Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 under the slogan “Change we can believe in.” It appeared on his banners, podiums and posters.
On election night, November 4, 2008, he spoke in Grant Park in Chicago. “But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
On December 23, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act. It created a U.S. Metric Board. Conversion was voluntary.
The board was abolished in 1982. Americans still buy gasoline by the gallon, measure height in feet and inches, and give the weather in degrees Fahrenheit.
In 1979 the United States began issuing a one-dollar coin with the portrait of Susan B. Anthony. The coin was widely confused with the quarter. It “received an overwhelmingly negative reception from the public.”
Production for circulation was suspended in 1981. The dollar bill stayed. The Anthony design was officially retired in 2000.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter’s budget director, is credited with popularizing the saying. In May 1977 the magazine Nation’s Business reported that he wanted the federal government to adopt it as a motto.
Lance explained: “That’s the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing things that are broken.”
In 1962 the American scientist Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His book popularized the word paradigm for the basic framework of a science. A paradigm shift came to mean the moment when one framework replaces another.
The phrase left science and entered everyday American English. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a major change in which the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.”
In 2001 the economists Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea published a study of a large U.S. company that switched its 401(k) retirement plan to automatic enrollment. New employees were “automatically and immediately enrolled in the 401(k) plan unless they made a negative election.”
“401(k) participation is significantly higher under automatic enrollment.” Employees hired under the new rule also tended to keep the default contribution rate and investment. The authors attributed this to “participant inertia” and to employees seeing the default as investment advice. They concluded that “large changes in savings behavior can be motivated simply by the power of suggestion.”
In Democracy in America, published in two parts in 1835 and 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “I accost an American sailor, and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years.”
From such answers, Tocqueville wrote, the American “infers that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement.” The chapter is titled “How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man.”
In 1997 Apple launched an advertising campaign called “Think different.” It began a few months after Steve Jobs returned to the company as interim CEO. The television commercial, narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, opened with these words: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.”
It ended: “Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.” The agency was TBWA\Chiat\Day. The campaign went on to play a key role in Apple’s recovery.
In April 1985 Coca-Cola changed its formula for the first time in 99 years. The new drink had won about 200,000 taste tests.
Customers revolted. The company hotline, which had taken 400 calls a day, took 1,500. About 40,000 complaint letters arrived. On July 11, 1985, after 79 days, the original returned as Coca-Cola Classic. Peter Jennings interrupted General Hospital to report it.
The company now calls it “the most memorable marketing blunder ever.”
Kennedy at Rice University in 1962: we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
The difficulty is offered as the reason rather than the obstacle. Nobody had been to the moon, no vehicle existed that could go there, and the deadline was set anyway.