How Change Happens

What Has Actually Worked

Alternatives to the dysfunctions described in this series of post exist. Ranked-choice voting in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and more than a dozen US cities has not produced chaos: it has produced legislatures that more closely reflect what voters actually want. Independent redistricting commissions have measurably reduced partisan gerrymandering in Arizona, California, and Michigan, where independent bodies now draw district lines rather than the legislators who benefit from them. New York City’s public matching funds for small donations have shifted the incentive structure for candidates, making it possible to run a competitive campaign on small contributions rather than depending on a handful of major donors. Broad constitutional reform through sustained public participation succeeded in Iceland following the 2008 financial crisis.

Campaigns that engaged the active participation of roughly 3.5 percent of a population have been sufficient to force political change in case after case. Electoral organizing, legal challenges, constitutional campaigns, and redistricting advocacy have all worked when that threshold of organized, sustained pressure was reached. The rich and powerful will always resist; while the specific tools differ, sustained, organized pressure wins time after time [Young2024].

A Paradise Built in Hell

On the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia. The resulting explosion killed nearly two thousand people and flattened the north end of the city. It was the largest human-made explosion before the nuclear age.

Within hours, survivors were pulling strangers from rubble, improvising hospitals in churches and railway stations, and sharing food with people they had never met. The next day a blizzard arrived. Residents of Truro, two hours away by train, loaded relief supplies and medical teams before anyone had formally organized them. People came from across eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, not because anyone had issued orders, but because other people needed help.

This is not the story most people expect. The version of human nature embedded in popular culture and reproduced in disaster media coverage is that when things fall apart, so do people. Civilization is a thin crust over barbarity: scratch the surface and you get looting, assault, and the strong preying on the weak. This story is wrong in almost every particular, but it keeps being told because it serves purposes that have nothing to do with accuracy.

The sociologist E.L. Quarantelli spent decades studying disasters and came to a conclusion that surprised many people: panic and antisocial behavior are the exception, not the rule. Communities typically show increases in prosocial behavior: strangers help each other, crime rates generally fall, and people who were barely acquaintances briefly become something like a community.

Rebecca Solnit documented this pattern across a century of catastrophes. Her case studies, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the September 11 attacks in New York, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, illustrate Quarantelli’s findings. Disasters reveal a capacity for mutual aid that is usually suppressed by the atomization of modern consumer society.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 produced the most extensively documented divergence between media narrative and documented reality in modern history. In the days after the storm, major news organizations reported roving gangs in the Superdome, mass rape, and snipers firing at rescue helicopters. Subsequent investigation found that the reported gang violence did not happen, the murder rate in the city did not spike, and most of the “looting” was people taking food and water to survive.

But these lies had consequences. Hospitals delayed evacuating critically ill patients while waiting for military escorts. Trucks carrying food and water were turned back from routes deemed dangerous when they weren’t. A group of survivors trying to walk across the Crescent City Connection bridge to reach Gretna, where they had been told buses were waiting, were turned back at gunpoint by police who said they were keeping their community safe. The fiction of social breakdown caused deaths that the storm itself had not.

Solnit has a name for what happened in New Orleans: elite panic. Ordinary people in a disaster tend to behave with remarkable generosity and calm, but authorities and elites tend to panic—not about the disaster, but about the public. Since they believe that the social order that keeps them on top is only held together by the threat of force, a disaster that removes their ability to enforce their rules looks like the end of civilization.

The gap between what happens in disasters and what gets reported is also explained by what counts as news. Editors make decisions about what to show based on what will attract attention, and dramatic conflict attracts more attention than organized mutual aid. The result is systematic selection bias in disaster coverage. If the media consistently describes human nature as more violent and more selfish than it actually is, people are pre-conditioned to believe that cooperation is unlikely, which makes them less likely to cooperate. Just as advertising can manufacture demand, biased reporting can manufacture mistrust, and in doing so, hurt us all [Quarantelli1998,Solnit2009,Tierney2006].

The Ozone Hole That Closed

In 1974, two chemists at the University of California published a paper predicting that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) would destroy the ozone layer in the stratosphere that shields Earth from ultraviolet radiation. CFCs were used as propellants in aerosol cans and refrigerants in air conditioners, and while the paper’s authors didn’t yet have a hole to point to, they had atmospheric chemistry on their side.

The chemical industry’s response was to fund counter-research, hire lobbyists, and describe the scientists as alarmists whose work was too speculative to justify regulatory action. This was the same playbook that the tobacco industry had been running for two decades, and for a while it worked. The Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, a trade group representing the manufacturers, argued that the science was uncertain. Industry representatives testified before Congress that banning CFCs would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and devastate the American economy.

Du Pont, which held a large share of the CFC market, said in 1975 that it would stop making CFCs only if a worldwide scientific consensus emerged and the appropriate regulatory bodies took action. This was not a promise to act; it was a description of conditions the company presumably believed would never be met.

Eleven years later, in 1985, a team from the British Antarctic Survey reported a massive and growing thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica every southern spring. Their data was so far outside expected ranges that they initially assumed their instruments were broken. NASA confirmed the finding using satellite data that, embarrassingly, had been sitting in archived files for years after automated quality-control software had flagged the anomalous readings as errors [Roan1989].

Industry resistance collapsed in just two years, and the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987. The protocol’s design explains why it worked when so many other environmental agreements have not. It set binding phase-out schedules for ozone-depleting substances, with different timelines for developed and developing countries. It established trade sanctions against non-signatories, which meant that countries outside the agreement faced economic costs for staying out. And it created the Multilateral Fund, which transferred technology and money from wealthy countries to developing ones to help them adopt CFC alternatives. This last element is the one that gets least attention and does the most work.

The protocol’s structure gave it leverage that most international agreements lack. A country that refused to sign could not import controlled substances from signatory countries and could not export products made with those substances to them. By the early 1990s, enough of the global economy was covered by the agreement that staying outside it became genuinely costly.

Du Pont, which had spent years arguing that alternatives to CFCs were technically impossible, announced shortly after the protocol was signed that it had developed workable substitutes and would accelerate their commercialization. What had been technically impossible became technically straightforward once the regulatory framework made the old product unmarketable.

The substitutes developed to replace CFCs were hydrofluorocarbons—HFCs. They did not destroy the ozone layer. They did, however, turn out to be extremely potent greenhouse gases, some of them thousands of times more warming per molecule than carbon dioxide. In switching from one problem to another, the world had traded an acute crisis for a contribution to a chronic one.

The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, adopted in Rwanda in 2016, addressed this. It added HFCs to the list of controlled substances and set phase-down schedules for them as well. Developed countries agreed to begin reductions by 2019; most developing countries by 2024 or 2028, with a small number of the hottest-climate countries, including India and Pakistan, given until 2032. The amendment was negotiated under the same structure as the original protocol, with the same Multilateral Fund available to support transitions. Climate scientists estimated at the time that full implementation of the Kigali Amendment would avoid up to 0.4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.

This is not is a story about individual consumers making better choices. Millions of people did not read scientific papers and switch to pump-action hairspray. The mechanism was a binding international agreement with differentiated obligations, a technology transfer fund, and trade sanctions against non-participants.

The lesson for climate change shouldn’t need to be spelled out, yet it rarely appears in public discussions. Renewable energy investment, corporate sustainability pledges, and carbon pricing mechanisms will all help, but the decisive ingredient for the ozone layer was a binding agreement with teeth. Similarly, if we want to mitigate the cognitive pollution caused by social media, country-by-country age verification isn’t going to make a difference [Parson2003].

Land to the Tiller

In 1947, the United States government did something that its own politicians would have called socialism if anyone else had done it. Under American military occupation, Japan’s agricultural land was seized from landlords and sold to the tenant farmers who had been working it, at prices set well below market value, paid in bonds that inflation promptly turned into confetti. This was expropriation, and it worked.

The Cold War was the reason. American planners in Tokyo feared that rural poverty and landlord domination were exactly the conditions in which communist movements flourished. They had watched what happened in China and did not want a repeat, so they did what they would never have considered at home: they redistributed productive assets from the wealthy to the poor on a massive scale and called it democratization.

Between 1947 and 1950, roughly thirty percent of Japan’s farmland changed hands under the land reform program. Landlords who had lived off tenant rents for generations suddenly held bonds whose real value was eaten away month by month, while the tenants who had always done the work owned the fields. The landlord class as an economic force essentially ceased to exist. What replaced it was a rural middle class of owner-farmers. In the following decades, those farmers’ children moved to the cities and provided the workforce for Japan’s industrial expansion. The land reform did not just change who owned the fields; it restructured the society that would industrialize in the 1950s and 1960s [Dreze2013,Studwell2013].

South Korea and Taiwan followed the same template, for the same reasons, at almost exactly the same time. In both places, American advisors pushed land reform as a counter to communist land redistribution programs that were mobilizing peasant populations elsewhere in Asia. In South Korea, the Land Reform Act of 1950 capped landholdings and required excess land to be sold to the state for redistribution to tenant farmers. In Taiwan, the program between 1949 and 1953 transferred land from Taiwanese landlords to the tenant farmers who cultivated it. The compensation paid to landlords in both countries was structured in ways that made delay expensive: bonds whose value eroded, or equity in state enterprises whose worth depended on economic policies the landlords no longer controlled.

The design was intentional. Reform administrators understood that the landlord class would use any instrument available to reverse the transfer, and they structured the compensation to reduce the resources available for that reversal. This was not incidental: the land reforms created the conditions for the subsequent industrial policies to succeed, because the rural population had both the stability and the incentive to participate in markets rather than spending their energy surviving extraction.

The Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese cases all share a feature that is easy to overlook: the reforms were imposed from outside, and so were insulated from the normal political power of the landlord class. This raises an uncomfortable question about whether the reforms could have happened through domestic democratic politics. The state of Kerala, in southern India, provides an answer.

Kerala’s land reform story begins with electoral politics rather than military occupation. The Communist Party of India won state elections in Kerala in 1957 on a platform that included land reform, and despite being dismissed from power by the central government before completing its program, it returned to power and passed the Kerala Land Reforms Act in 1969. The legislation abolished tenancy arrangements that had kept agricultural laborers in conditions of near-permanent dependency, placed ceilings on landholdings, and required excess land to be redistributed. Landlords resisted, courts were used to delay implementation, and the process took years to work through, but it worked.

The Kerala case is important because it demonstrates that land reform can happen through democratic elections in a country where the landlords have full political rights and access to courts and legal challenges. Landlords resisted energetically, but the political organization of tenant farmers and agricultural laborers was strong enough and persistent enough to sustain reform across multiple election cycles and through sustained legal obstruction.

What makes Kerala remarkable is what happened afterward. By the 1990s the state had achieved literacy rates, life expectancy, and infant mortality figures that compared favorably not just to other Indian states but to countries with far higher per-capita incomes. Land reform broke the power of a class that had used political dominance to block public investment in health and education; once that class’s power was broken, public services became possible.

The argument made against land reform in all of these cases was that it would destroy productivity, undermine investment incentives, and leave everyone worse off. Big tech makes the same arguments today about proposals to democratize social media and break up virtual monopolies. There is no reason to believe the outcomes would be different [Studwell2013].

Conclusion

These essays have described how power is structured, how harm is produced and obscured, who bears the costs, and how regulatory and political contests have unfolded in other industries. This final lesson asks what the historical record shows about how change actually happens in documented cases rather than in theory. The answer is consistent across domains and largely unwelcome to people who prefer to change the world through individual choices or technical solutions: change happens when organized groups apply sustained economic and political pressure over time, and it rarely happens any other way. The record also shows that nonviolent campaigns have historically been more successful than violent ones, and that the reasons why are structural and replicable.

The dominant popular narrative about social change centers on individuals: Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and the Civil Rights Movement was born. This narrative is factually wrong and strategically disabling. Rosa Parks was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a training center for labor and civil rights organizers. The Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed her arrest was organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association, coordinated carpools across a city for over a year, and was sustained by the labor of hundreds of people whose names are not remembered. The choice of Parks as the plaintiff in the subsequent legal case was deliberate: other potential plaintiffs had been rejected as less strategically suitable. This is what organized political campaigns look like. The reduction of that campaign to one person’s spontaneous act of courage makes it both more inspiring and less useful as a model [Beckerman2022].

The historical record of successful social change campaigns shows consistent structural features that cut across very different political contexts. Indian independence was achieved through a disciplined mass movement that combined civil disobedience, economic disruption, legal challenge, and international publicity over decades. Polish Solidarity built an independent trade union into a national opposition movement that eventually outlasted the communist state, sustained through martial law and repression by organizational capacity and international support. The South African anti-apartheid campaign combined internal mass action with an international sanctions and divestment campaign that imposed economic costs the apartheid government could not absorb indefinitely. The British suffragette movement used tactics ranging from petitioning and public speaking to window-smashing, arson, and hunger strikes, and it succeeded only after the combination of sustained pressure and the changed political calculus produced by women’s wartime labor made continued denial of the franchise politically untenable. These campaigns differ in tactics, duration, context, and outcome. What they share is organizational discipline, sustained commitment across setbacks, and an understanding of where the economic and political pressure points lay [Chenoweth2011,Lakey2018].

The most rigorous quantitative analysis of this question is Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s study of 323 resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. Their finding is that nonviolent campaigns succeeded roughly twice as often as violent ones, and that the threshold for success was consistent: campaigns that engaged the active participation of roughly 3.5 percent of the population did not fail. The mechanism is not mysterious. Nonviolent campaigns can recruit from a broader population, including people who will not take up arms but will march, boycott, strike, or withdraw labor. Broader participation creates broader legitimacy and makes it harder for the state to frame repression as protecting order rather than suppressing dissent. The 3.5 percent figure is not a guarantee; it describes a historical pattern. But it is a more useful starting point than the assumption that popular majorities produce change automatically.

Economic disruption is the mechanism that connects organized pressure to actual policy change. Boycotts raise the cost of doing business with a target. Strikes remove the labor on which production depends, and divestment campaigns raise the cost of capital for targeted firms or governments and create reputational pressure on institutional investors. The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because it destroyed the bus company’s revenue from its Black ridership. The South African divestment campaign worked because it raised the cost of the apartheid state’s international borrowing and created political problems for governments whose pension funds held South African assets. In each case the mechanism was economic: the people in power faced a cost-benefit calculation that changed. Moral suasion may have affected some individuals. It did not change the structural calculation that drove policy.

Moral arguments have a poor track record as the primary lever of social change, and this fact is frequently misunderstood. It is not that moral arguments are irrelevant: they build coalitions, provide the normative framework that justifies what a movement is asking for, and affect the willingness of potential participants to accept personal costs. But moral arguments addressed to those in power, without the economic or political pressure that makes their rejection costly, consistently fail. Slaveholders did not free enslaved people because they were persuaded that slavery was wrong. The tobacco industry did not voluntarily stop marketing cigarettes to children because public health advocates published articles about harm. Corporate privacy practices do not change because researchers demonstrate the extent of surveillance. What changes the behavior of those who benefit from a harmful arrangement is when not changing becomes more costly than changing, and that calculation is economic and political.

The word “political” is consistently used disparaginly in tech culture, as if politics were something that happens elsewhere and that a well-run technical organization can avoid. Politics is the process of making collective decisions in the absence of agreement on goals. Every decision about which features to build, which users to prioritize, and which harms to accept does this. The refusal to engage with questions framed as political does not remove politics from the process; it delegates those decisions to whoever is willing to engage. Refusing to vote is a political act. Refusing to join a union is a political act. Choosing to work on a product without asking who it will harm is a political act. The only question is whether the political choices being made are made consciously and with an understanding of their consequences [Young2024,Chenoweth2011].