What's called for is a dramatic New Technology Initiative that treats New Tech as the core of a stimulus package, not as an add-on after tax rebates and short-term boosts. Such measures probably won't coerce people drowning in debt and losing jobs to buy another iPod anyway.

After implementing the stimulus package, the new president should encourage foreign leaders to create a global New Tech Deal, taking care to include concerns from all stakeholders, including emerging economies.

Goals might include expanding America's 5 million new green-collar workers to 50 million workers planetwide, and an equivalent tenfold increase of $1.5 trillion to create alternative and carbon-friendly fuels.

Such an effort would reverse the decline in U.S. federal spending on research and development, which has fallen to its lowest level in 10 years—to less than 0.5 percent of G.D.P. The initiative would reestablish America as a world leader in science and technology.

Some critics will say that the government is too incompetent or corrupt to handle such a sweeping plan. But I can give you trillions of reasons why it can't do worse than the private sector, which has brought the world to the brink of economic collapse.

In any case, we all need to acknowledge in advance that some ideas won't work. Failure and waste will be part of the equation—as they always are in private as well as public experiments.

One critical element could be a leader who inspires people around the world to think beyond their personal gain, at least for a minute or two.

In recent weeks, the media and some lawmakers have compared Obama's talk about public-works programs to jumpstart the economy and create jobs to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

In fact, a major element of F.D.R.'s Works Progress Administration—which built roads, bridges, and public buildings between 1936 and 1941—was to embrace the latest innovations of that era. The entire W.P.A. effort cost $11.5 billion in 1941 dollars—about $139 billion today.

In 2008 much more is required, because $139 billion doesn't buy what it used to given current construction costs, standards, and regulations. Workers also would be unlikely to labor for wages just above the welfare rate, as many did during the Great Depression.

Unlike the trillions spent on bailing out the financial industry, this stimulus money will be an investment in the future—a "bail-in," if you will. When Obama talks about change, let's hope he truly means a recommitment to creativity and adaptation.

Much more than our economy is at stake. This is survival.