a smaller slower program than other New Deal initiatives, which it outlasted
- Francis Townsend had alternative UBI- like program; but smaller FDR program tying benefits to work made it impossible to remove
- SSN only became accepted over time ; in 1939 it was formed as a trust fund relating contributions and benefits as a pension plan as opposed to government revenues
- “In June 2021, Northwestern professor Daniel Immerwahr published an essay in the New York Times entitled “The Strange, Sad Death of America’s Political Imagination.” The subject of the essay was Edward Bellamy, a nineteenth-century author who called for a “rad-ically different future.” In 1887, Bellamy published a popular novel entitled Looking Backward, 2000-1887, which featured a man who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find an austere capitalist landscape replaced with a generous welfare state that included “universal education, guaranteed incomes and supported retirement.” Looking Backward was the third-ranked bestseller of its time, nosed out only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.”
- Does social security work? Well 10-15m elderly folks at any given time are out of poverty because of it, and works out progressively
- Why did social security work? In Derthick’s book Policymaking for Social Security she argues in part because a small group of insiders worked on it for years (Witte and Altemeyer)
- What is the NYC crime reduction story? Many small interventions (there was no single vision, though Dinkins took on police reform and compstat and culture shifted all were big parts
- Patrick Sharkey: Uneasy Peace book shows growth in community groups reduces violent crime
- After years of steady NYC gains, a divided New York State government became entirely democratic and bail reform pushed through that did not have widespread backing of DA/s and judges and cops — a practitioner veto . It was amended
- From modern low of 3500 jail population, back up to 5500
- George Kelling: “how New York became safe : the full story”
- Kaushal writes on immigration: No comprehensive reform but lots of small immigration updates; author calls this “hidden incrementalism”
- Many involved in welcoming and selecting immigrants : college admissions and employers; reallly poor people can’t afford to travel despite narrative
- Arun Henri Princeton immigration paper 2021
- Authors: “it’s much harder for a bureaucrat to set up a system to pick people who are entrepreneurial, hard/working and who take care of themselves. But that’s just what the American system appears to do, without a centralized decision maker having to take on this impossible task. “
- Kaushal: Canada gets more observable skills (education) from its education system but less from the less-visible skills that create immigrant success
- In 2020, Canada added express entry Which similar to H1B
- Three big immigration acts: 1924 (racist but worked to limit per their goals); 1965 (boosted Asia, limited Mexico far below the rates that had been occurring naturally, creating illegal immigration— though attempted by conservative support to limit immigration via preexisting family policy); 1986 (path to citizenship but added law enforcement)
- Michigan Rick Snyder state law letting 50k visas for job creators
- In 2015, Robert Suro wrote in NYT that states should lead immigration efforts and experiments
- 1900,1990 and 2020, 3% of the worlds population lived in a country other than where they were born
- Example of small incremental changes for immigration: despite higher demand we don’t always issue all green cards due to administrative errors and we could make small changes to that
- LBJ’s Great Society was possible because of the Kennedy assassination and democratic congress: it wasn’t incremental but surged. Some worked (Medicare/Medicaid / head Start and Civil rights act/voting rights; plus that immigration reform) but others failed
- Daniel Patrick Monihan was one of many intellectuals who found themselves in Washington, DC, in those years. According to Moynihan, the United States was experiencing the “professionalization of reform.” In his book about the War on Poverty, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, Moynihan includes social scientists, foundation executives, and a broad range of self-styled “experts” as being part of this emerging cadre of professional reformers. As he puts it:
- “the war on poverty was not declared at the behest of the poor: it was dedhared in their interest by persons confident of their own judgment in such matters.”
- Moynihan uses the story of Community Action as a case study (in his book Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding); this project started as a pilot in NYC funded by Ford foundation in Manhattan called Mobilizatin for Youth
- “The launch of the Mobilization for Youth pilot was preceded by four and a half years of rigorous study and a 617-page document. “A plan,” Moynihan writes, “devised by a group of middle-class intellectuals to bring about changes in the behavior of a group of lower-class youth who differed from them in ethnicity and religion, in social class and attitudes, in life systems, and above all, in life prospects.” The question Moynihan seemed to be asking albeit with a mischievous glimmer in his eyes- was “what could possibly go wrong?”
- Joseph Durlak: “ the program you think you are doing almost never turns out to be the program that actually occurs.”
- Moynihan said most damning part of the program was the phrase “maximum feasible participation”, which pushed for width of poverty inclusion not depth (push to include people serving); this brings in most radical elements and everyone seems to assume no one is more radical than they are
- Model Cities started as a plan called Demonstration Cities where Walter Reuther advised to concentrate investments in a few key communities to model behavior others to follow .. but it was again expanded too quickly and rushed forward — initially every state includes for politics and then up to 65 (the idea of concentrating is still used in Harlem Children Zone)
- 150 model cities in the end: Frieden Kaplan: “ if the designers of future urban policies, take away any single lesson from model cities… It should be to avoid grand schemes for massive, concerted, federal action”
- Nathan Kristol: 1998 Limits of social policy book part of the great society liberals who turned on the experience. Reagan was a response. This is what happens after big policy; a swing in reverse.
- Coleman Report critical of civil rights
- Peter Rossi’s iron law of evaluation: “ the expected value for any measured affect of a social program is zero”
- Robert Martinson “nothing works” on prison rehabilitation
- Replication crisis: all of these are reminders of how uncertain we are. That which works in one place won’t always translate
- “Gradualism (is) the best way to address social problems and combat injustice “
- Four qualities of incrementalism : honesty, humility, nuance and respect
- Thomas Sowell “there are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs”
- John Lewis: it’s time to tone down our political rhetoric
- William Goldman on Hollywood: nobody knows anything
- Darren Walker advocated for smaller jails to replace Rikers Island but got protested against because of a No New Jails coalition
- Edmund Burke: “little platoons” between individuals and the state
- Karl popper the “human factor” blocks many utopian goals; prefers “piecemeal social engineering”
- Fabian society: slow progress to socialism not radicalism. Its failed flirtation with eugenics was stopped by not moving fast. Trotsky called them “boring” in whither England
- Thomas Sowell unconstrained (institutions limit us; why do we ever have war?) and constrained view (we are inherently flawed; why do we ever have peace?)
- Philip Converse: Nature of opinion Mass Public’s: Americans don’t have ideology and don’t want one
- “Thermostatic opinion” voters just go in reverse of elected leaders
