by Smitty
Pardon my under-whelmed response to Neal Stephenson’s Innovation Starvation.
Neal comes near a breakthrough here, emphasis mine:
Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of email threads and Powerpoints. 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. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.
The Apollo Program put a man on the moon while I was still, in the eyes of modern feminism, a busy insurgent within my mother’s flesh. That link I just provided juxtaposes the Cold War and the Space Race nicely. From little bits of scuttlebutt I’ve heard in some odd places, the Apollo Program was really just so much cover story along the road to Really Big Missiles. This explains why, once the technology for Trident was in the pipeline, we got. . .the Space Shuttle. Not to mock the program; it has done much good. But really: can you match Neal Armstrong with a spiffy Hubble image? “One small NITF for man. . .one giant JPEG for mankind.”
Back to the quoted Stephenson above, now: people don’t scale. The significance of the external threat of the Soviet Union was as crucial to the success of Apollo as Nazi-ism and Imperial Japan were to WWII. Without the threat of the fertilizer hitting the air circulator, that Iron Law heads its ugly rear. Lacking an external bad guy putting the back against the wall, the engineers turn into intellectually flabby bureaucrats, launching applications instead of cutting edge projects. They can navigate the artificial intricacies of a travel claim more readily than deal with orbital mechanics. However, that engineering genius does not support people moving paper from point A to point B, now does it?
Many, like the Instapundit, strongly favor privatizing space efforts. Fair enough, but there are significant national security implications for allowing Stacy McCain to have a go at “Gonzo in Space”. Barbara Espinosa would just have installed on the main computer. Stacy’s head, and, subsequently, the spacecraft, would ‘splode, triggering some major repercussions. We don’t need that.
Maybe some credible national leadership could help. If you put Carmack at NASA, and gave him a free hand and an Apollo-style budget to git ‘er done. . . But no, that would just be more opportunity for Congressional graft. Perhaps the best government role is, in fact, command by negation.
Flabby bureaucrats have a highly socialist diet. They feed on regulations with the aforementioned high iron content. Fe males, they are. The creative, exceptional American vigor that should drive actual improvement (would have said ‘Progress’, comrade, but how liberally gay can the English language get and retain meaning?) is perverted to ensconce weaknesssocial justice.
So the useful question to ask is: How do we liberate the creativity of the people from the dismal prison of Socialism? Restated, just how hard are we going to work in 2012 to elect conservatives? How much pain are we going take to regain liberty? Sci Fi writers can spin all manner of tales, but the real failure is not of imagination: rather, over-regulation.
Update: linked at Daily Pundit. In response to:
Nobody is really interested in original or inspiring thinking, not when it threatens one of their sacred cows, whether socialist or socon. And that is the real problem, not regulations.
Let me say that I, personally, am not threatened by ideas as such. Ideas live on a failure/success spectrum. My task is to argue the successful ones in a positive way. Having served in the military, let me flog the drum: drenching the troops in hormones isn’t advancing the military strategy one bit. An election strategy, perhaps. That is all.
