A 21st Century Golden Age
[Like clockwork, as soon as I put a radio silence post up, I find myself posting something in spite of it…]
Spurred by Mark’s stimulating prompt, some thoughts on the Golden Age of RAND.
A confluence of unique trends combined to create RAND’s Golden Age. The organizational dynamics in particular were extraordinary. An entirely new service leapt into being, Athena-like, endowed with birth with the capability to deliver the most destructive weapons yet designed. The confluence of no institutional inertia, extraordinary power and budgetary security gave the Air Force latitude that it, in turn, could transitively provide to RAND. The creative tension between the freedom to explore and all-consuming urgency to address the most pressing strategic questions of the day drove extraordinary advances.
Where are the equivalent confluences in the 21st Century’s trends? Is the entire think tank model tapped out? Do we need to move to a more distributed and indirect model, where people don’t get paid directly for the value they create or they are compensated through a far-flung network of prediction markets, freelance writing, and self-organizing research programs? If we do want to walk that path, then we’ll need some David Hilberts to step up and propose some programs of research. In other words, we need some common orientations to direct the ambitious energy of rising stars towards a series of problems that will move us towards our goal.
And we need it done yesterday, of course.
