89ghettos 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.
90J. P. Larsson
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.