For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated.
For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions.
Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth.
Walking back from poor decisions is super-hard. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different."
Not sure what the answers are here, though.