It is a widely held belief that Jamaicans have an exaggerated opinion of their own abilities and usually accept advice from no one. It might even be deeply structured in their historical DNA as illustrated in the wonderful title of that marvellous history published in 2004 by Brian Moore and Michele Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven. The book is a superb analysis of the development of Jamaican culture during the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. The authors demonstrate convincingly that however hard they tried, the British were mostly ineffective in establishing the main contours of popular culture. Jamaicans took charge of their destiny and shaped a society in which they felt most comfortable.

If Jamaicans are adamant about not taking seriously opinions offered by foreigners, they are downright contemptuous of advice offered by their fellowmen. So there is no illusion that suggestions emanating in this column and elsewhere about social, political, and economic reconstruction are likely to be taken seriously at any level of government. Jamaicans see free food as good; free money, better; and free light bulbs as an entrepreneurial opportunity. Yet free ideas are regarded with the utmost caution. It is hard to conceive that the old recalcitrant ways are best in modern times.

It is difficult to imagine any sort of efficacious change without foundational ideas. Of course, the Bible has a uniquely different version for the precedence of the transcendental changes described in the creation story. Then a lot of things in the Bible are unique. Mundane changes require plans and the field of philosophy originated on the premise that methodical thinking should be a prelude to applied action.

This is the sort of attitude that became generalised between the end of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century. This period has been called the Age of Enlightenment because a number of individuals in several countries started to rationalise the structure of social and social mores. It led to a number of revolutions in the sciences, in literature, in economics, in social organisation, and most important, in the reorganisation of politics. Social and political engineering assumed enormous importance as a series of epochal revolutions took place in British North America, in France and its colony of Saint-Domingue (that later became the independent state of Haiti), in Spain and in its American colonies.

At the end of the 20th century the entire world experienced a revolution in informational technology. This revolution represented one dimension of the accelerated global integration of culture and economics that altered significantly the political and economic world order. Globalisation, however, is not a sharply defined event. Rather, it is an ongoing effervescent process that affects different societies in quite different ways. If Jamaica wants to modernise, it must change some of the ways it has always done things.

In many societies transformative ideas are constantly produced from a variety of formal sources. Governments establish investigative committees that examine an area of concern, creating reports suggesting possible avenues for resolving the problem. Political changes in the British Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s arose in large part from the West India Royal Commission sent out to the West Indies in 1939 under the chairmanship of Lord Moyne. Some governments have special institutes to do ongoing research and prepare advice on specific areas of interest. Many universities and national academies independently generate ideas or evaluate proposals of other entities. The Chilean government is contemplating more than 10 ways to save the 33 miners trapped underground. Options often optimise results.

Authors of important ideas do not necessarily have to be certified in any specific area of competence. In short, they do not need academic degrees. The experience of John Harrison, the discoverer of a way to measure longitude provides a good example of how independent developments can be achieved without prior academic certification – much to the discomfort of academics. While latitude (the location north or south of the equator) was relatively easy to determine, longitude (the distance east or west of the Greenwich meridian) was harder to ascertain. In July 1714 Parliament passed an act establishing a Board of Longitude that offered a prize of £20,000 for anyone who could discover a method of verifying longitude within an accuracy of 30 miles.

The initial Board was a collection of intellectual heavyweights. It included the leading British astronomer, academics from Oxford and Cambridge universities, the president of the Royal Society, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Speaker of the House of Commons as well as the First Commissioner of the Navy Board. For more than a century the Board futilely pursued a series of lunar charts as the best way to discover longitude.

John Harrison, a Yorkshireman born in 1693 had a different idea. An experienced

clockmaker, Harrison invented a series of accurate clocks and between 1761 and late March 1762 sent his son with one of his clocks to Jamaica to check the accuracy of the distance covered. The clock was accurate to within 18 miles. Two years later on a journey to Barbados the clock registered an accuracy of 10 miles. Harrison received material reward but not the official recognition, largely because he was an uncertified rural village clocksmith. But by 1815 his invention was universally accepted as the standard measure for longitude.

Generating ideas is easy. Moving from ideas to action is a bit more complicated. Jamaica needs formal mechanisms to capture and examine the feasibility and economic prudence of new ideas as well as ways to prioritise the best ones. Moving from ideas to action should not be seen as a matter for government, or even exclusively the private sector. As Brazil, China and India illustrate so well, success comes faster when public and private sectors work together harmoniously.