The CP will label failures as successes and divert endless resources into it

This chapter has analyzed the innovation machines within our societies, making a case that the entrepreneur is, next to human capital, its most integral part. I have also argued that those market forces that spur and fetter entrepreneurs do not translate in any simple way to the realities of the state. A firm that is hijacked by a bad idea suffers financially. A state that is hijacked by a bad idea is unlikely to suffer by any parameters it cares about. It might even find parameters by which it appears successful and tout its success.

The most recent call for the state to be entrepreneurial involves so-called mission-oriented innovation policies: the mobilization of great resources across many sectors to solve a great problem or act on an opportunity. Missions suffer from three overarching weaknesses. First, we do not know how to pick them or operationalize them. Second, we do not know how to evaluate their successes and failures, and it is likely that we will never be able to do so in a satisfactory way, since the opportunity costs are incredibly complex. Third, it is difficult to make an actual flesh-and-blood person accountable, which greatly increases the risk that an unproductive, or even destructive, project is initiated, as well as supported past its due date.

Sometimes a simple answer is not simplistic. In his famous 1977 book, The Moon and the Ghetto, Richard R. Nelson asked how it came to be that humankind managed to put a man on the moon but could not help ghetto kids read. It is of course a hopeful proposition that resources and political willpower are the missing pieces, as embodied in the call for missions. But when Nelson reflected back on his book almost 35 years later (Nelson, 2011, p. 685), he recalled that a central argument of the book, and something he considered still central to things we could not do, was “not so much political, as a consequence of the fact that, given existing knowledge, there were no clear paths to a solution.”

With problems for which what to do is reasonably straightforward, it is obvious who the experts are, we can draw on already well-developed knowledge in science and private enterprises, and there is currently a lack of critical mass, missions may work in theory. The question is how many problems of significant importance fit those criteria. We must also figure out how these things interact with the institutional-technological issues of our time. Hammurabi could not have flown to the moon, but he is likely to have been able to fix a few issues with readability in ghettos if he had so intended. Today, things like fly a rocket to land on the moon clearly qualify for the list of achievable missions, as do things like building the world’s fastest car or the world’s best chess computer. Find an accountable head, hire the best minds, and pour endless resources into them. The problem of opportunity cost would remain, but the mission’s goals could probably be reached.

It is possible that putting enormous amounts of resources into staying ahead of resistant bacteria would qualify as well, given that the taxpayers involved are willing to pay for everybody else’s spillovers. Some vaccine research and roll-out programs may also be candidates. But then again, would that not be best performed through enormous R&D subsidies or innovation prizes, rather than through missions?

Sadly, dealing with global warming (and many other issues of our time) is not on the list of problems that are likely solvable through missions: We just do not know what to do about it, at least not in a way that enough people find acceptable. Contrary to the Apollo or Manhattan projects, it is unlikely that one technological solution will take us past the global warming scare (Mowery et al., 2010), exponentially increasing the complexity of the problem and likewise reducing the likelihood that a mission can solve it. Alas, those are the kind of missions that we are steering against. Indeed, not really knowing what to do is perhaps what ultimately separates fixing markets from creating markets. Proponents of entrepreneurial states and their missions are trying to convince us to apply top-down approaches to issues for which the knowledge required is too complex and too incomplete for top-down approaches to work. If we allow our states to take on such issues, they are likely to fail in more ways than one. Many politicians and civil servants will likely have a favorable view of their ability to do the impossible. The rest of us must keep our heads cool.