The Idea To Action Pipeline

My education and life training was typical of a lot of people who grew up in upper middle class families and lots of upwardly mobile people who used education and skill training and socialization in the course of securing those things. There are maybe a hundred million people in the United States, a country of about 340 million people, who have been raised or trained to have the kind of mindset that I have.

As younger children, a key focus from my parents (and the parents and teachers of most people like me) was on making good choices, and that's also something that was an important part of what my wife and I, and most of our peers viewed as good parenting.

As I got older, and advanced in my education and socialization all of the way into college, I was raised and taught (formally and informally) to identify problems, to analyze them in evidence and experience informed ways, to be familiar with lots of proven problem solving strategies, to devise appropriate solutions to problem that would work, and to know how to evaluate what is likely to work and test proposed solutions to see if they work as expected (and to revised the solutions if they don't).

Even in law school, the curriculum, while it taught us to nuts and bolts of what the law says, was very oriented towards identifying legal rules and official policies that were good, or were flawed, partially so we could use this knowledge in our adult lives and careers to push for better policies, and partially so that when we encountered flawed rules that we couldn't change we could understand what we were up against, why the rules were a problem, and with this information could devise the best strategies for dealing with them.

We learned to be on the lookout for good ideas that other people had, from other countries and places within our own country, from history, from different cultures, from people with a good track record for innovation, from sources that specialize in identifying good ideas. In the areas of science, and technology and medicine, back before the Internet, we subscribed to Popular Science and Science News. In the area of style and food and architecture when we moved to the West, there was Sunset magazine. These days, for example, I regularly check in on the Boing Boing websites, and read the latest academic scholarship from free sources like the arXiv and bioRxiv and SSRN preprint websites, NBER, the Legal Theory blog, and the various law professors blogs.

It is a way of thinking and conceptual tool kit shared with modest variation, by a large swath of people trained to make up our classes of mangers, professional, and makers. It's an approach used by scientists, engineers, inventors, transactional lawyers, mediators, business executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and innovators.

One of the textbooks used in my first college level political science classes, at Miami University of Ohio, was called "Power and Choice". And, the training, upbringing, and inclinations that I developed and that a huge swath of people developed, was focused on the choice side of this formula.

One of the reasons that I blog, and a major theme of my life, and the lives of lots and lots of people, although I probably have the luxury and means to do so more than most people, is to float constructive ideas for how we as a society can make better choices and find better solutions. Sometimes they are proposed government policies or laws. Sometimes they are better way to fund or finance something. Sometimes they are new technologies to could be used in a new way. 

Sometimes they are concrete approaches to concrete problems like better ways to landscape our home in a city in what is almost a high desert, or a better kind of appliance, or coming up with a better way to keep track of what pills I've taken or need to take, or a better way to keep track of what we need to buy at the store and what we already have in a way that we can actually find it, or how to manage household plants, or a more efficient way to pay bills.

Many of these ideas are solutions to problems that somebody else has. How to make better military procurement choices. What tools we could make available for first responders and disaster responses. How to tax publicly held companies and multinational business in a better way. How to deliver better health care results for our society as a whole, while doing so in a more affordable way. How to cut red tape in big bureaucracies.

Collectively, most of us have much less familiarity, less training, and less comfort and familiarity with the power side of the "power and choice" formula, even many of those of us who are truly exceptional and extraordinary at the choice part.

A lot of us are attracted to politics because we care about and have a good skill set for making policy, but are adrift when it comes to securing the power necessary to putting those policies in place. A lot of the scientists who see most clearly what paths to new scientific discoveries would be most fruitful and which are most likely to be dead ends are stymied at how to generate momentum and funding for those ideas in the scientific community. Lots of us are aware of businesses that would be good to invest in, or would be good to short, but don't have the financial wealth or the influence with people who have access to money to do anything about this knowledge. Lots of us are aware of innovative technological solutions that could bring about a lot of constructive change, but don't know where to begin to go about getting those solutions adopted more widely.

People like me, and there are perhaps a hundred million of us in the United States, have lots of good ideas, but feel hopeless or frustrated when it comes to turning these ideas into action.

And, it isn't just that we are stupid or missing the obvious. The idea to action pipeline is hard for most people to locate, is clogged up, and is full of seemingly unnecessary twists and turns that make it less effective. Acquiring the power to make even a seemingly obvious on brainer innovation that is itself minor seems to take absolutely epic amounts of time, money, connections, and effort that seems grossly disproportionate to the swift moment it takes to recognize that an idea is good and should be put into action.

It is no secret that I am no fan of Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world. And, Mr. Musk is not a particular genius when it comes to coming up with ideas of his own. The technological innovations behind Telsa, SpaceX, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Hyper loop, and his other projects were all the work of someone else. His ability to identify good ideas is slightly above average, but it isn't particular exceptional. Frederick W. Smith, who founded FedEx, is cut from the same cloth. He had identified one particular, not really profoundly innovative idea that could be implemented with technology that wasn't cutting edge but was still pretty new at the time he came up with it.

But, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that what Musk and Smith both excelled at (and may even continue to excel at) is securing the resources and momentum necessary to turn moderately good, although fairly obvious ideas that no one had implemented (as is so often the case) into action that allowed the ideas that were mostly children of other people to actually come into wide use.

In the case of Musk, being an heir to an emerald mine fortune helped a lot. Smith also grew up as the son of a wealthy, moderately successful business owner, attended the top local private schools, and went to Yale in some of the last years when doing so was more about money and connections than academic merit.

But turning ideas into action can be a lot more challenging for the rest of us, partially because we don't have nearly as much training in how to do this as we do in how to come up with good ideas (i.e. because we are much better at making good choices than exercising power), and in part, because the idea to action pipeline at the moment is mediocre and has deteriorated over time is a society that is starting to stagnate (something that Economist Tyler Cohen wrote a book about).

This is true even for people like me who have a solid nuts and bolts understanding of things like how capital is raised for businesses in the modern U.S. economy, how the political process works, and the inner workings of academia, while spending decades working side by side by quite successful political figures and business people and academics (albeit not necessarily the peak "A-list" individuals in their respective fields).

Yes, it is possible to innovate and turn good ideas into action, even if, in my humble opinion it is too hard to do so. And, it is true that innovation shouldn't be too easy or free of gatekeepers. There are also a lot of really bad ideas out there that, when implemented, do immense harm. The more easily ideas get turned into action, the more important it is that the ideas that receive the thumbs up are good ones.

For examples in the 20th century of bad ideas being adopted too quickly and causing immense harm, ask the people of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, revolutionary Cambodia, or North Korea. Ask the members of cults like the one organized by Jim Jones. 

Ask the people who thought it was a great idea to cover beautiful hardwood floors with cheap vinyl who convinced tens of millions of American homeowners to do so. Further back, ask the people who thought that putting the ill-drafted Second Amendment into the United States constitution was a good idea.

More recently, look at the policy initiative of RFK, Jr., or the actions taken by Elon Musk's DOGE, or the "Liberation Day" tariffs in the second Trump Administration.

On the other hand, lots of opposition to new ideas is mindlessly stubborn, ignorant, corrupt, or mendacious.

Sitting in my living room under the ceiling fan on a hot, dry summer day in August, after returning to work at home after a morning in my office doing a lot of work that actually generates money, I don't have a solution for how to improve the idea to action pipeline. But, surely, even identifying this as a crucial and pervasive problem in our society is progress in and of itself and can lay a foundation for future progress.