SUMMER 2022 / REAL-LEADERS.COM 19 MINDFULNESS “BIG IDEAS HAVE THIS SHOCKING, SENSATIONAL IMPACT. HUMAN HISTORY, HUMAN CIVILIZATION, REALLY DOESN’T MAKE MUCH SENSE UNLESS WE HAVE SOME AWARENESS OF THOSE IDEAS THAT MATTER MOST.” — MICHAEL BHASKAR MOVE IN CIRCLES THAT ARE WILLING TO BACK YOUR BIG IDEA. If you look at businesses, they want a safe return. They don’t want to gamble huge amounts of money on something that is unlikely to generate a return. That’s even often true with venture capitalists and others who are supposedly taking all these risks. Almost nobody can afford to back things that might fail for 20 years before they become good. There are many areas, by contrast, that used to have backing for big ideas. For example, you had a great ecosystem of innovation in mid-20th century corporate America, where in places like Bell Labs there was a huge amount of freedom. A lot of those places have been closed. And although tech giants do a lot of R&D, it doesn’t necessarily replace that real, broad-based ecosystem. So, we don’t give the timelines or the money. And secondly, a lot of the people coming up with ideas are at universities and other places where incentives for taking on the risks of a big idea just aren’t there. Scholars have to get citations. What gets cited? Well, it’s generally stuff that is already established. You have to calibrate what you pursue to what’s out there in order to get cited. If you take a big risk with your career and get it wrong, you won’t get jobs, you won’t get tenure, and you won’t get citations. The entire sector of research and universities has been taken over by an almost 3 FIND YOUR CIRCLE have become a lot safer, sleeker, cleaner, more efficient… but we’re not getting new ideas. There have been countless incremental improvements, but the big ideas that would transform transport seem to be stalling. There are lots of proposals for flying cars or drone delivery, but nobody’s actually getting them off the ground. My idea of the Great Stagnation is broader than just economics and technology. When you look at our cultural world, it is stuck in a similar pattern. For most of the 20th century, you could clearly identify when music was from. Music from the 1980s sounded very different from the 1960s. There were new genres, new kinds of instruments, and whole new subcultures. Nowadays, there’s a lot of great music, but it’s not that different from 20 years ago. There’s not that kind of wholesale revolution in public taste that used to happen. There was a time in the 20th century when there were huge novelists, great philosophers, and they would dominate their fields. These huge ideas would come in, but it seems like big ideas are out of fashion. Likewise, we’ve kind of given up on big new ideas about politics. When Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of history, he was talking about the end of massive new challenges to forms of political organization. And he seems to be right. We have a kind of reheated authoritarianism, we have liberal democracies, and we have a bit of a fudge between the two, but nobody has any clear idea what, if anything, might come beyond that. When you start to drill down, it does seem like there’s been a Great Stagnation of sorts. The big exception would be in digital technology, but it doesn’t invalidate the idea entirely.
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