The pace of change in society accelerates over time.
Henry Adams's 1904 formulation, written from the observation that his own lifetime had seen more change than the several before it. Adams offered it as a speculative historical analogy rather than a demonstrated quantitative law, and its age is not evidence for its truth.
In practice
- A firm rewrites its five-year strategy every eighteen months, and each rewrite is justified by the pace of change rather than by the last plan's errors.
- Every generation has made the claim since, which is either evidence for it or evidence about how change is perceived from inside it.