Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for

From "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" by Tony Judt in this weeks NYR - worth reading, especially on privatisation of public infrastructure:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23519

"If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?"