Scott Adams was on the case back in 2011. It is still worth considering. Full WSJ essay here. A longish excerpt here:
A well-crafted delusion can be a delicious guilty pleasure. And best of all, it's totally free. As a public service, today I will teach you how to wrap yourself in a warm blanket of imagined solutions for the government's fiscal dilemma.
To begin, assume that as the fiscal meltdown becomes more perilous, everyone will become more flexible and perhaps a bit more open-minded. That seems reasonable enough. A good crisis has a way of changing people. Now imagine that the world needs just one great idea to put things back on the right track. Great ideas have often changed history. It's not hard to imagine it can happen again.
Try to imagine that the idea that saves the country is an entirely new one. It's too much of a stretch to imagine that a stale idea would suddenly become acceptable. In fact, that's the dividing line between imagination and insanity. Only crazy people imagine that bad ideas can suddenly become good if you keep trying them. So let's assume that our imagined solution is a brand new idea. That feels less crazy and more optimistic. Another advantage is that no one has an entrenched view about an idea that has never been heard.
For those of you with healthy egos—and that would be every reader of The Wall Street Journal—you can make this fantasy extra delicious by imagining that you are the person who comes up with the idea that saves the world. I'll show you how to imagine that. I think you'll be surprised at how easy it is.
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