Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don't talk about them anymore, says Ries, and many of them stem from the fact that elite decision makers have adopted an unusually short-term framework. This problem is further compounded because the number of decision makers today is much smaller than it used to be—there are half the number of public companies in the U.S. today as there were 20 years ago, according to Ries. He attributes this sharp decline in public companies to three factors: 1) private companies tend to delay going public much longer 2) the amount of private equity has increased significantly and 3) there's much more consolidation in today's markets. Ries believes that we need to address the root causes of the problems in our economy, not just the symptoms. His litmus test for developing practical solutions and weeding out pie-in-the-sky fantasies is whether they are doable while we're still alive.