Can we get the big stuff done?

From Neil Stephenson, Innovation Starvation:

Here's the synopsis:

"I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done...The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 crystallized my feeling that we have lost our ability to get important things done... [T]he real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff... The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it...Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense...Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail... Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done."

Brooks also has a take on this.

I tend to agree with both. The audacity and will to take big risks comes from either a feeling of acute necessity or the occurrence of innovation insulated by a degree of both ignorance of others failures and ambitiousness just short of hubris. When societies are threatened by a large, existential threat, they will take huge risks. Witness the great depression, the world wars and the Cold War from the previous century. What are the risks today that urge us on? Likely minimal by comparison. Or at least not felt acutely, for those seeing climate change as a serious long term threat. And, for the space program at least, there appears to be even less risk than we thought recently concerning near earth asteroids.

Genius insulated from easily accessible knowledge of other's failures with similar ideas is less likely to be thwarted early and more likely to have identified how to actually accomplish what was once failed. I think Neil Stephenson's point it spot on -- we may be stopping too many ideas early.

All this combines with a fear that not only can't we get the big things done, but we are poor at realizing, and taking steps to insure against, the big risks and black swan events. Hurricane Katrina and Japan's tsunami caused nuclear power plant meltdowns may demonstrate some of these failures.