A short report in Business Week prompted a series of thoughts, most of which I'm sure the writer never intended. His simple, but vast, premise is that "the age of transportation" ended in 1969, and that ever since then we've just been tweaking the already established technologies. "… (W)e've traded innovation for stagnation," he writes. "We live in an era where few risks are being taken."

I agree with the summary comment, and I think the evidence he assembles is persuasive: cars are safe and reliable now; road systems are complete, except for the upkeep; jet travel has standardized long-distance travel; and so on.

I care about this because the businesses that support transportation — the operations that manufacture the vehicles and the machines that make transportation so convenient — is effectively the core of manufacturing. Marketing, finance, and retail segments also benefit massively from transport. You could name other segments that are similarly essential (housing, energy) but I think we'll look long and hard, and possibly futilely, before we find anything that supports so many different organizations and people as fully as the transportation sector.

But, I think the writer comes close to, and dodges, the obvious conclusion: It's no fun. There's no excitement. There's no individual reward. Worriers, do-gooders, and corporate guardians have sapped all the excitement out of transportation. We do what we must to comply with expectations, and no more.

As a result, buying a car forces you to examine your environmental conscience. Flying by plane amounts to submitting your body and time to a cruel bureaucracy. Road and bridge construction is just a headache for drivers and taxpayers, who feel punished rather than gratified that we live in a civilization capable of such achievements.

It's merely an extension of this theme to say that what is wrong with our economy, or even with our world, is that we've given up on optimism. We have too much too fix, too much to worry about, too much to regret, too much to guard against. It's too bad.