<<<So it's completely accepted, for instance, that private venture capital can pour buckets of cash into mostly failures, for a few high-return successes which make the whole thing worthwhile. And many corporate types have the same hypermotivation which door-to-door evangelists share despite day after day of repeated failure.>>>
[WS:] It is not very surprising at all. Capitalism is more of a religion than actual money making in this country. Actual money making comes from inside connections, sweet heart deals with the government, government largesse, monopolistic practices, pyramid schemes, etc. none of which has anything to do with "free market." The risk taking and competition is for the birds and religious zealots who believe in the free market mantra.
A few of those may succeed on the principle that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then - and those few success stories grow into a legend. Most of them fail, but those failures are either unnoticed or quickly forgotten. And if trees fall in the forest and nobody hears them, they do not really make a sound.
And then, there is rationalization and legitimation. Somebody made money on a risky venture because (i) he had government guarantees and subsidies, (ii) he had inside knowledge which way the policy winds would be blowing in the next few years (iii) he was shielded from competition or had a virtual monopoly (courtesy of friendly politicians) or (iv) all of the above. But the story that is told about his endeavor is that of foresight, determination, and superior personal skills and charisma (cf. Bill Gates).
To sum it up, the gung-ho attitude toward solving social problems is either a naïve optimism of the star-eyed do-gooders and social movement "activistists," or a shameless PR campaign of clever entrepreneurs in the process of - or hoping to- milk the public coffers. Of course, this is not to say that these efforts do not work, many of them do, but in the big picture they are just small drops in the bucket of needs.
One policy analyst dubbed these efforts "mellow weakness" - measures of rather limited (if any) effectiveness, but that make everyone feel good that something is being done, so more extensive and radical, but also more costly and risky measures can "legitimately" be tabled. This is a part of a behavioral pattern that some organizational theorists call "satisificing" - or doing the bare satisfactory minimum and justifying it in terms of the prevailing in a particular organization or environment values, myths and beliefs (e.g. free market, efficiency or risk management, populist or social movement mythologies.
The position that I am taking on this issue has nothing to do with my "liberalism" or preference for social democracy to be more precise. It is based on my training as a social scientist and my understanding of human behavior. It involves a very different behavioral model than that that typically espoused by both radicals and free-marketeers (e.g. rational choice, personal motivation, and economic determinism, but interpreted differently by foes and friends of the status quo).
Wojtek