When someone moves up to a new and
different position to promote their idea or policy I have often found it
to mean the idea or policy was a failure.
My best example was the idea of 'appropriate technology'. AT was an idea first advanced by E.F. Schumacher in the early 1970s that third world development required a specialized form of technology that was designed specifically for use by the indigenous people who would use the technology.
I saw the idea applied in many third world countries, 95% of the time it failed but in a few cases where the idea was uniquely modified it suited the third world circumstances. I did see an efficient stove, designed in Amsterdam, made by metal-smiths in Dakar, Senegal that was sold and appreciated in the local markets.
But
what I mostly saw was that people who promoted the idea of AT saw it
fail and then began to say that it required a different kind of
government structure, more money and more international support. They
took their failure to a higher level of action. They got good international jobs at the
higher level but the idea still failed.
Lawrence Lessig is another good example. Lessig is now promoting himself to Harvard to work on 'corruption'.
For the past half decade Lessig has been a Stanford professor advocating a free and unhindered Internet with a weak patent climate. He has failed to find an audience for his ideas which are generally wrong. He has failed completely to get Congress, any legislative body or any regulative body interested in his ideas.
So he has concluded that legislatures ignored his ideas because legislators are being bribed by big telecom companies.
To solve his problem of failure, to redeem his ideas, he is going up a level and attacking the resistance to his ideas as the result of corruption.
As I say in the heading of this blog: 'Up is a sign of failure.'