My current focus is wisdom, I feel uncomfortable that I don't have perspective on problems in society or the structure of the economy (i.e. how my quality of life is maintained). When I mention these ideas to others their reaction is generally to describe the problems as being too hard or impossible, I think this is a very interesting form of rationality failure, because the same people would go to enormous lengths to construct a solution to a technical problem if they were told it was not possible. Why don't creative, intellectual and rational people apply their problem solving skills to these kinds of issues? Why don't they 'have a go'?

My guess would be that the situation is that the "self-help" genre has a really bad name among creative/intellectual/rational people because the quality of people who have written in it is so low, and that consequently creative/intellectual/rational people feel squeamish about even entertaining the thought of doing an analysis of the type you describe.

Basically, when problems are really obviously important, lots of low quality people get attracted to them, so that when high quality people work on them they're at risk of signaling that they're of low quality. When high quality people work on more arcane things that are of subtle importance there's not the issue of being confused with hoards of low quality people.

The dynamic described above has the very unfortunate consequence that many of the most important problems are simply not addressed.