This is just the nature of the world. There are enough defensible reasons to screw your own team so people will do that anyway. The real reason is that once you've hit some degree of prosperity, loss aversion overtakes gain seeking. Today's America is therefore focused on maintenance of its wealth.
You can try anything you like, but it won't work. America cannot build in the real world because it constrains itself out of fear of losing what it has, because it has so much.
All these articles and open letters and appeals are just the same as internal company memos at massive corporations exhorting innovation. But IBM can't innovate, no matter how many innovation labs it funds. It just can't. The fire is dead and that's a property of what it's hit: the upper limit of prosperity. The next innovation won't come from IBM and it will rocket past IBM and then hit its own upper limit.
Perhaps the only recent big companies that have innovated are Apple and Amazon. Maybe there's something to be learned from their relative approaches. But America as it stands won't build, because it can't build. The excuses will be numerous: "law written in blood", "do we want to end up like X who built but built wrong", "America is big", "America is sparse". But the problem is none of that. The problem is that America won, that America is prosperous and glorious, and so it can no longer countenance any risk of loss.
"It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas” - Marvin Hagler
I think there's definitely something to be said for Elon Musk sinking his entire Paypal fortune into Tesla. Hitting the reset button and starting again from ground zero is one hell of an incentive to succeed.
You can try anything you like, but it won't work. America cannot build in the real world because it constrains itself out of fear of losing what it has, because it has so much.
All these articles and open letters and appeals are just the same as internal company memos at massive corporations exhorting innovation. But IBM can't innovate, no matter how many innovation labs it funds. It just can't. The fire is dead and that's a property of what it's hit: the upper limit of prosperity. The next innovation won't come from IBM and it will rocket past IBM and then hit its own upper limit.
Perhaps the only recent big companies that have innovated are Apple and Amazon. Maybe there's something to be learned from their relative approaches. But America as it stands won't build, because it can't build. The excuses will be numerous: "law written in blood", "do we want to end up like X who built but built wrong", "America is big", "America is sparse". But the problem is none of that. The problem is that America won, that America is prosperous and glorious, and so it can no longer countenance any risk of loss.