Interesting essay, and have to agree we need to know what we don't know? i.e., the wright brothers knew they couldn't fly and the rest of the world knew, if man had been meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings.

Not that many years since that first powered heavier than air flight, giant cargo planes fly all manner of produce, including herds of pigs and or military equipment around the world. And a man named Armstrong walked upon the Moon! And we also knew to a proverbial man that was impossible?

All too often we allow opinion to take precedence over facts and what could be done if we gave full rein to our better ideas and thinkers, rather than try to suppress them with gooble de gook, masquerading as critical thinking?

Culminating in a veritable conga line of our best ideas and people heading for less conservative, can do, pastures. The atomic absorption spectrometer, the ceramic fuel cell, pulsed light uranium enrichment, and single step steel smelting, just to name a few of the more glaring examples.

If we excell in anything, it has to be timidity, thus we are up there at around number thirty as world leading innovators, and somewhere down in the bowels at around three hundred developing them into commercial realities.

We can't finance them without foreign capital? And said straight faced, while acknowledging, that we own a two trillion dollar super fund!

Every western style economy rests on just two support pillars, and for all practical purposes, we have surrendered both to our foreign competition all while virtually allowing them to decide our destiny?

If management teaches just two things, it teaches there is always a better way and doing what you've always done, while expecting a different result, is insanity.

What we need are imaginative big ideas and a workable plan, with achievable steps that need to follow a planned order to succeed then just start! Nothing being impossible!
Or we could trust economists, (self declared experts) whose combined record as predictors, are no better than dart throwing monkeys!
Alan B.