It's Time to Build - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ <comment><USER5> I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position.

It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.

I can't help but think that there's a fundamental flaw in the American regulatory approach. From the European perspective, the US is sometimes viewed as some time of free market haven, but in practice it often turns out that the regulatory burden is much higher. The framework imposed on financial markets by the SEC and related authorities is on a whole different level in the US, and with higher complexity you a also get a larger surface area for special interests to make their mark.

Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.

<comment><USER6> Getting an answer from a court (is X legal?) takes a long time: at least a few years and several hundred thousand dollars. Far too long to wait before building a business around X. Asking people to build the business first and then find out if it's legal isn't how a society of laws is supposed to work.

Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.

<comment><USER7> Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is [https://donotpay.com/](https://donotpay.com/)

<comment><USER8> No, law is not code and it's very important that it's not code. Law is subject to interpretation, and that's great. When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.

<comment><USER7> Are bugs discovered and corrected faster today in law or in code?

<comment><USER9> Things are happening at the bleeding edge of computational law that move this debate into new territory.

(TL;DR: yes, "law is code". And $10M of fresh funding says law should be open- source code, to be precise. Hackers wanted.)

Background: the "Rules as Code" movement is bringing software engineering practices to the drafting of law. [https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four- things-you-should...](https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you- should-know-about-rules-as-code/)

The premise: the judiciary is one source of authority; the legislature is another. If we treat contracts and laws as executable programs and specifications, we want to find bugs at compile time, because handling exceptions at run-time is called "going to court".

How do we find bugs at compile time? Static analysis. Formal methods. Formal verification methodologies (Lamport's TLA+, MIT's Alloy) applied to contracts and laws make it possible to SAT-solve for loopholes ("sploits") that violate LTL/CTL specifications. Once law is code you can go full white-hat/black-hat. Automate the fuzzing. [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving- the-world-from-code/540393/)

Maybe we don't always want "law as code" ... for, say, criminal law. Judicial discretion is important. Human judgement matters. Though if an overworked public defender can only spare two hours out of the hundred you deserve, the robolawyer starts to sound more attractive. What if we send Watson to law school? If you're hunting for a way to stay out of jail, wouldn't you want Deep Blue and AlphaGo to help you find it? [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public- def...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender- case-loads.html)

There are plenty of black-and-white areas where the rules don't invite human interpretation: mostly things to do with finances -- like how DoNotPay.com can help apply for unemployment. Even in those domains, there are deep, deep pockets lobbying against the kinds of freedom (as in speech, and as in beer) that "law as code" promises. [https://www.propublica.org/article/inside- turbotax-20-year-f...](https://www.propublica.org/article/inside- turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free)

But, you ask, what about the knowledge acquisition bottleneck? Ah, yes, the AI Winter. Ontologies (SUMO, OWL, UFO-L), visual modeling notations (BPMN, DMN), and a new generation of tools (Flora-2, Protégé) take a new whack at that problem without going anywhere near machine learning and neural nets, which typically lack the nuance you need when every comma counts. [https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas- tha...](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-that-cost- companies-millions)

Spring is coming. The vision for computable law, as laid out by Michael Genesereth at Stanford's CodeX Center, is for software that does for legal reasoning what the spreadsheet does for quantitative reasoning. (Who's Michael Genesereth? You've heard of Russell & Norvig's textbook on AI. He was Stuart Russell's Ph.D advisor.) [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517)

Is there any money in this? Hell, yes. In the US, DoNotPay is running a pitch- perfect Christensen disruption playbook. Outside the US, the EU has issued a half-million-euro tender for exactly the Rules As Code thing mentioned above: machine-readable-and-executable regulations. See section 1.4.2 of the PDF at [https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old- versi...](https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old- versions.html?docId=66957)

Oh, and as of last month, Singapore has just thrown $10M behind a project to turn the "law as code" vision into open source software that you can clone off Github.

I've been researching computational law since 2015, and a picture of the future legal tech stack is coming together in my head: open-source, open- standards, laws and contracts drafted in a domain-specific language from the start; libraries of clauses, linters and interpreters and unit testers and theorem provers built into the IDE, that find bugs in contracts in real time as you edit; compilers to English and other languages; model-driven architectures that flow from the specification to the app.

Once that legal stack is downloadable and accessible to the geeks of the world, then, as Joshua Browder would say, DoNotPay a law firm thousands of dollars just to copy and paste a Word doc out of their library. The law firm is _not the customer_ \-- as Atrium proved, expensively.

To help move this stack out of my head and into Github, the SG government is funding the development of open-source software targeted to real-world use cases, for drafting rules and contracts in a DSL. They've approved a grant for my small team (hi, Alexis! <3) to hire people to make it happen. [https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese- singapo...](https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singaporean- startup-partners-with-singapore-management-university-to-make-computational- law-a-reality-software-is-eating-law/)

(Why Singapore? Fun fact: it's the only country in the world whose prime minister has degrees in mathematics and computer science.) [https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?...](https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?lang=en)

If you're in a position to move to Singapore (whenever air travel reboots) ... and have skills in obscure but powerful technologies (or want to gain those skills) ... and want to help design a language that could be the basis for the next iteration of the legal industry ... we're hiring: [https://computational.law/hiring](https://computational.law/hiring)

<comment><USER10> I can see the attraction in making rules/regulation as code. But there is a downside we should be cautious of. Making law into code doesn't necessarily make it more readable/understandable or clearer for humans. In fact, making it into code will make it scalable to add lots of rules (very prescriptive, not derivable from a set of core principles) making them hard to comprehend for anyone but a rules evaluation engine. Anyone who has implemented a business rules engine and operated it in a complex workflow domain (like say e-commerce or banking) knows what I'm talking about. Then, when the machine renders judgement, we will need technical engineers to debug/explain/interpret why the machine evaluated all the rules to this particular judgement. There will also be potential for modeling the legal context of a particular case incorrectly while feeding it to the machine which can make the machine render incorrect judgment. Now, how will you appeal this decision?

<comment><USER9> You're quite right. Garbage in, garbage out. And if the cost of generating garbage goes down, we're going to get a lot more of it! There are definite risks in misinterpretation and complexity and cruft. As Genesereth quoted:

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.

So, we will have be on our guard. The hope is that if the rules are open and machine-readable, we will be able to counter with software that sides with the user and helps to mount the sort of response that in the past was only available to corporations with very deep pockets.

One intriguing approach is to submit test cases: concrete scenarios, or traces of events, that should result in certain desired outcomes. A diverse range of people in different circumstances could be collected in a comprehensive test suite. If the contract/law passes the test suite, you're good! You can imagine two legislators from different parties with different constituents and concerns, each bringing their set of test cases; and when the negotiated compromise passes enough tests, they proceed, without ever actually reading the text of the bill, lol.

<comment><USER11> > If the contract/law passes the test suite, you're good!

Not necessarily, you risk the same sort of problems suffered by naïve statisticians who over-fit their data with ever more complicated models. This leads to erratic behaviour in real life and severe lack of predictability outside the range already covered by the data.

You need to run some kind of sensitivity analysis as well because the components used in the implementation (policemen, lawyers, auditors, traffic wardens, etc.) are not all of perfect quality. Think of an audio amplifier design, it looks wonderful on paper and works perfectly in the simulator. But fails spectacularly when built of real world components because each component is not quite exactly as specified. A sensitivity analysis can discover this by, for example, running the simulation multiple times with each component varied according to its expected quality (say +/\- 10% for resistors, +/\- 30 percent for transistor gain, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues, but who will actually do the political work to fight against it? Someone spent money to capture the regulations in the first place, through lobbying and campaign donations. Who will spend the money to lobby and donate for the cause of undoing that?

The "builders"? No, their focus and limited capital is spent on whatever it is they are working on.

The most logical choice would be the investor class who supports such work. After all, these regulations create legal risk (from lawsuits/fines/regulators) for the ventures they fund. It also makes employees more expensive (through higher housing/education/medical costs), thus requiring more investment just to get a venture going. Yet, why is there no real, funded, concerted effort against regulatory capture? Just essays and talk?

I suspect two potential reasons:

(1) Opening regulations would help all current and future ventures, not just an investor's own portfolio, so no single investor has an incentive to do it by them self.

(2) Such investors are typically wealthy, and spending money to tear down regulatory capture that other wealthy people already paid for would be... uncomfortable. Such spending could be seen as indirectly attacking friends, relatives, college classmates, etc... No one wants to be labeled a class traitor.

<comment><USER13> This is a great comment, and hopefully I could add some real life example around this, esp with 1) and 2).

Uber did this in Europe.

Uber pushed, fought and introduced gig-economy employment laws in every country it has operated in EU, specifically around taxi and for hire transport regulation. Uber employed a huge amount of legal and PR counsel to achieve this, with massive lobbying funding.

And what has happened? It's getting beaten to it's knees by new, mean competitors. Competitors that enjoyed all the same benefits without the millions invested.

<comment><USER14> Nobody want's a new McDonald's destroying their old status quo in their country. People don't want one-world-gov. They want disparate nations, that have charm and local uniqueness. Except that goes directly towards harmonizing international (trade) laws. If you want a lesson, check out how Lidl did in Norway when they challenged local chain stores.

<comment><USER15> The failure of Lidl in Norway due to vested interests is an argument _for_ one world government.

Maybe if we had one government we'd finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc. etc. Imagine if every country developed its own indigenous WiFi standard? How lovely, until you want to read your email.

Charm and uniqueness is great on a postcard, but not when you want to actually achieve anything IRL.

<comment><USER16> Indigenous solutions typically develop differently for a reason. Building standards in a wet humid climate prone to flooding differ from those in the desert because they have different needs: if you make a standard set of guidelines that applies universally, it will inherently need to be more complicated than the guidelines adapted for a specific scenario.

Part of the brilliance of the internet is the way things are layered; you can have all kinds of different solutions for different layers while keeping things interoperable. If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn't mean they can't connect.

While I understand the impulse to have some central body moderate unproductive standards wars, if you enforce overly strict standards by law you stagnate industries whether you're trying to capture them.

Just imagine how much time and effort would be wasted trying to get every software engineer to use the same programming language. Arguably it would lead to way less duplicated effort, but you're never going to get everyone to agree on all aspects of the language. And that's as it should be; people should have the freedom to chose what works best for them.

If we're smart and focus more on building base, opt in, very generic/low level infrastructure that can federate responsibility and adapt to differing higher level standards rather than getting everyone on the same set of high level standards, I think we're better off.

I'm not sure exactly what the regulatory equivalent of a tcp/ip layer would be, but some sort of very basic, fill in the blanks kind of regulatory template would be better than enforcing various discrete world standards.

<comment><USER15> Good points.

I think the regulatory equivalent of TCP/IP is probably some form federalism. There are many regional examples of this, to varying degrees. You want the minimum set of laws to provide the conditions for local human flourishing everywhere.

"If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn't mean they can't connect." This would be great IRL! All digital protocols could be reduced to one; but then IRL is also made of physics, so I guess you'd need one physical standard too (USB-C is our obvious candidate), and one harmonised set of radio frequencies etc. It's those physical properties that are hard to reduce to a virtualised layer.

Kind of impossible when it comes to driving on the wrong side of the road, unless you abstracted the interface in some kind of VR (so everyone is apparently driving however they please, while confirming to one physical standard).

<comment><USER17> Having worked in a lot of banks, I can appreciate the desire for standardization. But remove competing standards, and you will never innovate again. In any situation, whatever standard you prefer, it was originally created as a new-comer competing standard.

I think this perspective is very narrow minded, in the sense that it only really considers a very narrow category of problem. If you want regulations to be more effective, you need to bring the regulators closer to the people they're regulating, not further away from them. If that means people end up doing things differently, fine. It's better than having regulations the either work for nobody, or only a portion of all people. For an analogy, who would you rather be managed by, a manager with 4 direct reports, or a manager with 50 direct reports? (Or a manager with 7,500,000,000 direct reports...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the goal here? The American dream? Well, you need to be able to afford a home and children. People can't.

Why not? Because they aren't paid enough for the work they do. The money is being made, but it ends up at the top, and not even corporate tax is being paid with all the tax optimization routes.

So what do people do? They begin startups. Most of the time they're done by people who should even waste their time on it, because they haven't been trained to build and run a company. But guess what? It's the only way to "make it" and the "American dream".

Want to be taken care of properly? Pay RN more.

Want better education for people who can't afford? Pay teachers in community colleges more.

Want more R&D? Pay "smart" people more, instead of forcing them to try and do the startup.

Want affordable housing? Force big companies to have offices outside the big cities. Also, value housepricing at 20% of what they're worth not to destroy mortgages. Tax forgein owned housing. Tax owning houses beyond the first one.

Building is not the problem. Building is easy. You talk about robots... how is that gonna help "the american dream"? It's not.

The problem is financial and ownership disitrbution. Normal people stand no chance against tax routes, against their employers, against the government. They are slaves to all of that.

<comment><USER19> >Want more R&D? Pay "smart" people more, instead of forcing them to try and do the startup.

... having found that I can attack problems which are 10x harder in academia, as a lowly PhD student, than I was ever allowed to come close to _touching_ in industry, because I didn't have both a PhD _and_ my own company...

 _Yeah._ I would never claim I've done particularly great or world-changing research so far (all my conference papers get rejected, after all), but nonetheless, I definitely think I make more contribution to society overall working on, say, applying Bayesian deep learning to study individual differences in neuroimaging than, say, doing web apps for sports teams or embedded firmware for a product that gets canceled (my previous two jobs).

And I _definitely_ contribute more to society working on the derp larnin' for neuro-imaging than I did when I was unemployed and getting turned down for ML engineer jobs because I hadn't done enough ML before and the stars didn't align my way.

Arrange the money so that it pays to throw smart people at hard, useful problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was one of the best posts I've ever read. Thinking about printing it out and framing it. It's more inspirational than anything I've read, and it articulates the elephant-in-the-room problem we all know but aren't talking about.

No one is innovating anymore. Everyone copies each other. Even in the YC crowd, every other thing is a dumb CRUD app or AI snake oil project that has been rehashed since the 80s. Where's the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort. Just showing up is supposed to be a sufficient condition to reaping the rewards of growth. You would have thought the 2008 financial crisis would have put an end to this mentality, but it actually made it worse because now everyone who invested in _anything_ in 2009 is now a millionaire without having lifted a finger. Faith in the System restored. Why build anything when your survival doesn't depend on it--the System will take care of you automatically.

All you have to do is "get in"\--we see this in the heavy credentialism/careerist people. We are a culture that shows up to the race and starts celebrating at the start line. We are more interested in proving status with fake competition trophies (e.g. degrees, medals, CVs) than doing that which the status was meant to predict.

None of this happens when you're _actually_ on the frontier. In the late 1800s, America was really on the frontier. Large parts of this country had untapped natural resources. There was no shortage of mystery.

Now people believe that there are no new problems to solve. "Someone else is already working on that." This is demonstrably not true--otherwise we would all be living in post-scarcity Neptune colonies--yet everyone acts as though it is true.

People by and large do not work to fulfill their curiosity; they work to survive. They do the minimum to survive. In frontier eras like the late 1800s in America, curiosity and survival happen to align. The principal problem in all this is how to inject curiosity into a jaded populace who believes there is nothing new to discover or accomplish.

<comment><USER21> I believe we have reached a point where most people are in an equilibrium of comfort and desire, where the desire to innovate and do more, is perfectly balanced out by the present comforts we are able to enjoy.

People are so doped up on Netflix, cheap takeaway, porn etc. There is relative safety, lack of disease and war for the most part. People no longer desire to improve the world. It's about maximising the small pleasures for as long as possible and then dying.

America used to innovate, improve the world, improve our knowledge. Now it has stagnated. The populace is obese, lazy, and getting dumber.TV and porn were bad ideas.

<comment><USER22> This is the kind of response that comes from, and please excuse my language, someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.

There is barely a safety net. There is barely any institutional support for innovation. Accessing either is a competitive process that is purposely obfuscated to reduce costs. The downside involved in preparing for and executing on innovative ideas is potentially lethal for the individual, even if it might be incredibly advantageous for society for even one person to be successful.

If you want people to fly high, you start by putting a trampoline under them, not a trap pit of crocodiles. Things are as bad as they are because the people with the means to push us onward do not understand the problem.

<comment><USER23> It's not obvious to me your comment has more truth than the one you're replying to. Either argument could be made. Why the rude animus towards the original poster?

<comment><USER22> The parent argument has been made for going on 3 decades now and is the source of the austerity and institutional divestment that has proven unworkable at best, and disastrous at worst.

It's telling that a single f-bomb is interpreted as more rude than calling the American public - which is by far the most overworked workforce in the West and among such as far as the developed world as a whole is concerned - "lazy."

Reply to him next. See what he says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly.

> Is the problem capitalism? I'm with Nicholas Stern when he says that > capitalism is how we take care of people we don't know — all of these fields > are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for > capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are > served.

He argues that this is true, but then tries to make a central thesis that undercuts this declaration:

> The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things. The problem is > inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these > things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to > build these things, even if incumbents don't like it, even if only to force > the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to > build these things.

This overlooks the fact that Marc is in fact _one_ of these folks who has a profoundly outsized role in deciding what he _wants_. Like it or not, America follows in the moneyed aristocratic morals of the subjective theory of value. In some sense it is the function of concentrations of capital to _assign_ value to things in America. Therefore, folks in control of lots of capital (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz and other venture firms) and their investors have a huge input into what "we want" as a nation. And yet here he is arguing that he feels like there isn't a national desire for these things.

We don't have it because building these things requires long term investments and folks like Marc and his investors are _not interested in long term investments._ America's corporate leadership has pursued elastic labor forces with minimal training (and therefore minimal flexibiity), outsourced manufacturing (and therefore long lead times on domestic production) and minimal redundancy in infrastructure _because these rich folks think, plan and act on a quarterly calendar_. We don't build new homes because homeowners _like_ the value of their goods protected by intense scarcity. We don't compete with China because capital sees value in redundancy only with the framework of internal corporate prognostication, not as an actual net good when considered in a system

While many Americans like to pretend "capitalism" is synonymous with free market mechanics, that's actually false. Capitalism _is_ a dominant force in America's future and the folks with all the power to assign value have been clear: their value lies in quarterly profits. Capitalism means that market competition is reduced and capital concentrates under a small number of collaborating actors.

I agree with Marc's core tenant that "we have to want these things." But I want these things. Hell, we're _building_ grassroots infrastructure in my radio group because our capitalist-driven infrastructure is so antiquated we can't even do a software update to existing hardware without it taking 3 years and taking an entire flood warning system offline.

Marc and his investors have to want these things. They clearly don't. These things would have "taken care of strangers," perhaps, but folks like the people who invest in Marc's funds genuinely don't seem to believe they're worthwhile values. If you'll forgive the tired metaphor, the top 0.5% doesn't see value in these things so we don't have them. We even have some in that 0.5% paying incredible sums of money to run media org's who's entire purpose is to convince people they don't actually want their lives to be better!

<comment><USER25> _> This overlooks the fact that Marc is in fact one of these folks who has a profoundly outsized role in deciding what he wants._

He says what he wants, but then he expects someone else to build it. He's rich: if he wants these things, why doesn't he just pay to get them built? Sure, not all of them, but just pick one and pay to get it built.

But, as you point out, he's not interested in long term investments--and _that_ is the root of the problem. The very people who are the most suited to making long term investments--people who have enough wealth that they don't have to answer to anyone else's expectations for earnings, profits, whatever-- are incapable of making long term investments.

<comment><USER26> I doubt Marc has anywhere near enough capital to get these things done (by himself). 2 trillion is on a completely different order of magnitude.

That said, maybe this post is a call for help and the billionaires will unite?

<comment><USER27> He could call Harvard and donate a bunch of developers for a year to build that system which could educate a million 18 year olds. Harvard will certainly take his call.

He couldn't fund all the hyper efficient factories for the country, but he could build one.

<comment><USER28> Harvard could easily build that out of their own $40,000,000,000 endowment, if their first priority was actually education, rather than protecting their own prestige and the value of their credentials to the elites they mostly serve.

<comment><USER22> This is another impediment he didn't mention: a sort of regulatory capture working on the social level. Harvard's prestige begs the question of why people want to go there. None of the interested parties want to change that, because it's to their advantage. To provide a Harvard-level education to millions (not simply academically, but to open the lanes of opportunity in all ways Harvard provides) is to destroy Harvard. But then, one wonders what the utility of Harvard is to the average American.

<comment><USER29> I don't know if it would "destroy" Harvard, but it would definitely make prestige more "merit" based (merit being in quotes because its definition is highly contentious). If Harvard were catered to all students with capable ability and/or drive then we'd have a new class of highly paid professionals. The problem as I see it is with funding. Will the state by itself be able to uphold the funding that supports the infrastructure and academic resources researchers and students need to succeed? Those who were admitted to this merit-based system may contribute, but that leaves room for the incentive- based system that we have today

<comment><USER22> >If Harvard were catered to all students with capable ability and/or drive then we'd have a new class of highly paid professionals.

I doubt that.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140525060607/http://www.cepr.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140525060607/http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/a-college- degree-is-no-guarantee)

Trends that hit the black community tend to follow in the working class and, later, middle class and wealthy white communities, perhaps under different circumstances but ultimately similar in nature. Compare the crack/cocaine epidemic with the opioid epidemic, for example. While I support the expansion of elite education, I think it's naive to expect it to be a panacea. Someone still has to see enough value in these grads to hire an order to two magnitude mire highly-paid professionals than there were before. Save some other concurrent intervention, what's more likely is that you'll have more highly- educated underemployed workers than ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The author is a VC who almost exclusively funds software-based businesses where "build" generally refers to intangibles and businesses based on intangibles. He refers to Western/American effectiveness ("we") in building computers, including smartphones. His famous quote, displayed prominently on his website, is "Software is eating the world."

However, strangely, this post from him calls for building tangible assets, not software. Perhaps some of the funding directed at software can now be directed to businesses whose primary assets are tangible. What do you think.

Consider all the money and willingness to invest that has been directed toward software-based businesses. What if more of that investment capital had gone to non-software-based endeavours that America chose _not_ to build while Silicon Valley VC like Andreeson Horowitz were busy directing focus to software.

It seems to me that his firm could be complicit in a general unwillingness in America to build tangible things. If I was someone following his philosophies over the past few decades, I would be less inclined to invest, or promote investment, in the types of "traditional" business required to build the things he calls for in this post.

</comment><comment><USER31> > We don't have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, > amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don't have enough > ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don't have enough > surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York > City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical > gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

This passage is followed by a long list of things we urgently need but don't have in America, from a great educational system to a great healthcare system. I agree 100% with that list of things and the urgent need for them. I'm also happy to see this on the front page of HN!

> The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things. The problem is > inertia.

"Lack of desire" and "inertia" are surely NOT the root of the problem. All of us already want all those good things.

The root of the problem, I think, is that during normal times people and companies have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust (i.e., inefficient/redundant) infrastructure that everyone agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly diffuse, or might not be recouped until after everyone today is dead.

For example, any company that during normal times heroically decides to make the investments necessary to survive rare events like a global pandemic or world war will quickly go out of business as more nimble competitors sidestep all those costs. Financially it makes more sense for the company "temporarily to ignore" the possibility of such rare events in the future so it can remain competitive today.

No amount of exhortation will change _that_.

<comment><USER25> _> during normal times people and companies have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust (i.e., inefficient/redundant) infrastructure that everyone agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly diffuse, or might not be recouped until after everyone today is dead._

And who is in the best position to overcome this barrier and invest in stuff like this anyway? Someone like Marc Andreessen, who as a lot of wealth he can invest in anything he wants, without having to answer to anyone else about financial returns. If he and everyone else in his position did what Bill Gates is doing with malaria, and just picked one of the problems he lists and threw money at it until it was fixed, how many of those problems could be fixed? So why he Andreessen writing an article complaining about these problems, instead of just going and fixing one of them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.

This is like saying we need to want to end poverty more than we want to prevent ending poverty. No one is for poverty, but very few people are against it enough to give up their money, power, or time. We need to want these things enough to make _sacrifices_

> We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, > and healthcare

Most of the problems he mentions stem from government. Our government is legacy software and the author is right that lodged deep within the spaghetti code are leeches who benefit from the current system and fight against change. But they aren't the biggest problem...

Billions of dollars are spent lobbying and the % of that money that is spent pushing for causes like better healthcare or education for everyone is infinitesimally small compared to what's spent lobbying for changes that'll benefit a few at the expense of the many. But this isn't the biggest problem either...

The problem is that the infrastructure that powers our democracy -- the stuff and rules that exist to enable the people to _exercise_ their authority -- is eroding. I asked my grandparents if people always felt like their government was incompetent. To my surprise, they said that when they were young most Americans were proud of the government.

What's the solution? The idea of democracy isn't broken, but our current implementation is. We need an upgraded democracy the way Wikipedia upgraded our old encyclopedias or Amazon upgraded commerce. These aren't new ideas, they're simply new implementations using new tools. Technology is transforming everything around us but our government is stuck in 1776.

You know what the right and left have in common? We all know things could and should be better, but they aren't. Right now we're pointing fingers at the other side, but eventually we'll realize the machine is broken. When enough people feel this way, change will come, and it will come from the bottom up. But it's not as simple as just wanting change as Marc suggests...

First, people need to get angry enough to do something. In retrospect, change seems obvious, but looking forward it's risky. People have to lose a lot in order to put their time, money, and future on the line to fight for something that might not work, and this is hardest for the people who are the worst off in society and most need change to happen.

Second, people will vote for increasingly extreme candidates to try and change the system from within. This will result in incremental change, but it won't reform the system.

Third, a new system will emerge in parallel to our current government. If history is any predictor of the future, this is almost guaranteed to happen eventually. I have no idea what the new system will look like or when it'll emerge, but _this_ is the type of thing we need to build. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone is building it already and we just haven't realized it yet.

<comment><USER22> Third, non-voting legislative house. 1 member for every 3500 citizens, geography agnostic; get 3499 of other interested citizens together and elect one of you to represent the group, for whatever policies or interests you care for. Members of this body are the only people who are allowed to meet with the Senate during four annual 6-week periods of sequestration. Outside lobbying by non-individuals is banned. Conversely, "legislative marketing" to the public by individually-controlled entities is banned.

In this way, the arms-length nature of the Senate and the existence of a body close to the public are restored, while disrupting the influence of entrenched, established interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm quite sympathetic to a lot of what's in that blog post but... A16Z directly invests gobs of capital, and, indirectly, shapes the outlook of other VCs who follow their investment decisions, and they plow way more money into software/bitcoin than physical companies. Why? Because they are really good at what they do, and they realize that building physical stuff is really hard, and they'd rather invest in areas that have better returns.

I remember during the Theranos saga, Marc Andreessen kept defending Elizabeth Holmes over and over (he deleted most of those tweets unfortunately) - yet he was smart enough to not put any of his own or A16Z's money into Theranos. Words are cheap: let's see A16Z actually lead the way into investing in physical goods before we praise them too much.

<comment><USER34> That's a valid criticism and something that ran through my mind when reading the article. But keep in mind that there's orders of magnitude difference in what they invest vs. the federal government.

According to these 2 articles, it could be around THREE orders of magnitude -- ~4 billion in for them in 2014 vs. ~4 trillion for the federal government.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz)

[https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53624](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53624)

One way to think about it is that they could plow 100% of their money into physical infrastructure, and come up with something like half an aircraft carrier ($8.5 billion according to this article):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz- class_aircraft_carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz- class_aircraft_carrier)

\-----

Looking around a bit more, all of venture capital combined is something like $100 B / year. Which is less than 20% of what's spent by the military in a year, leaving aside all the other federal programs that could produce physical infrastructure.

Apparently, all of VC is also less than half the interest that the federal govt pays on its debt...

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture- capital-a...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital- amount-invested-in-the-united-states-since-1995/)

<comment><USER35> With so much money earmarked for the military, how absurd would it be to create a "health force" alongside the Space Force?

<comment><USER36> The US spends about 600 billion on the military and about a trillion on Medicare and health.

[https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal- bud...](https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal- budget-101/spending/)

<comment><USER37> That trillion in Medicare is due extremely overpriced supplies that in any other develop country would be exponentially cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm in favor of building things.

But we build in response to demand. Once people need more of something (e.g. PPE), production ramps up. That effect has been in place and has worked quite well for thousands of years. It doesn't require any policy or government, or even a new social movement, it's just an emergent property of humans being free.

You might argue that we could be smarter, and that we should build excess PPE before the demand hits just in case. This is reasonable to an extent, but probably to less of an extent than you think. The problem is that there are dozens of possible scenarios we should prepare for, and we can't know ahead of time which one is going to strike next. We have to prepare for them all: nuclear bunkers, asteroid deflection, global warming mitigation, sea walls, military capacity, etc, etc. Giving the competition among possible future disasters, it is often wiser to KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY (in capitals, because that is my main point) so you can respond to any of them after they eventuate, not before. This requires that we have the capacity to ramp up production quickly. That's not always a given, so I'm in favor of governmental action to ensure we have "stragetic capacity" to ramp up anything we might desperately need. But I'm not in favor of just building lots of things that we _might_ need.

<comment><USER39> I've spent the last month setting up a company to build PPEs, so I hope to bring an interesting perspective here.

Most importantly: production ramps slowly because of the implications of structural organization.

1\. From what I can tell, our supply chains are carefully tuned for efficient output of known, predictable, quantities

2\. If you want to suddenly double, triple, or 10x production, it isn't easy: the reconfiguration necessary is hard. Building new injection molds is hard, the surrounding transport chains are hard.

3\. In light of those two facts, our existing manufacturing infrastructure is wholly unequipped to change or to help.

This is exactly where a strategic, savvy reserve would make a huge difference.

You can see this in the flurry of press releases from three weeks ago which have largely turned into nothing. Bupkis.

By contrast, my small, scrappy, and deeply dedicated team of volunteers has designed, prototyped, iterated, refined, and is now _shipping_ emergency PPE in quantity.

Go visit [https://maskson.org](https://maskson.org)

We're ramping up to 2000 masks shipped a day.

That's going to take $100k/day in capital: [http://gofundme.com/f/maskson](http://gofundme.com/f/maskson)

<comment><USER40> I think power grids have a kind of similar problem, super oversimplifying here because this isn't my area: Baseload power plants (e.g. coal) are large and comparatively efficient, but they need to be kept running continuously, and they take a long time to restart. Other types of plants (e.g. natural gas) can start and stop more quickly to meet surges in demand, but they aren't as efficient overall. In order to keep the second type of plant available, but not constantly running, there's a whole separate contracts market for short- notice capacity. What could such a market look like for e.g. hospital equipment capacity contracts? Food growing capacity?

<comment><USER41> Your analogy with the energy market is quite good, the only thing I would address is that coal plants aren't more energy efficient than gas plants (roughly 40% and 50%, respectively). The reason coal plants provide the base load is that the raw material, coal, is cheaper than gas. However, with falling oil and gas prices this might change in the 'near' future.

The reason the US military (among others) buys so much equipment even during relatively peaceful periods is to keep alive the ability to produce massive amounts of tanks etc. whenever they really _do_ need them. So just not outsourcing these kind of essential goods to foreign nations might be already a great leap in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, > or city was prepared

This is silly. There are clear differences in response. Here's just one example:

21 Jan - The city department of public health activates its operations center to prepare for a potential outbreak. 28 Jan - The city activates its emergency operations center. 25 Feb - The city formally declares a state of emergency to prepare for an upcoming outbreak. 5 Mar - The city confirms its first case of COVID-19. 17 Mar - Shelter in place order implemented.

This was a great timeline. And it comes from the local jurisdiction so many here love to hate: San Francisco.

There are absolutely lessons we should be drawing from this pandemic. And one of them is that the political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub are putting your own lives and those of every vulnerable person you know because of that ideology. And those that want functional government aren't.

I'm all for more radical solutions too. But if you aren't going to learn the lessons of the present you're in a shockingly bad place to tell anyone what's right for the future.

Also, we need to tone down the white supremacy and learn some lessons from the Asian governments who did well here too. My search space for good ideas isn't confined to "western governments" and neither should that confine anyone else's.

<comment><USER43> NYC and SF have roughly similar sized city budgets when measured on a per capita basis and they had _wildly_ different responses to Coronavirus. Whatever it was that causes such different responses, I don't think it was "political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub."

<comment><USER19> Yeah, it's fair to point out that both New York and San Francisco are thoroughly Democratic in their politics, _and yet_ responded very differently to the crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> >Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings.

This is simply not true. In Australia, New Zealand, and several European countries institutions did act fast enough and did manage to flatten the curve. Go take a look at Australia's epi curve [0]. It is flat. Our case load has peaked, there are less Australians in hospital with Covid19 today than a week ago. There is reason to believe at least some Australian states will be completely free of Covid19 within 2 weeks.

Some might argue that this is because of the lucky isolation of Australia. But a similar thing can be seen in South Korea, and even more impressive results in Taiwan. Institutions can solve this. Even, gasp, Western ones. If Covid19 is a test of the quality of our institutions, the USA has failed and Australasia has passed.

0\. [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases- dat...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-data-reveals- how-covid-19-spreads-in-australia/12060704)

<comment><USER45> I think a lot of Americans want to believe that there was no other choice and that every other country is in the same boat. The fact is that this was an utter failure. With better preparation, communication and leadership, there didn't need to be an economic shutdown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like the sentiment. I like the impassioned tone and the call to action.

I'm sitting here thinking: where can I go to help run some machines, lathes, 3D printers, CNC, etc? How can I roll up my sleeve and help build what's needed in these times? How can I help move humanity forward through this pandemic and climate change?

In these times I often turn to the wisdom of Buckminster Fuller, who was more prescient about these times 50 years ago than most contemporary leaders:

> Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to > our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, > clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what > we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all > humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it > is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to > the final moment.

In so much of what is discussed, here, on HackerNews, and elsewhere, people express their solutions. What does it take for us to build and mobilize to bring those solutions to fruition? Why are we spending so much time spinning our wheels, our time and attention elsewhere, distracting ourselves, and putting our heads in the sand when problems need to be solved? Are the barriers political, educational, financial, etc? What systemic changes can be made if the current system is not working?

<comment><USER47> Thanks for the Buckminster Fuller reference! Such an underrated thinker.

I hate being overly cynical, but I think that there is a simple answer that can be found by looking at who's incentivized to _not_ make these systemic changes.

To take that further, there's a subset of that group that is incentivized to _actively prevent_ such systemic change.

It just so happens that those 2 groups wield the most authority, power, and influence.

So, that leaves me with a view that some may call 'dystopian', but I consider 'hopeful':

Only a massive revolution can change this system.

<comment><USER46> I try not to be too cynical, especially when the article was such a call to action, but I am often prone to it as well.

I feel like I do live a life of privilege and as such I must try to exercise that privilege in ways that won't contribute to the systemic problems as best I can--that I don't contribute to a loss of rights, nor a loss of our essential ecosystems. I do my best not to empower those who wield their power and influence to the detriment of others.

When it comes to the internet, I try to keep McLuhan in mind: > Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> _> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here's a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There's an excellent chance I'll agree with you._

What we need to build is the _capacity_ to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.

For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.

Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.

One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.

Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for _exactly this crisis_. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.

None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.

<comment><USER49> Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?

<comment><USER48> Here's one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the past 100 years.

That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.

<comment><USER49> I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight.

1\. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving.

2\. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure out in 2020, are the pieces of cloth on my face help to fight the virus or not? Seems it's still up for discussion.

3\. Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff.

So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"? I still not getting it.

<comment><USER50> > _Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and > maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff_

That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.

Where did the foundational ingredients for each of those things come from? Computers, networks, video compression, touchscreens, materials, ... heck, even pagerank, and a large fraction of the breakthroughs in ML/AI (till very recently) have come from academia -- through publicly funded research. Companies are very good at solving the "last mile" to apply technologies towards making products, but don't typically have the vision or the wherewithal to pursue deeper innovations.

<comment><USER51> Public funds for research is a tiny fraction of the funds that the government spends. There are trillions wasted elsewhere that shows that overall it is terrible with spending money productively.

<comment><USER52> All the same, the reason you have maps on your smartphone can be traced to GPS satellites and ultimately the space program itself, funded by the government.

Yeah yeah, SpaceX exists now, decades after all the very tough and very expensive initial work.

<comment><USER51> Nobody is denying that. The point is that the government is not lacking for funding but poorly spending the money it already has.

Imagine how much more we could have now if the space program budget was more than a fraction of a percent. That won't be fixed by just giving more money to the govt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions for buildings. People do want them. VCs, less so, unless it's as high margin as a photo sharing app, destructive and lucrative as consumable businesses like Kurig, etc.

Consumers don't know what they want until the possibilities are presented to them. VCs are literally the gate keepers of much innovative possibilty at the early phases of enterprises. It's not an issue with want, it's that making a quick buck for VCs doesn't come from capital intensive, long ROI cycle businesses. Other asset classes may be better about this but they tend to participate at less innovative stages.

<comment><USER54> > I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions

Can you explain what it is you do without copying and pasting a line from your pitch deck? This sentence could literally mean any of at least a dozen completely different things.

<comment><USER53> Sure. Tbh, I didn't really want this comment to be an opportunity to pitch my company or make it too specific about our solution as there are many different types of solutions, categories and problems that could use innovation capital that are second in line.

flair.co is us.

We have taken money from investors, those that aren't afraid of energy problems, that aren't afraid of energy efficiency, and that invest in meaningful problems (and some others too, but much better portfolio mixes than most). Things are (minus covid 19) changing. We are already a key transitional electrification solution, we are solving peak problems on the grid, and we are poised through a few partnerships to redefine home energy consumption in North American homes. I'm adding that for context as our website doesn't publicly lay that out.

All that said, I'm so thankful for the investors that we do have. They listened to our larger vision from the get go, focus on meaningful problems, and put their money where their mouth is. Now that we are realizing this vision, they will realize returns and leadership ROI as this particular blog post fades into the past.

<comment><USER55> Your post still reads like marketing-speak — it is not immediately clear how you differ from other home builders.

Anyway, I'm not really sure the point of your criticism of VCs. That you eventually found investors is good, but your grouse is that you don't have prominent venture capitalists among your investors?

Venture Capital, by definition, has a different appetite for risk than private equity for instance, so it is understandable why your idea may not have been interesting to them.

Why? Because it is inherent in their name: _venture_ , noun; 'a risky or daring journey or undertaking'. Building an energy efficient home is an innovative undertaking, but I'm sure many will agree it hardly qualifies as _risky_ the way social-oriented startups like GitHub, Slack, Pinterest were risky before they matured into going concerns. Social businesses live and die by the power of network effects, so those startups had no choice but to seek out _venture funding_ to fuel their hockey-stick growth and in exchange they promised their VCs high returns.

Home building OTOH may not benefit from seeking out _venture funding_ compared to _traditional funding_ since the risks of construction are pretty well understood. Also, there are no network effects to ride on to massive growth, as is abundantly clear from the WeWork story.

That's a summary of the purpose of VC. In practice, the fact that VCs herd towards funding the next big cat video sharing app that would surpass TikTok is a different story. More of a failure of imagination of the VC class as a group.

<comment><USER53> We are not home builders and our site seems like it makes it pretty clear what our consumer offering is. I'm not advocating for home builders to take VC money although there are plenty of construction tech companies with unique ideas that have taken VC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The article chalks it up to a lack of desire, but that seems completely wrong to me.

The sad truth is that building yet another addictive and attention-grabbing way to push ads into people's faces pays the bills. Doing the right thing does not, or at least not in America.

As a German, it took me a while to figure out how business in the US works, but basically everyone only treats things listed next to a monetary amount in the balance sheet as real. As a result, a concept like "for the good of society" does not exist for most CEOs.

There is plenty of well-educated and well-meaning young people happy to build a better future. They certainly had the desire to do that when they started working.

The real question is how to make it financially viable for them to do the building.

<comment><USER57> You're right, America has long given up the notion of what is "for the good of society" in favor of making money. Walking around SF (until recently) meant literally seeing both millionaires and people defecating in the street. It's extreme.

Marc wants to know how to use capitalism and growth (building) to overcome this, when the best outcome might be just realizing how broken capitalism in America is.

<comment><USER58> There exist a culture of people who are happy sleeping outside and living on the streets. Even if all the homeless who don't want to live on the street have a bed, there will be street people. It's a lifestyle preference where the weather is nice, like beach bums.

<comment><USER56> I certainly enjoyed the time when me and my friends slept outside on a beach :) but my criticism of the article isn't so much that people make bad choices, but instead that some choices are blocked for financial reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I expect my reply to be buried in the flood of others, but I enjoyed the essay because of the various responses it provokes internally:

1\. Optimistic response.

Right on! More influential VCs need to beat the drum of rebuilding the American Dream and the manufacturing base in spite of there being less potential return than shoveling more money into ad tech. We clearly have the talent to build things again, what we need to work on now is the incentives for talented people to take long term risks instead of joining a FAANG or a hedge fund.

2\. Cynical response.

The American Dream has absolutely been crushed. We need triage in the short term, not thought leaders writing about the wonderful opportunities ahead of us in rebuilding after the COVID crisis subsides. Those sitting on large amounts of capital should make mass donations to things like food banks across the country because there is a massive risk of millions of people falling into long term poverty in the immediate future. The short term must be about helping those in desperate need. Long term planning can come later.

3\. Response as a father

I hope others read this essay and get inspired about taking more risks in building a better future. As for me, I'm a sole provider for my family and must focus my career on making enough money to support those that depend on me.

I could go on, but you get the idea. A good essay is thought provoking in spite of bits and pieces being easily criticizable.

<comment><USER60> Here Here! We need more reasonable responses from someone not living in the SV bubble putting on a front.

I swear, sometimes I feel like the VCs are stupid enough to be very Marie Antoinette about their monologuing. As if stating the obvious and doing nothing about it helps anyone or anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ok, assume I'm bought into this idea - where would I even begin?

What are some companies working on these kind of fundamental building things problems? I know of the Boring Company, though haven't really heard anything from them since the flamethrowers a few years back. Sidewalk labs was doing some cool things in Toronto, but I think they've been running into big regulatory issues too and it one point it sounded like their plans were completely on hold. The YC New Cities idea sounded intriguing, but as far as I know they never talked about a single thing to come out of that program and it's now been shut down.

I really haven't heard of very many companies at all doing these kinds of things (which is Marc's whole point), and the ones that I have been casually following, I check back 5 years later and they don't seem to have made any tangible progress. Is there just no way to iterate quickly at all in the physical world?

Then of course there would be the challenge of trying to actually get a job at one of these places, I'm not sure what experience would even be required for this kind of work. Maybe a Civil or Mechanical Engineering degree? As a software developer I'm not sure how I'd even get my foot in the door.

I guess that would leave trying to start something myself, but there too I really have no clue where to even begin. It doesn't seem like you can just start tinkering on construction innovations with minimal upfront investment on your nights and weekends like you can with building an app. On this front someone like Marc Andreesen could offer a ton of advice, I'd love to see him follow up on this post with more thoughts about this. Or even announce a program to fund new companies focused on this type of fundamental building.

Anyway, I'd be really curious to hear if anyone knows of either 1. more examples of companies working these spaces to look into or 2. resources to even just learn more about the problem space and which areas might be ripe for innovation.

<comment><USER62> If you're actually set on the ideas laid out there, _don 't join a pre- existing company_. Find a domain you're passionate about advancing, learn what you need to validate your hypothesis on improvement, then do what you need to do to advance it. If you don't have any passion about whatever you'd be doing, there's not really any point; the world doesn't advance because of people who don't care about what they're doing. Those people make a whole bunch of money, though.

<comment><USER63> The parent comment is asking for tractable ways for a person to help improve things. Starting a company is not tractable for almost anyone. If you have kids, are poor, etc, you need some form of income. If you don't fit the right mold, you're unlikely to get VCs to invest in you.

Starting a company is not a feasible option for most people, and the average company fails and ends up causing nothing but harm for all involved (in the form of lost years of their life they could be doing something that didn't fail so).

Your answer amounts to "you can't do anything. It's impossible unless you're so privileged or already independently wealthy that you can start a company".

Your answer sounds like "Well, Bill Gates made the Bill Gates foundation, just make your own research institution".

<comment><USER62> A software engineer _is_ privileged. You're acting as if he or she was a fast- food worker. If you want to actually change things, you've _got_ to use what privilege you have to advance things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Well, the thing about building is that when a people achieve comfort and are well-fed and happy, there's very little incentive to build. Countries get old. They get middle-aged and a little tired or complacent.

It really does happen. The question is how you keep on renewing a country and a people when things are going "just fine".

There is really something to the idea that strife / disaster / starting with nothing causes you to yearn to be better and invest in things that you wouldn't do when you've already made it. You raise kids in wealth and they rarely have the same drive as their up-from-bootstraps parents. And maybe nature's checks-and-balances on this is that eventually those people who struggled through adversity and built things get comfortable. They stop wanting to invest, and instead want to extract. It gets hard to get people to be willing to sacrifice like they did when they were young.

The USA has already made it. In its own mind. So most people are not desperate to have high taxes, high effort, low potential of immediate reward -- the kind of thing that builds things that last beyond your children.

Now it's either 15% returns or it's not worth it. Or vote out anyone who proposes something that costs a lot. And only when we see other countries whose people had to struggle from nothing do we realize that standing still sometimes equals going backwards in the global race. It's how you end up landing at La Guardia, trying to take a subway, and wondering how your capital of prosperity could have gotten so bad without anyone noticing.

I don't know how exactly to incentivize a contented culture to be willing to sacrifice. I am sure, though, that social media and polarization and targeted outrage of special interests against any potential idea doesn't help. It's a real puzzle how we're going to get out of this funk and not be passed on the highway by lots of others.

<comment><USER65> Best response in this entire thread imo.

And I have yet to hear from pmarca or anyone else an answer to this puzzle that is even slightly convincing.

Which gives me pause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> There are two problems: rapidly ballooning income and wealth inequality, and ladder pulling. That explains everything. Why are schools bad? Because we disproportionally fund schools for rich people's kids, and there isn't money or regulatory freedom to innovate there. Why is transportation bad? Because rich people have drivers and private jets, and there isn't money or regulatory freedom to innovate there. Etc etc etc.

Until a16z starts investing seriously in lobbying to end federal corruption, establish a far more progressive tax code (that also considers wealth) and to aggressively prosecute monopolies, I have to assume they're just greenwashing.

<comment><USER67> > Because we disproportionally fund schools for rich people's kids

I was under the impression that such kids disproportionately went to private school. With a some exceptions (disability programs, ...), private schools don't receive funding from the state.

That is to say, taxes don't disproportionately fund schools for rich people's kids.

Many of these schools are better funded than public schools but that funding isn't through tax dollars.

<comment><USER66> There are a lot of factors, but AFAIK the main dynamics are:

\- We primarily fund schools through states (federal funding is < 10% on average)

\- States are largely funded via regressive taxes (like sales and property taxes)

\- Until Trump's tax law this was all deductible from federal taxes. Now it's just property taxes and it's limited to $10k (which is pretty high, we're talking a $333k property w/ 3% property tax)

So effectively what happens is everyone pays a flat tax to fund schools, then people wealthy enough to pay income or capital gains taxes get their school payments subsidized by the federal government.

It's also important to note that many private schools are religious and pay no taxes at all. They also receive lots of federal benefits via federally funded and run intermediary organizations. Finally, charitable giving to religious organizations (including schools) is tax deductible.

The effect of all this is a huge education subsidy for high income earners and the wealthy. Couple this with the total lack of redistributive policies for educational funding, and you get what NPR calls "a money problem" [1].

And if education is the silver bullet, what we're counting on to lift people out of poverty, and what we point to when we talk about "equal opportunity", then the future looks dim indeed.

[1]: [https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas- school...](https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools-have- a-money-problem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Definitely feels like an inflection point. With all of the rush to return to "normal", I've been thinking about a lot of the ways in which "normal" is pretty busted. And yes, many of us are fortunate to live in this point in history.

But a lot of people aren't so fortunate, and I don't know if those gaps have ever been quite so apparent for our generation.

Being really sick over the past month has definitely led to a lot of reflection. There's a burning desire to make every day count in a way I've never felt before. Closest thing being the birth of my kids.

I've posted this before, but this essay reminds me of a great _West Wing_ exchange with Chief of Staff Leo McGary:

Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.

Josh Lyman: The personal computer...?

Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?

</comment><comment><USER69> Seriously, whilst I agree, what can I do about it.

I can't raise the capital to start any business that could challenge these things. I work too many hours to sustain my family to do anything serious as a side project.

I can't find anywhere more progressive to work than where I am, if I could I would move. I have a set of skills which seem to match what Marc wants, yet I earn less than the sales and marketing people.

I can't vote for a political party that wants these things because they don't exist, and couldn't exist in the UK without a massive benefactor.

All I can contribute is an upvote to your article. If someone would buy me a house for my family, and enough cash to run it I would join this crusade. Until then, just an upvote.

<comment><USER70> Learn a new skill that allows you to build something that is meaningful to you.

If you give up, you've already lost.

<comment><USER71> Working more is not a guarantee to becoming wealthier or living a better life.

And "learning a new skill" can take an interminable amount of time. Leisure time that we have less and less of as our commute get longer, due to housing costs, and as our jobs cut more and more jobs and put more and more work on individual workers.

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" We need to build the boots first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> > ... The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop > rapidly in price. The things we don't, like housing, schools, and hospitals, > skyrocket in price. What's the American dream? The opportunity to have a > home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the > rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to > make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do > that is to build.

What if building in itself _isn 't_ the answer to increasing affordability and ensuring supply of things that matter? What if incentives are the key?

Things the author says drop rapidly in price:

\- computers

\- TVs

Things the author says skyrocket in price:

\- housing

\- schools

\- hospitals

The former group includes small-ticket items that are often bought with "cash." These are also items with an inherently low regulatory burden.

The latter group includes big-ticket items bought on credit, or paid for by someone else (health insurer). Often, there's a government backstop involved. And these industries have a very heavy regulatory burden.

What if the key to making necessities like housing and education more affordable was to get the federal government out of the business of guaranteeing loans and backstopping reckless investors?

<comment><USER73> We don't build TV's and computers. Other countries do.

We do build hospitals/housing/schools. Maybe if we imported slave labor like say, Dubai, it'd be cheaper to build things.

<comment><USER74> Are you claiming that most of the cost in building housing is in labour costs?

At least in places with housing shortages, like the Bay Area and NYC, it seems to me that the high costs comes from the government slowing down (or refusing to allow) new housing construction.

I think a similar problem is evident in healthcare, with certificate of need laws and AMA's restrictions on number of doctors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > Why shouldn't regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?

Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution.

Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?

<comment><USER7> Harvard is subsidized by the federal government and the American taxpayer several ways. It benefits from federal student loan programs. It receives federal research grants. It is allowed to be a tax-exempt institution. And it is allowed to own a tax-exempt endowment. Normal private institutions in America have none of those.

<comment><USER76> > _It benefits from federal student loan programs._

If by "normal private institutions" you mean companies, sure, that's true. But normal private _educational_ institutions absolutely benefit from this and other similar programs. The University of Phoenix, for instance, heavily recruits GI Bill-eligible students, and their right to do so was defended by Republican US senators.

> _It receives federal research grants._

You can do this as a private company just fine. SBIR is a great example. I worked at a startup that got federal research grants less than a year after being formed.

> _It is allowed to be a tax-exempt institution. And it is allowed to own a > tax-exempt endowment._

These are common for normal _non-profit_ institutions in America and are in no way specific to Harvard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Marc makes a lot of sense but his thoughts come out a bit too simplistic. Yes we deffo need to build (in a sustainable way). But what's holding us back isn't our technical capability. It's the fact that we need creative destruction.

To build those fast trains, we may need to do it over people's houses. To build safe nuclear plants, some may need to fail. Like SpaceX failures before they get it right.

We have a refactoring problem. To see the results, it could take decades. The demand is there but the power isn't even in the hands of government. It's by the people who own corporations and lobbyists, it's by the private equity folks and the bankers who are over leveraged. They are very happy with current system of seeking rent from their monopolies.

Also we aren't as organized. China can get shit done. I'm willing to make a bet that by 2030, China will have a higher GDP than US. China knows how to build.

</comment><comment><USER78> "Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation."

I stopped reading here. I thought this (HN) was a discussion board of thoughts outside the political realm. But this is clearly a political statement begging for a deeply partisan response. Or, worse, a gross misunderstanding of the last century of political history which contributes gravely to an incorrect recollection of all that has unfolded. In effect establishing a deeply political conclusion to the benefit of one specific party at the cost of another.

</comment><comment><USER79> > _But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, > or city was prepared_

This is absolutely untrue. What Americans mean about "the West" is the US and the UK. And indeed those two countries reacted absurdly and fared and will continue to fare bad. Many countries in Europe are in the same situation (including France, where I'm from).

But one country did and still does very well: Germany. One of the most urgent tasks should be to understand what they did that worked so well.

<comment><USER80> A charitable read would mean that no Western country was able to contain the virus without dramatic action such as shutting the entire country down, vs. the two examples in the East, Taiwan and South Korea, who have been able to keep their countries moving.

And it's a really stark contrast: I remember reading about the Taiwanese man who was fined a bunch of money for violating quarantine. What caught my eye, however, was that he was fined for going to a nightclub. During the height of this, Taiwan hadn't even closed their nightclubs, one of the first places I would think you could and should shutdown.

Germany may have done a good job, but I would love to live in a country right now we I could eat at a restaurant and go to the gym throughout the whole crisis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Living in New Jersey, gives me a front row view of crumbling America. I grew up in India and have no illusions of American infrastructure being third world standards. I'm taking about houses people live. I've been trying to buy a house I like for past 4 years. I've been to open houses in many small towns here. Town after town, I see 60, 80 even 100 years old houses, that are beyond repair. They all sell at upwards of 400K. I talked to realtors about new houses. They said people are afraid to repair or rebuild houses. If you rebuild your house from ground up, the town would reassess their property taxes and often charge 1000 to 1500 dollars a month of a medium sized family home. My friends in India earning much less than me live in far better and newer houses these days.

I think it's the lack of political will in America to make our lives better. You let your politicians (especially at local level) confine you to essentially urban slums rather than let you build a dignified life with your hard earned money.

</comment><comment><USER82> It's great to see this passion and sentiment. I wholeheartedly agree.

In my opinion, the deficiencies that the pandemic is unmasking in the american system need a political solution and change.

Looking for heroic activism isn't going to fix the systemic issues.

 _The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model!_

Look to the European democracies. They have a lot of what is missing here. They are more socially oriented, the state taking care of it's citizens.

Look to Germany's healthcare system. It's regulated, but works well for everyone.

<comment><USER83> I don't think there is evidence of European governments being any more competent during this pandemic.

<comment><USER82> Certainly not all of them, but the German healthcare system has dealt extremely well. There is plenty of testing capacity, and plenty of ICU beds. Thanks to century old unified health insurance laws.

Edit: Otto von Bismarck actually instituted the health insurance system of Germany, certainly not a socialist!

<comment><USER84> The republican stronghold of Texas has one of the lowest covid deaths per capita in the United States, better than even California (which is doing relatively well). Deaths per capita at 16/million is lower than almost anywhere in Western Europe.

It's not obvious to me at all you can make a political judgement from covid19.

<comment><USER66> It's a little more obvious if you compare places with equal exposure (numbers of European and Asian travelers) and density.

<comment><USER84> Once you drop the exceptional case of the NY metro area, not really.

What makes Washington, Illinois, and Michigan so bad compared to Texas, Virginia or California?

<comment><USER66> California was hit early but acted very quickly and effectively. They're also pretty wealthy so they could get equipment and supplies before there was really a rush.

Texas and Virginia had the benefit of getting hit when most people were taking this seriously (i.e. they didn't want to become NYC). You also have to consider public transportation use which is way higher in places like Seattle and Chicago than it is in Dallas, Houston, etc.

So again it's mostly about exposure: density, travelers, being in contact with travelers, being in contact with people who've been in contact with travelers, etc. How quickly shelter in place was ordered (getting a testing system set up would also have worked but you have to act even faster and spend upfront money, which of course we were never going to do) has a direct effect in exposure. And then it's all about how well you get supplies to treat the infected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> It seems a bit too easy to challenge the left to show that the public sector can do amazing things ... when the public sector doesn't have the freedom of action we've given to the private sector, and the left isn't even in control of it right now. "Come on, let's fight, you with your hands tied, and see who's better." Cheap shot, Marc.

Point the second: of course a VC wants people to build. Of course a VC wants creative destruction and displacement of incumbents. But - as I see other people wondering as well - what's a VC going to do about it other than sit on the highest stock tranches and reap most of the rewards?

<comment><USER74> The left is in control in both California and New York, and many of the problems there are in the realm of state/city governments rather than federal government.

<comment><USER86> Healthcare, mental healthcare, and welfare for those in the bottom quintiles are two huge problems that are not in the realm of California and New York.

In general, any problem of wealth redistribution (the ones I mentioned above) require a federal solution, otherwise any locality trying to solve them will end up getting an influx of the welfare receivers and possibly an exodus of the taxpayers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Some preconditions are needed:

Step 1: fund a national campaign to challenge _Citizens United_ and put new test cases through the courts.

Step 2: restore the federal prohibition (dropped during Obama admin) against propaganda.

Step 3: implement a modern equivalent to Glass-Steagall banking regulation, so that taxpayer capital is not backstopping high-risk investments.

Without a shared model of reality, it is difficult to collaborate on the building of new realities. If unlimited ad/PR spending can be used to manipulate media, the voices and interests of individual humans struggle to be heard, leaving us with flawed models awaiting the next crisis where reality suddenly corrects rhetoric.

If the above is not feasible at the federal level, start with one state and use every available legal/policy/finance tool to (a) pursue similar goals, and (b) encourage migration of like-minded civic leaders and builders from other states.

</comment><comment><USER88> _You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old?_

Because the US has too much college education now. About 45% of the people with college degrees are working in jobs that don't require them. The payoff for a college education is often negative now.[1]

[1] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-really-arent-many- ba...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-really-arent-many-baristas- with-college-degrees-research-finds-2016-01-11)

<comment><USER89> I think it's more nuanced than that. America in particular has incredibly high education costs and a mercantile payback system. This is coupled with companies making ludicrous demands on qualifications so people feel they need to have a degree. In turn, graduates are branded as failures if they don't land "college level jobs" because they're saddled with debt that needs paying off.

Lack of jobs seems like an equally important problem here. It's not like if you didn't have a degree you'd be in a better situation. The only difference is that because you have a huge loan, having a low paid job is now a problem. Maybe a better question is, can you survive on a low paid job if you didn't have student loan repayments?

This could be fixed with means-tested payback, like the UK system (also student loans don't affect your credit here). Or simply by making education free, like most of Europe.

There are large intangible benefits to college education. One of them is it strongly promotes mobility (getting out of your home town) and cultural/diversity tolerance. Overwhelmingly in the UK, college towns voted to remain for example. For many people going to university is their first time away from their parents, and it's a transition period between living at home and true independence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> We don't need to build more things without a market, we need to buy more things that are built right. There's a surgical mask manufacturer in the states who had capacity a few weeks ago but no hospital would sign a contract, they wanted masks immediately and then go straight back to buying from Asia once this blows over. This same thing could be said for many other categories in the post.

If you buy it, people will build it.

</comment><comment><USER91> > The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things. The problem is > inertia.

I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest.

It's akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually _everyone_ is thin, whereas today you basically the vast majority of a similar population is overweight-to- obese.

Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years? Of course not, there were huge structural changes over that time in lots of areas (design of our cities, rise of the automobile, industrialized food and agriculture, etc.) that caused the person with "average" willpower to become obese.

Similarly, it's not as though people have less "desire" than before. There are large structural changes, many of which Andreesen doesn't address at all, such as the forces that have led to so much inequality and a hollowing out of the US manufacturing capacity.

I don't fundamentally disagree with Andreesen's goals, but "try harder" is the sort of platitude that rarely brings about real societal change.

<comment><USER92> Using an example where an outcome (weight gain) is completely driven by an individual's (in)action (consuming more energy than expending) is probably not the best argument for opposing a "try harder" approach to living.

Yes it's never been easier to eat like shit and have hobbies that require no movement, but the opposite is also true.

<comment><USER93> Would you say the same when talking about drug addiction, rather than just weight gain? Would it matter to drug addiction rates, if there were cheap Fast Drug stores all across the country, akin to fast food stores?

I think it's quite clear that here it makes zero sense to just say 'try to resist taking these ubiquitous drugs which give short-term satisfaction' as a policy measure. You'd need to treat it as a public health issue in which human beings not rational robots, but instead pleasure-seekers who would be helped by e.g. a sugar tax, policies that restricted the number of fast food stores to a minimum concentration level, healthy-food subsidies, public health and information campaigns, public cycling infrastructure, rules to enable workers to engage in sports at their workplace blablabla.

Apparently willpower is not enough and there are lots of policy instruments we could employ.

<comment><USER92> To what end do we put the onus of an individuals poor decisions on "policy measures". Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games? Should we reinstate prohibition?

It's dangerous to equate someone choosing to "get fries with that" in the same vein as a chemical addiction to drugs.

<comment><USER93> > Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games?

Of course, if it was necessary?

80% of US men for example are overweight, obese or extremely obese, all of which have substantial and known effects on health, with about half overweight and the other half (extremely) obese. Further, the trend is worsening. You also have a context in which one of the main reasons for caloric surplus is sugar which is priced in the food industry at 7700 calories per $1, way more expensive than many healthy choices, and is known to be addictive.

Then you have studies which show a gradually implemented sugar tax has beneficial policy outcomes, without destroying industries, saving many lives and reducing healthcare costs by orders of magnitude greater than the revenue losses (for which the food industry could be compensated, if you'd want), and improving the quality of life for many people who'd otherwise be diabetics, unhealthy, unhappy.

Now if you can show me statistics where 80% of your friends, colleagues, parents, teachers etc, have some kind of addiction to a particular niche of games, which have widely studied and known impacts on physical and/or mental health, and where a small gradual tax can be introduced to nudge people to other games, without destroying the gaming industry, and being able to compensate any losers in the market due to this policy change, then yes... absolutely I think we should put a tax on that.

> Should we reinstate prohibition?

No, we should not reinstate prohibition. We have no evidence that works. There's lots of evidence that a sugar tax works. As is there evidence that alcohol taxes work. All to a limit, introduced in balance.

I'll grant you that these are not trivial questions and we should not try to control people's lives. But I also think there are some policy decisions that make complete sense. Alcohol taxes by the way, are already quite widespread. This isn't some new big-government idea. It's science-based, experimental based, balanced policy making, that aims to give people a choice, but also incentivise the right choices. It's not treated as a moral judgement question, I love sugar, I keep consuming it, but it's also a public health problem and I'd really benefit from not being able to get a big coke for $1 with every meal, but rather for $4 every now and then. (That by the way, is a way more extreme example than any policy recommendations, which is typically 15%, e.g. $1 to $1.15, and works)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Tony Hseih tried "to build". With hundreds of millions of dollars, international renown, support of experts, and the ability to buy anything the project needed. It failed massively. We don't have Most of these fancy things because either there isn't demand, or the idea is good but it's way more difficult to execute than we expect.

[https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/kingdom-of- happiness.html](https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/kingdom-of-happiness.html)

<comment><USER7> What's happened to the price of Las Vegas real estate since Tony bought his section?

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Let's not build the Alien Dreadnought, though - we wasted two assembly lines chasing that dream and ended up having to put up a tent in a parking lot to meet 80% of production goals 3 years later, and we ended up _behind_ our peers in automation.

Measure twice, cut once, respect our forebears.

<comment><USER96> A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I love the post, but it's hard to ignore the cynic in me who thinks a large part of the problem lies in these VCs who have defined success to be achieving unicorn status. You know what's never going to be a unicorn app? An app for tutoring kids. I would have loved to work on that. I tutored kids and I know first hand the impact of tutoring. But guess what, I'm only getting older and I need to make a living in an increasingly expensive world! Guess I better work in a startup with better prospects.

</comment><comment><USER98> While I'm pro nuclear power, at what point do we say that nuclear isn't the way to go? The cost of solar panels and batteries are declining every year, and you don't have to deal with the terrible stigma that nuclear power has. Sure, new reactors are "zero emission", but will people actually want them to be built?

<comment><USER99> I love nuclear power, I used to be a 'nuke' in the Navy, but it's not feasible at today's tech level. There's too great a risk of nuclear accident right now, even if it's very uncommon (risk = severity x probability, if severity is 10/10 then any probability is too high, IMO). Someday, if the financials are right (if profit margins are good enough), or if we need it more than ever (if profit margins don't matter), someone will come up with a guaranteed safe and reliable reactor design, much like Google invented a much better search algorithm or Uber came up with a way to overcome the taxi coalition (I don't support Uber or Google today, but their ideas were revolutionary). Once that 'revolutionary' new nuclear tech comes, if it does, then I'll back it. Today's reactor designs aren't proven, not tested, and cost too much, so for now I will support renewable energy, like geothermal, solar, wind, etc, combined with storage like batteries, dams, gravity potential energy solutions, etc.

<comment><USER100> What do you mean by severity being 10/10? The issues we had in recent times were fairly mild. As long as they're not hidden and acted on quickly, we seem to cope well. Sure, people die, but it seems like severity 10 only because it all happens in one go. Take the deaths from air pollution, resources transport, mining, production, etc. involved in coal/gas/solar/wind, and put them in one day at the same rate as we had reactor failures - that would seem even more "not feasible".

<comment><USER99> You still don't understand that it's not financially feasible, for many reasons. I love nuclear, I fucking operated nuclear plants, but until we have passively safe designs that are tested and proven, it's not an option. You're totally correct on the facts, but no one is willing to fund it, that's the fact that killed nuclear.

<comment><USER100> I was not questioning the financial part. Just the severity of issues.

<comment><USER99> The problem is that there's tons of deaths from accidents that we can't quantify due to cancer or the like. If we expanded nuclear, who's to say the deaths from mining nuclear materials, cancer, etc wouldn't outstrip those of wind, solar, etc.? Severity and probability are hard to quantify, and with the financial argument, I'm kinda saying that it doesn't matter anyways because no one will fund one of the most expensive forms of energy that has high enough risk profiles that you cannot even insure it in many places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Okay but how does a "knowledge worker" like me, and many of the other readers of HN who work in jobs with little exposure to large-scale structures, get started building the city of the future? I have no idea where to even begin.

I learned how to program by watching tutorials and doing online coding classes. This is how I am used to learning. This method of learning isn't going to work when it comes to say, starting a startup that will build a new monorail. This is such a huge blockage for me and probably others with limited exposure to industries outside of software.

Has anyone ever felt this way and how did you overcome it?

<comment><USER102> I feel the same way. Hundreds of resources for learning programming online, but little else. I would love to take a class on "Building plant based proteins" but can't find anything online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Marc's essay should come with a personal commitment of funding or some other concrete effort towards the future he wants to see. Without that, it's yet another elite op-ed.

</comment><comment><USER104> This reads very much like the engineer who hears of a political problem and then wants to write software to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER105> I'll just chime in with a fundamental truth and I don't really care who is offended or what HN rules I'll be supposedly breaking: The right has no new ideas, no desire to build anything but their own wealth, and no respect for science, nature, their fellow humans or even basic facts. They are, and always have been, fundamentally evil, full stop. Writing an essay about progress and change, but not recognizing that half the country are backwards, ignorant, selfish, fearmongering, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic cowards who care nothing but themselves is avoiding the core issue. If everyone on the right disappeared tomorrow, the country would be a vastly better place.

</comment><comment><USER106> The lack of a desire to build is very surprising to me, as an outsider at least. Disregarding politics and everything else, America was (and until now is) a builder's paradise. At least from a taxation and policy viewpoint. I mean, compare US to a place like India which, from a policy standpoint is very anti-builder. Yet, we have seen entrepreneurs springing into action and preparing low cost face shields, low cost masks and what not. Heck they are even making those contactless thermometers.

I am just thinking about this irony, a country of people who have a desire to build, has all the anti-builder policies. A country with the most builder friendly policies has no desire to build. Sigh..

</comment><comment><USER107> "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value"

[https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business- ha...](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your- family/)

</comment><comment><USER108> The distillation of Marc's thesis points echoes " _We should have businesses coming out the wazoo!_ ", at least in my mind.

I think plenty of his points about pushing investment into broad market innovation are very true.

Simultaneously, this post made me think about how we got here. Many of the problems being experienced that are exasperated by the coronavirus are also being contributed to _by_ private industry. I guess the notion of what the government should/should not provide or manufacture is up to personal belief... however, since "small-government" was pushed starting in the 1980s(?), there's been a big change in the way many public services (and public service dependencies) are operated.

I like the idea of supporting home-grown innovation through startups and market disruption - however, seeing it from the other side, those are also the forces that brought upon harsh realities like experiencing PPE shortages because the manufacturing is outsourced to cheap labor overseas or millions of people relying on shit-tier digital services built by an amalgam of government contractors a decade ago and billed at a ridiculous rate.

I think there's an opportunity to take the overall message and shift it inwards towards actually pushing government-enabled innovation and development projects. That at least seems more "by the people, for the people" than proliferating a system of voracious hunger to corner off a big pile of sweet government money.

</comment><comment><USER109> You can't just solve everything by "building".

Build too much, and you end up with depleted resources, non-environmental solutions, and outdated artefacts.

Recycling is surely an option, but it should be the fallback, not the default.

While the current crisis could've been handled better, it is not at all badly handled. Nature is much stronger than us, and the fact that we are not totally screwed after over four months since the outbreak is impressive.

Over building hospitals for the next pandemic sounds inefficient to me.

<comment><USER110> He's saying build solutions, not just stuff, is he? So, you could build an environmentally sound solution to replace a polluting incumbent.

<comment><USER111> As I've gotten older I've realised that sometimes us trying to "build our way out of things" is often just "digging the hole deeper". Technology doesn't have all the answers unfortunately; I used to think so but as I've seen more I realise I was wrong. Someone's progress is someone else's nightmare quite often; especially in a system where capital (and therefore technological control) is concentrated in the hands of the few rich.

Anything you built has inputs, outputs and waste (this is the bad stuff that makes our lives worse and is subject to the problem of the commons) - it isn't an efficient process. Often benefit accrues to the person with money, and the waste goes to everyone else. Sure there are some nice solutions out there but on the whole we probably need less building than done today; and what we do build being much more targeted to society's benefit.

As an example I look at China and think - they build a lot of stuff but I wouldn't want to live there personally with the smog, pollution, bad environment, etc. I live in a nice part of the world but can see "progress" coming close to my door. Maybe I'm just getting cynical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> I don't know why soaring skyscrapers should be viewed as some sort of penultimate view for the future. With remote work tech, we can rid ourselves of the need for dense urban cores, and we can decentralize our population centers more appropriately.

<comment><USER7> Let's build what we need to make remote work fully practical and available to many more people!

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> > we've been doing education research that's never reached practical > deployment for 50 years since; why not build a lot more great K-12 schools > using everything we now know?

Because in 2020, education is credentialism. Every one of my friends who approached or was approached by a VC was asked: did you go to a good school? Do people up the chain like you? Show us references from professors and supervisors! This is not some big player hiring a manager-executive, I'm talking about investors whose job is to identify left-field potential and take risks.

You can't create Harvard 2.0 if your measure of success is having attended Harvard 1.0, and Harvard 1.0 is under no pressure to change or adapt.

Even the best VCs won't invest in socially inept dropouts anymore. The next Steve Jobs isn't building something in his parents' garage, because nobody believes in his ability to sell computers. He doesn't have an MBA from Wharton; he isn't a Stanford PhD. Thiel's "just don't fuck it up" just can't happen in 2020, except maybe by Thiel himself (or Weinstein, who is slowly waking up to this truth).

If anything, crises might force VCs to take risks again. Let the flood of easy M&As run dry and the dam dismantled!

</comment><comment><USER114> Books accompanying Marc's essay - [https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1251648508655923200?s=21](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1251648508655923200?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER115> __Westworld spoiler __

I'd have to watch again to be sure, but I think the scene in Westworld in Singapore is actually in Singapore because Paris was destroyed. There are scenes in futuristic sf also that show Fremont street among others.

<comment><USER7> "When we were trying to think about what the future could look like, we scouted and examined a bunch of areas, and that's how we came to Singapore. There's nowhere that looks like Singapore; it's absolutely beautiful on a purely aesthetic level. And it's incredibly different from modernism in other cities, even the lines of it; when you look out of the window (of The Esplanade Theatre), you have these, linear lines, but it's cross cut by these curving rows, which on film always looks so beautiful. There's a different texture to everything and the bounce from the water off of the glass there. The other thing that's really interesting is the incorporation of nature.

Singapore has done this incredible job of integrating nature into the city. We're staying in the Parkroyal on Pickering and there's greenery everywhere, just crawling up there. There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper."

[https://sg.style.yahoo.com/interview-westworld-creator- lisa-...](https://sg.style.yahoo.com/interview-westworld-creator-lisa-joy- jonathan-nolan-singapore-filming-location-160114813.html)

</comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon _But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared_

Finland seems to be a notable exception to this unfortunate rule: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus- finland-masks.html)

</comment><comment><USER116> I want to start a real estate development company to buy distressed land (as opposed to raw wilderness) and develop "living neighborhoods"[1] (like Village Homes[2] in Davis, CA) combining Pattern Language and applied ecology (Permaculture et. al.) and sell them. I think demand would be enormous and it would be a net ecological benefit.

Imagine the "City Country Fingers"[3] pattern:

> Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of > the metropolis. The urban fingers should never be more than one mile wide, > while the farmland fingers should never be less than one mile wide.

Let the farmland be food forest[4] that also grows starch/sugar crops for local alcohol fuel production and bamboo for construction. The buildings can be designed with hyperinsulation and passive solar architecture to have really low energy requirements.

Who's in?

[1] [https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln- exp.htm](https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm) Christopher Alexander's site.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes)

[3] [http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm](http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening) A great example in action: [https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance](https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance)

</comment><comment><USER117> Very interesting article. 5 cents from post soviet hole I'm in:

[] US/EU moved production to China because it was/is cheaper

[] It was/is cheaper because innovation in production technologies to this date haven't narrowed the gap for US/EU companies to move production back to US/EU.

[] US/EU workers don't want to compete with Chinese workers because they are "too cheap", but can't scale their efficiency proportionally. This is the main challenge of the developed economies - find how to continue growing the efficiency

[] US strategic failure is in putting all the eggs in one basket - China. Why not to have 5 production hubs around the world is not clear (maybe other nations don't want to work as hard as chinese?)

[] Another US strategic failure is to choose offshoring over local production. This could be achieved by lowering minimum wage or if this decision is not politically feasible - import of workforce. For this you could make elaborate laws where people coming to US for work couldn't stay there and had to go back once their work is done. Arab countries are doing this a lot.

[] The conflict of interest became apparent in times of struggle: virus shown that US is not de facto in control of outsourced production overseas

[] It DOESN'T mean that US must bring back production or start wasteful BUILD projects, which no one ever will use. It means that US must start investing even more into bridging the gap between overseas labor costs and automation due to innovation. Or create even more service industries that will be in demand overseas

[] If US succeeds in this mission - it is rightfully the leader of the world, its system is superior and next development revolution will be theirs to benefit from

[] But if US fails to bring the world new development cycle or someone does it before them - US citizens shouldn't expect their living to improve significantly since financial manipulations can bring you only so far

So if robots happen - all of the above resolved. And in times like this it must be quite easy to repurpose robot, which will solve extreme capacity shocks in the system.

BTW US were building high speed trains - it is called airplane! And was winning worldwide competition to date, but decided to outsource critical development to India... So I guess another example of strategic failure.

</comment><comment><USER118> Really well captured. It's like we all want to have nice things, without having to make them ourselves.

I'm not in US but in Europe, and I feel like many countries are like a 50-year 100M LOC codebase with fragile dependencies on module boundaries. The inertia is massive and refactoring even a small part of it requires enormous effort, and there will always be people unhappy about any change and a maze of laws making stuff difficult.

You need to really think big and have that inner energy to persuade people to change anything. Most people (me including) just don't have, most of the time, enough mental energy for thinking big about the world around after doing their 8h of busywork and 2h in commute to make ends meet.

Most people at their (non-tech) works are not told to think big either; hell, they are probably discouraged to, and are told to juggle an infinite backlog of low-impact "JIRA tickets" and keep the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER119> I'm not sure I understand the thesis of this essay, and it seems like rambling to me. Is the thesis "we need more desire"? That seems so abstract as to be meaningless. Obviously we all want companies to build new cool useful stuff. I'm failing to see any actionable suggestions or even new insights in this essay.

</comment><comment><USER120> Such great ideas, both in this article and here in the comments, yet, none of these ideas will bear fruit. Why? Partly due to the fact that the people like Marc Andreessen and others here in this thread that you can clearly see are very capable of thinking through and helping solve some of the issues touched on in Marc's article don't run for office. Instead you have glass eyed Attorneys and puppets on both the right and left side in office. I'm embarrassed often while watching our federal and state leaders talk. I'm watching in utter disbelief, wondering how so many of these people got elected... we voted for them. It's our fault. If we really want change we need to start with the people running the country, all of them and the system in which it allows politicians to be elected (selected) based on the amount of money they've accumulated.

</comment><comment><USER121> He's right about a lot of things.

But, as far as education goes, if everyone got a degree, then what's the point? it would have no value at all. The whole point of awarding degrees is to separate those who have them from those that don't. How are employers supposed to know who to higher, if everyone has a degree?

<comment><USER122> Almost everyone has a high school diploma, that doesn't make high school useless. I learned things in high school that I used in college and continue to use every day.

<comment><USER96> Like addition for example, can be useful in many different contexts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> >The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things.

Good luck generating the want. You don't have insurance nerds like computer nerds. You can't open your insurance plan, hack it to bits, and then put it back together in an interesting fashion and start your own business with it. You can't iterate and break stuff in insurance like you can with software. Even if you removed all of the regulatory capture, companies in those kinds of industries only come down to profit.

Insurance is boring. What are you going to do, make a $10/month health insurance plan that covers everything? You'll be popular, then broke. But that's what America really deserves: essentially free healthcare. The problem beyond regulatory capture is capitalism at its core because capitalism doesn't like anything given away for free.

</comment><comment><USER124> "Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?"

So, what are you building?

<comment><USER125> Ultra fast and reliable 3D printing for engineers - submit a file at praxismfg.com and we courier deliver a plastic copy in 0-2 days at a price you'll love.

We run on proprietary printers built in house with advanced features like support-less 5-axis FDM, multi-material/multi-resolution printing, and integrated QC.

The real goal is to combine manufacturing services with a machine tool OEM like Kern Microtechnik has done in precision milling. Combining those two businesses strongly differentiates your service, freeing you from the race-to- no-margins that's wrecking every other 3D printing hub right now, and subsidizes 100-1000x more in-house hardware "testing" than any regular OEM can afford to do, which lets you build great new machine tools at lightning speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> Pre crisis we had <4% unemployment, who is left to build?

The Govt. is required to steer the economic ship to make these things happen:

1) tie state taxes to per/capita testing infrastructure and ppe reserve

2) stress test public health institutes like financial institutes

3) use the military to war game these events

<comment><USER127> > who is left to build?

The people who are now unemployed

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> I for one believe the quality of generally accessible k12 eduction is America's biggest problem, by far. Who's to build if there's no good system for creating builders? Public k12 education in America is abysmal and few people are talking about it. It's because we are myopic and talk about problems only when they manifest concretely in the economy. As in people accruing and defaulting in debt, unemployment, crime, etc. We suck at slightly longer term analysis and getting to the root causes. The American motto is "if it doesn't hurt _me_ , _today_ , fuck it." Good luck building a robust society with that philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER129> Now seems like the perfect time to repair infrastructure -- bridges and roads, etc -- while people aren't driving on them.

<comment><USER130> SF is supposed to do exactly that to minimize a summer carmageddon: [https://abc7news.com/coronavirus-san-francisco-caltrans- to-r...](https://abc7news.com/coronavirus-san-francisco-caltrans-to-replace- bridge-deck/6094057/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Somewhat related, but The New Deal basically invested 40% of the GDP into 'building' and paying Americans to do it.

The US in 2020 just invested roughly 10% of the GDP to prop up some corporations, and more or less called it a day.

<comment><USER131> I think a New Deal style fund for infrastructure and human capital investment projects would be fantastic.

Some ideas...

Government will pay your former salary if you attend a Masters or PhD program and are succeeding there.

Delay recent bachelors grads entering the workforce by heavily subsidizing Masters degrees and PhDs in STEM. (Only others if we must, personally I think social sciences are currently acting as a destructive force in our society and are not behaving as academics but as ideological advocates.)

Massively increase STEM research and development funding.

Free technical and trade schools.

More ideas:

Subsidize universities putting their courses online for accredited degrees.

Subsidize private tutors for all subjects for K-12 kids, creating a large demand for private tutors. Require a bachelors degree that includes the subject to be tutored.

Provide funding to rebuild any manufacturing infrastructure that has been lost in the last 50 years, or just to build more. Especially designed in ways that manufacturing plants can operate safely for their workers in pandemic conditions.

<comment><USER27> Aren't most decent Masters and PhD programs paid already?

My friends in PhD programs are paid a stipend. It's not an industry level wage if that is what you were meaning, but they certainly don't pay anything to be there.

<comment><USER131> Yes, I mean to make up for the opportunity cost of not working. Even if the PhD stipend is around $40-50k, that's nowhere near an industry salary that may be needed to support a family, mortgage, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> I don't disagree. I believe, though, that our working philosophy limits us: "pursuit of property" in the Lockean sense, and "pursuit of utility" in the Bentham-Mill sense have guided a lot of what we currently build and define the right-centrist consensus. Marxist-anarchist answers are often unsatisfying in that rejecting the market as the benchmark tends to lead towards bureaucratic or tyranny-of-structurelessness outcomes where gatekeeping and favoritism thrive, because, as Confucius says, "the most important thing is to define words" \- change the words, change the benchmarks and metrics, and you have set the agenda for society. And if you let people tinker with those benchmarks at random, you get random results, skewed to optimize towards a fairy tale. Think of all the fads and trends you've seen in your career - <USER2> proposals for improving your skills, productivity, status, income, etc. How many of them ultimately ended up being a disproven hypothesis built by someone doing some brand-building? The market weakly indicates demand, but it's a naive system, prone to acting like a toddler.

This is, in fact, often a major question in game design too. When the problem space gets reduced to a score optimization problem(whether score in the context is "high score" or "maximizing some form of output" like HP damage), you often end up with degenerate solutions that involve a repetitive linear application of some technique. And when this appears in a competitive context, the game starts stagnating into a rote exercise of min-max, and other solution sets go unexplored. Competitive players often look for ways to gatekeep and declare a playstyle unacceptable so that they stay in their comfort zone and keep their status - but acceptability is ultimately a matter of what you believe the competition is or should be about. If you don't have that agreement of shared belief, the game itself falls into incoherence, and that is what we see at a broader scale in society where its systems fail.

But there are some answers. One is to enforce a broad set of all-or-nothing contractual failure modes: If you fail the minimums you don't get the maximum. At a baseline we have Maslow's hierarchy of needs setting some of these minimums. And our legal system often works in this direction of adding a minimum. Another is to add buffers, delays and noise on results: If you don't have an instant guaranteed outcome, you can't push your margins nearly as hard, and so you don't end up in a distorted min-maxing zone, but a more systematic one, which can only be manipulated through careful synchronization that "gets ahead of" or "applies leverage" to the problem. This is something we're now dealing with increasingly in an interconnected "instant society" where continuous access is the norm and many activities that were one arduous and needed a strong commitment have been reduced and repackaged into status symbols. Lastly, overt market mechanisms - pricing and bidding and ownership - help when applied appropriately. But they are premised on active participation in the process, humans in the loop who can really think through all the factors. When we automate market activities, we end up back in the scenario of min-maxing.

Lots of fun things to think about. It's not just the building that matters, but the "why" of it. If you can justify the "why" you can get a lot farther.

</comment><comment><USER133> Re: Housing

Housing is about the least desirable form of real-estate development for land owners. That's why low cost market housing is built in former cow pastures outside of town and in town market rate housing development tends to be built for upper income and luxury buyers. That's why affordable housing has been done with public subsidy. First as public housing. Then as tax credit financing and housing vouchers. Recently as a condition of building market rate housing.

Real-estate is where wealth is parked with long time horizons. Pension funds and life insurance reserves and intergenerational personal wealth preservation. When wealth preservation is the goal or the investment horizon is thirty years or more, sitting on under-utilized land waiting for a commercial use on a triple net lease provides higher returns than selling houses. Even better if the land is producing rent off the sunk cost...and there's always a market for used car lots. Housing competes with every other use and most uses are much more profitable and stable.

Even leaving land vacant is better than converting to housing when the goal is wealth preservation. In wealth preservation, if you sell, you have to find someplace else to put the money. When real-estate is the wealth preservation vehicle, that means finding another parcel of greater value for equal cost. E.g. a more valuable parcel than the valuable one already in hand.

<comment><USER134> The solution to that is simple: raise property taxes to the point where underutilized land is no longer a suitable vehicle for wealth preservation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER135> >> If the work you're doing isn't either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we've failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.

Most people do absolutely nothing useful, despite skill and desire, and they know it. We all know we're much better at creating value on our own, but much worse at capturing that value. Something seems really unproductive about this system; must be a better way.

</comment><comment><USER136> The problem is the failure to differentiate between wealth creation and wealth appropriation.

The USA has a system that makes it easier to appropriate wealth via rentier activity (for example becoming a landlord), than to create wealth (for example building accommodation).

Until this mentality changes you are going to see your living standards _continue_ to plummet.

Rentier activity is a zero sum game. For you to win someone else has to lose. Making this a cornerstone of your economy is a disaster.

</comment><comment><USER137> > What's the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a > family you can provide for.

It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

— George Carlin

</comment><comment><USER138> > In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we > build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The > things we don't, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. > What's the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a > family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price > curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every > American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

You could lower the immigration rate and ignore trans-nationalist calls to perpetually increase the GDP, primarily for their benefit. The Asian Tigers + Japan (minus Singapore, with a higher rate, but it's not a true democracy), don't have this problem. You could perhaps more importantly do better to alleviate world poverty, a strong driver of population growth, consequently immigration, consequently large environmental footprints from increasingly more people adopting 1st world lifestyles, such as this American dream of the house, car, education & healthcare, flights overseas, etc.

</comment><comment><USER139> The problem is incentives. I absolutely agree that we should build more. Building brings us closer to the world outlined in the essay. But building more doesn't solve the kind of problem like how we were unprepared for the Corona virus. Neither in the health care system nor on the political level are there any incentives to act in the long term, taking rare events into account. Preparing for rare events does neither help the current quarterly figures nor a re-election. On the contrary, such preparations require money and attention. When the disaster is there, a government can act in crisis mode. Sums that seemed unimaginable before can be waved through quickly. Even governments that have been in power long enough to take precautions are now getting approval for at least not failing completely in the crisis. And with the approval won, the government still has no incentive to change anything in the long run. We need to adapt our systems to reward long-term incentives and preparation for rare events. I doubt, however, that the actors will be able to make these adjustments on their own.

</comment><comment><USER140> > "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the > other part of the problem is what we didn't _do_ in advance, and what we're > failing to do now. And that is a failure of action ..."

The case of being reactive vs proactive.

1\. No one is rewarded pointing out problems. Thus no one wants to be that guy. 2\. Reward constructive ways to points out issues / problems. 3\. Listen & Acknowledge or disregard. Rewards solutions, goals, and resources (e.g. timeline) for resolution.

Accountability — management/upper leaders fail when failing to document the decision (brush away complaints with no record of decision and does not welcome hearing the issues through the management chains). Document the decision making.

Must have positive culture that every issue/problem pointed out is welcomed so that it can be looked at. Someone should be accountable / responsible for those issues whether deferred or not.

Was it a failure to imagination? Or a failure to take action on such conceived idea, once upon a time? Leaders must lead which includes partnership/collective efforts outside their own organizations...

</comment><comment><USER141> Sadly, every human attempt at creating a successful system of allocating capital begins to decay as time passes.

With all respect to Andreesen, it is unlikely any of these problems will be solved before the entire post-WWII system collapses.

Climate change, sovereign debt levels, permanent-QE...

Honestly 6 months ago, even those who see doom around every corner weren't really talking about a pandemic.

The problem is, the problems are outpacing the solutions.

This here, written 16 years ago, is still true:

"Consequently, for thousands of years, uncountable coronations, revolutions, coups, appointments, elections, assassinations, and regime changes have occurred. Kings, prime ministers, princes, presidents, secretaries-general, and dictators have found themselves in and out of power. Unexpected changes have removed even powerful rulers. (See the box "Suddenly out of Power," on page 5.) Still, competent and enduring leadership has proved elusive."

[https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2004800#h=5:0-7:728](https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2004800#h=5:0-7:728)

</comment><comment><USER142> Thing is, no society was prepared. You may name Singapore and Japan but after initial success, cases are now spiking there. You may name South Korea and that will be fair, but their success is a continuation of their failures (effectively they are have a techonology-driven totalitarianism, most Westerners would hate to live there, and this results in more pressing problems than there are in any Western country). Even if Russia that declared itself safe (for ridiculous explanations) initially, now has world's 3rd number of new cases daily and appears to be on track to become one of the worst hit countries - it wasn't preparedness, but rather a delay because of deep poverty and low mobility of post population there - so epidemic took a lot of time to get there.

No one was prepared. This is a black swan event, they happen once in a century. If you try to get prepared to every kind of them you'll spend more than if you just absorb the consequences. Trick isn't preparedness, but rather resilience, ability to get up and move on quickly.

<comment><USER66> The US was especially unprepared. Compare NYC to anywhere else. We had months to build a testing infrastructure like South Korea, we did practically nothing, and now thousands have died. Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, etc., all did better than we did with worse situations. Government competency matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER143> I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, and I think it's cultural. I don't limit it to American or Western culture; I think this a human behavior.

My thesis is that quantitative and spatial intelligences, which are required to build things, are rarer than verbal intelligence and thus more likely to regress to the mean. This makes them harder to pass on to progeny and less reliable as conduits of status.

Highly verbal careers like law and to a lesser extent finance (which is more about networking than crunching numbers at the high level) are more accessible to the average heir, because they require more common skills. If being an engineer or doctor were the pinnacle of social status, it would be harder to pass on social status because it would be less likely that your child would be able to perform those functions.

So elites decided to build societies that gave structural advantages to the so-called FIRE economy because that gave them the best chance at locking in their status. This relegated builder careers to second or third tier status.

</comment><comment><USER144> I think the writer goes too abstract and in the meantime ignorea several points. It's not like people, companies, and politicians don't want to build. It's because they are voices from both sides that delay creations. And going in bluntly will only make things worse. Going on to undertake big tasks without proper plans and rules will sooner or later cause harm.

</comment><comment><USER145> I think it's telling that in this conversation so far the one thing not mentioned has been the I-word: Ideology. Though there has been a bit of the C-word: Class.

Talking about what's best for the country is _by_its_very_nature_ s political, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not.

"Politics (Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with the governance of a country, state or area. It involves making decisions that apply to groups of members and achieving and exercising positions of governance—organized control over a human community ...

... In modern nation states, people often form political parties to represent their ideas. Members of a party often agree to take the same position on many issues and agree to support the same changes to law and the same leaders. An election is usually a competition between different parties"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)

</comment><comment><USER146> Another thing I thought was interesting was, when China was building hospitals in a few days, I figured that's something we just could never do. Well we ended up converting Javits into like the third largest hospital in the world in 48 hours. Turns out we really can build a hospital that quickly if we really want to. Maybe it is just a matter of attitude.

</comment><comment><USER147> I love building things, especially new things. I've started to see over the years that while I've built many things, I've failed just as much to maintain them.

I think there may be a paradox underlying his point: while we need to build things, we also need to maintain things. If I have limited resources (e.g., time, money, land, materials, etc.), then if I choose to build something, I may be choosing to abandon (not maintain) something, or even to destroy that thing. I think this applies to businesses, apps, bridges, skyscrapers, and even relationships. If I start something new, it often replaces the old.

I believe we may struggle with this, because, while we crave new things, we get emotionally attached to old things. We get attached to the way we're able to see the SF Bay from our house and don't want anything blocking our view. We get attached to our expertise and comfort at coding in a specific language and don't want to learn yet another new language. We get attached to the way we've made cars day after day, year after year, and also to the juicy profits and lives that it has given us.

Also, I think a lot of business models rely more on the maintaining of things than they do the building of things (unless you consider maintaining some sort of (re)building, but I don't). Facebook built a platform and for the most part, while adding users, seems to maintain it and want to prevent others from taking their users. Someone who builds a nuclear power plant will probably spend a lot of money building it and therefore wants to "milk the asset" for as much as they can. Even the construction firm who builds the power plant probably has methods that they've practiced over the years, and wants to leverage the learning of those methods more so than learn new ones.

I still agree that we need to build new things, I just believe there are strong financial and emotional reasons for why we maintain old things.

</comment><comment><USER148> I have nothing against the VC industry just like I have nothing against hedge funds, PE or the banking industry. They manage capital inside a regulatory framework to generate returns for their investors. The VC industry however excels at hype and hagiography which enables them to build up entrepreneurship as a holy calling while urging on legions of founders to take more risk but I digress.....

Imagine Wynn Resorts (world's largest operator of Casinos) berating the world for living large, drinking too much and indulging in non-productive activities. The biggest hits of a16z - airbnb, lyft, pinterest - are companies that are either media assets to monetize eyeballs, or _software_ that extracts more value from existing assets while doing an end-run around existing regulation.

Yaay for a16z for being such baller investors. But to tell the rest of us it is time to build is like Pepsico trying to scare us into healthy habits.

Immensely hypocritical article.

</comment><comment><USER149> America has ~16M marketers & sales folks (roughly 10% of all jobs) compared to only ~2.7M engineers. Source: [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed- occupation.ht...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed- occupation.htm).

</comment><comment><USER150> "I expect this essay to be the target of criticism."

For starters, this might not be the right time to blame the victims.

"Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building."

And yet, the people who physically build things are left destitute, while the managers are raking it in.

This ought to be a time of reflection, not action.

</comment><comment><USER151> My take... we need to greatly increase access to capital by dropping the accredited investor requirements. It is ridiculous that people in less economically advantaged areas are forced to grovel to those deemed rich for capital rather than ask their neighbors and friends for investments. Instead of allowing these people to make investments, the government throws them a bone by allowing them to 'crowdfund', which is another name for making an investment without being entitled to any of the return (dividends and shares). Instead, we incentivize capital sharing only for the rich and are surprised when the rich get richer.

This is the greatest form of regulatory capture in existence today because it cuts across all industries and fields. It is a regulatory capture of the free market itself by the rich.

<comment><USER25> _> It is ridiculous that people in less economically advantaged areas are forced to grovel to those deemed rich for capital rather than ask their neighbors and friends for investments._

AFAIK the accredited investor requirements only apply to sales of securities to investors who don't have a prior relationship with you. They do not apply if, for example, you want to start a startup and you get ten relatives, friends, and neighbors who already know you to invest in it and give them each a proportionate number of shares of stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER152> At least for higher education, I think it's a little more difficult to scale than this piece makes. Higher education has a very entrenched culture of obsessing with fundraising, accumulation of prestige through factors tangential to education quality, and exploitation of undergrad/grad labor. My state school tried to 'build' enrollments in it's historically competitive STEM majors and I just saw these problematic factors become worse; increased reliance on underpaid student TAs, with additional funding being dumped into band-aids such as tutoring programs fractured between departments and stress relief fairs. For higher education it needs complete cultural or policy reform to focus on educating and eliminate cruft, before we can start building it out.

</comment><comment><USER153> The introduction was chilling.

How do the preparations for the next big San Andreas earthquake compare to those that were (or should have been) made for Covid-19? What else do we need to build for something like that?

The impact of the two seem quite similar: at best, stuck at home on a dwindling pile of food that can be replenished sporadically every two weeks while you try to make a living online. Covid-19 didn't take out physical infrastructure, but decimating the workforce has had a similar effect, and knock on effects are real (how do I service a broken car during lockdown?)

The two big takeaways from Covid-19 for me were: have better food security at home, and invest in a home grade wireless internet connection. I'd probably think carefully about exposure to natural disasters too, the next time I move.

</comment><comment><USER154> Regulatory capture seems like a red herring that everyone is fixating on here. Marc is right to mention it, but it's part of a bunch of other things and the most important part is the will of people to actually build and try new stuff, and run through walls to make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER155> One way to win at anything in life is to be counter cyclical. Sure you can also win by being best but the numbers are stacked against you when everyone is doing the same. As someone funnily quipped the pandemic is so bad that most places are out of stock on podcasting microphones. If everyone is podcasting and writing apps then it's much harder to get through the noise. Find something that no else is doing, maybe something that requires physical presence, just to be contrarian. So now might a great time to write some software but now and in a few months will be a particularly hard time to turn that into a profitable business. Remember VCs don't care if you take losses.

</comment><comment><USER156> The boom/bust cycle, which they don't have in China, means that anything capital intensive will be given back to the banks on the next down turn and resold to somebody else if a big fish doesn't acquire it between market crashes. That's why nobody builds capital intensive stuff that has a long term ROI, at least in this country.

For example, watch Tesla go broke and give all that beautiful capital they've built back to their creditors before this is all over. This doesn't happen in China, even though lots of companies have debts they haven't paid on in years because the government just buys the bad debts off the banks and the banks continue to lend.

</comment><comment><USER157> > The problem is desire. We need to want these things.

... and you can't really force that. americans seem unmotivated to _want_ the same things. cynicism drives people to politicization and polarization of everything, including chemical compounds. On the one side, half the people believe that through politics they can force the other half to do their work for them. The other side realizes that and becomes increasingly cynical, hiding their money away from them. there is no sense of common purpose despite the proclamations. maybe the issue is trust

this essay is nice and arousing and all, and hard to disagree with it, but somehow i think people will forget about it

</comment><comment><USER158> Marc has to accept some responsibility for this as the decisions by himself and his industry for 20 years have been part of the problem.

Building more housing in the Bay area is not part of the solution. What is part of the solution is funding business activity elsewhere, where people are not packed in like sardines and breeding viruses.

Note it does show that the VCs are not a master class because they can't win against bay area landlords. If the ground in the Bay area is so uniquely blessed that is a case for sky-high property taxes, right?

I want to see salesforce, Apple's and similar companies ditch the Moscone center and move their conferences to Las Vegas for one thing.

</comment><comment><USER159> What if the problems we face today are harder than the problems people faced from before roughly 1980?

What if we're comparing apples to oranges when we say people in the past had more ambition? People would build an entire suburb in the 1950s without filing an Environmental Report to the EPA because didn't even exist. (An environmental report for those who do not know is a massive piece of legal documentation that shows how a prospective development will effect the natural landscape.)

Perhaps Singapore is building gleaming skyscrapers because they've taken the baton from us and have no "baggage" per se.

</comment><comment><USER160> They way he glossed over money being the problem really shows how much of a position of privilege he is in.

 _Of course money is the problem._

More specifically, the subset of money that is profits. How can you build if you don't feel secure in you and your loved one's futures? Whether that future is just enough to scrape by to making sure your children have a safety net. The majority of people simply do not have the luxury of ignoring money to divert their attention on building. If this current pandemic hasn't made that abundantly clear, I don't know what will.

(Yes, I'm aware of the outliers on both ends. I'm choosing to ignore them because to build something meaningful for the future requires the majority. And that is precisely the population that is most concerned about money.)

Regulatory capture? That's because those in government know how quickly money can be earned and lost. So why not let this happen to secure their own future?

Startups and investors? Everyone is focused on ROI and the short term because that optimized for _your_ wealth. Long term spreads the wealth among employees which ultimately does not help secure _your_ future. If this hurts to hear, it's because deep down you know it to be true.

It takes a lot of wealth and time for outliers to see that they aren't building for the future. It's great if Andreessen sees this issue and is trying to solve for it, but money is not so easily solved for.

> Here's a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of > what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?

Sure. I'd love to take the time to flesh out and propose my ideas to you. Then build and iterate on them. But first, give me stable income. Promise to take care of me.

I've just been part of a mass layoff for the third time in my life! Every time I've built up some sort of financial safety net, it's been burnt to ashes by a recession. I left teaching and returned to engineering precisely because I realized how impossible it would be to build a financially secure life for my family (parents included).

So that is my challenge to you, Mr. Horowitz and everyone who agrees. What will you do to _feed_ the desire to build?

</comment><comment><USER161> I love the idea of building, but we also shouldn't lose sight of earth's limited resources.

We don't have unlimited land, and we need much of that for agriculture to sustain the billions of people living here.

When we use energy, we must make sure it comes from renewable sources.

When we build, we must take care that we don't destroy existing ecosystems. And so on.

And since we cannot rely on everybody being responsible on their own, we need regulations. They should be as efficient and frictionless as possible, but let's not dismiss them all together in a frenzy to build, build, build.

</comment><comment><USER162> Well Marc, one problem is the world of VC-driven innovation. Building truly revolutionary work takes time and commitment, while the VC ecosystem and entrepreneurial culture actively works against this.

\- Telling founders to be underpaid and commit their entire finances to the success of their startups forces startups to spend more time finding product- market fit than building what the world needs long-term.

\- Hiring employees at below market salary and offsetting with equity incentives people to think short-term. You need to move towards going public and increasing valuation if you want to keep your talent.

\- The funding round model forces short-term thinking by constantly forcing companies to prove their vision has a market in a short amount of time. How do you prove that a two-decade project has legs in the first 5 years? The path I've seen is people reducing their ambitions to find traction.

\- The VC industry does not value positive social externalities in any appreciable way. Fast growth and revenue is all that matters and we celebrate the companies that achieve that by causing negative externalities.

There's a reason that the most impactful real-world innovation I can think of comes from people like Bezos and Musk who can afford to think in terms of decades.

Maybe VCs are not the vehicles for long-term innovation. Or maybe the leaders of the VC industry could look inwards and find changes to how they approach innovation that could help solve these long-term problems.

When you have extreme wealth and influence, there is an inherent responsibility to ask whether 'you' are doing enough.

<comment><USER7> Fortunately, VCs have no regulatory protection whatsoever. Build a better way to finance innovation!

<comment><USER19> You may be interested in Vannevar Bush's ideas on this matter from 1945. [https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm](https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER163> I share some of the sentiment, but only demand and necessity will drive "building". An energized or optimistic citizenry surely helps, but to kick innovation into high gear we need a Cold War or something. A crisis where we can go outside at least - this virus really has deflated some of the American spirit it feels like. Sort of stuck in this limbo where everyone wants to rally and help but the touted best way to help is to stay inside. A lot of pent up energy in me at least; perhaps Marc is channeling a bit of his own.

</comment><comment><USER164> OK, fair enough. If we have to build and do all those things, what is it that we should STOP doing, buying, investing in? There is only so much time, capital, skill, energy (both literal energy and human willpower). What can we sacrifice? Commuting to work in droves? MacMansions? Travel for pleasure? Sporting events, concerts, and mega payments to celebrities? Buying new car every 5 years? Luxury cars? Infrastructure hungry suburbia's and exurbia's? Who will take a stab at this question?

<comment><USER165> Wealth isn't a zero-sum game. People in the first half of the 20th century didn't give up anything to develop electricity, automobiles, air travel, etc. But if our current regulations and institutions existed back then, we'd have missed out on many technologies.

Heck if aspirin were invented today, it's unlikely it would be approved by the FDA. Even if it was, it would be prescription-only. And if caffeine were invented today, the FDA would ban it and the DEA would find and arrest anyone manufacturing or using it.

<comment><USER66> You should Google some of the stuff the FDA fast tracks. You'll almost certainly come away with a much wider view of the regulatory state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER166> "The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price." That's great for basically everyone except the people building them. In fact that's probably the worst possible argument to convince someone to start building more of these things. I don't know the answer but a lot of this essay was stating what would be best for the whole without really addressing the incentives/drives of the people who are supposed to be doing all this building.

</comment><comment><USER167> This article was interesting in seeing how demand in these types of circumstances will eventually wear off and all the buyers will go back to looking for the lowest cost:

[https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if- you-i...](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-imagine- that-a-local-business-making-surgical-face-masks-is-working-247-guess-again/)

</comment><comment><USER168> I just wanted to note that most of Westworld is shot in Downtown Los Angeles! I love that he mentions this though because futuristic worlds in the show have been amazing.

</comment><comment><USER169> Can't wait to see the same investors praising this essay announce investments in frivolous startups like TikTok lookalikes and Clubhouse in a few months from now

</comment><comment><USER170> Agreed. Let's start by building a new nation. I propose we rewrite the Declaration of Independence so as to strike out the myths and update it with what science has learned since.

And let's set out with a more ambitious dream than simply providing the opportunity to have a home. A nation not explicitly designed to take care of our needs, such as housing, is inefficient by design.

Myth 1: Independence. Reality: Interdependence and autonomy.

</comment><comment><USER171> One wishes there was a more direct call to action here. It reads like a general complaint about how things work and doesn't really get the ball rolling.

</comment><comment><USER172> It would help to have a leader who inspires, a leader who brings the opposing side along (knowing that we most of us want the same result, we just disagree on how to get there), a leader who couldn't give a damn about re-election, a leader with a vision of a positive future, and a leader who drives us to our better natures. We haven't had one of those in a while.

</comment><comment><USER173> The problem wasn't foresight. Lots of governments engage in foresight activities and have highlighted the risk of pandemic for decades.

</comment><comment><USER174> Great article and passionate tone!

But why doesn't it also say that $X billion of a16z money will he allocated for such investments in the next 3 years?

</comment><comment><USER175> So I guess my question to Marc is: how many of your portfolio companies pair their _morally_ correct level of corporation tax?

</comment><comment><USER176> """You see it in manufacturing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, American manufacturing output is higher than ever, but why has so much manufacturing been offshored to places with cheaper manual labor?"""

"""Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers."""

This is interesting. They are investors, why is he asking the government to provide the capital for this. Shouldn't they be all over these great unexplored opportunities? How many companies that build actual physical stuff have they backed compared to yet-another-SaaS plays? I'm really curious how a pitch of "we want to build/manufacture stuff in the USA" would have went pre- Pandemic at a16z. Even trying to pitch hardware instead of software seems hard enough as is.

"""The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don't like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things."""

This is also interesting. Isn't one of the first things they want "moat, moat, moat"? Sure it's nice to ask for easier entry into markets when you try to fund the disruptor. But once said disruptor is funded they also want as much protection as possible.

"""Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?"""

As a start, I would humbly suggest to rethink the model of "relocating all companies to where the capital is located" and move towards "move companies to the places where they should build most of their stuff". It's pretty mindblowing to me why software companies should be located in SV even when their customers are located elsewhere. I would also argue that building stuff should be done in a more humble way than the typical VC-ambition. Build, test, show profit, grow organically. I think that could be more healthy than pump up 20 builders and hope one goes hyperbolic.

As an aside, the cynic in me thinks that Theranos would probably go through the roof right now if it was still around and waste a lot more capital than it did. It's easy to call for action, any action in times of crisis without being careful and level headed enough.

</comment><comment><USER177> There was no lack of foresight.

But in a dynamic economy is really hard to sustain the cost of continuous preparedness because needs are infinite.

[https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait- pandem...](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic- late-prepare/story?id=69979013)

</comment><comment><USER178> In the article, Marc doesn't mention software. Maybe software could eat the world faster too(probably will, since many companies starting communicate over the internet). But there is still a huge gap between developers and consumers. I'm wondering what he thinks about that? Also, I'm glad He mention Westworld, great show.

</comment><comment><USER179> Not sure I agree with the notion that we can ignore political motivation. Obama left a pandemic response organization and the intelligence services knew how dangerous it was going to be.

Trump absolutely failed and is failing at leading us through this thing.

Innovation is great, but let's not ignore bad leadership.

Andreseen is notoriously conservative and clearly whitewashing reality.

</comment><comment><USER71> We do want to build things. Our government has rotted from the inside and people inside of our government contribute a large amount of their effort to protecting their own wealth. Look at the senator insider trading story from a few months ago for proof.

We tried to build this thing called "medicare for all". It would have freed people up to take greater risks in their employment because our physical health would not be tied to our employment.

That idea was run into the ground by an all-hands-on-deck media ( the media that is owned by billionaires ) and DNC blitz to shut it down. Because that would cost the 1% some of their money, and the 1% are the ones WITH all the money, so they have the power to write the checks and make things happen.

Healthcare is something everyone needs at one point. We cannot take a risk because our healthcare is insanely expensive and tied to our employment.

We would love to build things. Building things costs money. Most people do not have much money. The 1% do not let us spend "their" money to build things. They take a larger and larger slice of the pie, while everyone else is fighting for crumbs. The ladder is pulled up for labor to fight back with "right to work" laws, and other anti-labor policies. So nothing ever gets built.

</comment><comment><USER180> It's time to build - but yet most of us are legally mandated to stay home and NOT build.

"I'm from the government, I'm here to help" \- inspiring confidence in nobody since forever.

Regulatory capture is the biggest problem stifling innovation today. The government needs to get the hell out of our way and let us get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER151> I broadly agree with him, but I do think his opinions on the 'right' are more due to media portrayals of right wingers rather than the actual opinions of those 'on the right'. He says.

> The right must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, > ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly > buybacks in lieu of customer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, > even more investor-friendly) innovation. > > It's time for full-throated, > unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive > investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new > science, in big leaps forward.

Regulatory capture is something the right is adamantly against usually. I mean, most right-leaning politicians in America are into reducing regulation.

Offshoring is also something that hasn't been on the right for almost a decade.

Finally, the right typically often has absolute political support for aggressive VC investment. Our current right-leaning president has supported a ludicrously low interest rate to encourage private investment in technology as well as set up economic opportunity zones to encourage investment in underserved communities.

<comment><USER181> > Regulatory capture is something the right is adamantly against usually. I > mean, most right-leaning politicians in America are into reducing > regulation.

Getting rid of regulation is the ultimate regulatory capture.

<comment><USER151> Can you explain rather than simply state? Regulatory capture typically refers to regulations entrenching current players and increasing barriers to entry. By definition, less regulation, lowers barriers to entry of new participants. You surely cannot actually believe that no regulation increases barriers to entry of certain industries?

<comment><USER181> My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate.

Most voters think that some level of regulation is beneficial and support it. Politicians who advocate for the complete removal of regulations don't usually do well in the polls, but this is a widely held belief in right-wing thought. The market will do all the regulating necessary. This has quite obviously been proven incorrect over the years. Nevertheless, the idea persists.

The next most effective way to have no regulations is to keep the appearance of regulations and have the enforcers be completely ineffectual, thus regulatory capture.

So, you end up with the externally perverse-looking, but internally consistent situation where the right will support regulators' existence and even promote their people into those institutions.

<comment><USER151> Thank you for the decent explanation. You are certainly correct in your assesment. However, I was commenting on Andreesen's caricature of voters 'on the right'. While true that most voters support regulation, right-leaning voters are more likely not to support much at all, so they are entirely self consistent. When restricting yourself to only one 'side', then it's quite misleading to claim that right-leaning voters are siding with the kinds of people who enable regulatory capture.

Your explanation explains why regulatory capture may arise out of an interplay between right-leaning politicians and their constituents. Regulatory capture in your view arises when right-leaning politicians succumb to voters (not necessarily right-leaning ones) desire for regulation. However, this is an emergent phenomenon, not a tenet of right-leaning thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER182> I like the angle, and mostly agree with it, but I have a hard time believing our system isn't already so deadlocked that none of it will ever happen.

Like, it's not as if "the left" wouldn't love to make over institutions like the VA, but has such a thing been politically realistic in ~the last 2 decades?

</comment><comment><USER183> The biggest argument for tax paid, public sector health care and education, is that it should be much cheaper for the customer when the institutions are made efficiently and not for-profit.

A quality education does not have to cost more than $10-20k to produce (per student). So why are current prices in the $100-200k range?

<comment><USER43> US spending on public education at the K-12 level is close to 15k per year. Your assertion that removing the profit from the system will lead to significantly lower costs is not supported by the data.

[https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66)

<comment><USER66> Why should education be a market? Why does it make sense for poor people to get worse education? And if you're thinking the government will subsidize it, how is a sufficient subsidy different than public education?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER184> > Where are the supersonic aircraft?

They are out of business as they are not economically optimal for the market. I see where you're going though.

> The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things. The problem is > inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these > things.

> And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

This is an accusation for lack of motivation. An accusation without any specific substantiation. Hindsight is not a fair substantiation for such accusation.

Motivation is the preference for getting into the most favourable thinkable outcome from the available starting conditions. The current situation was beyond most people's thinkable outcomes, so most of us were caught off guard.

> Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination.

Agree on this. Perhaps I'd say it's a failure of being informed on this possibility. But that's it.

> Why shouldn't regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?

Welcome to the USSR.

If Harvard isn't incentivised, demanding that they build will not make anybody better off.

> Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do > you think we should build?

I think Marc Andreessen should manually manufacture surgical masks in his bedroom 8 hours a day 7 days a week and supply Department of Health & Human Services free of charge.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace)

</comment><comment><USER185> _Solve the climate crisis by building — energy experts say that all carbon- based electrical power generation on the planet could be replaced by a few thousand new zero-emission nuclear reactors, so let's build those. Maybe we can start with 10 new reactors? Then 100? Then the rest?_

Yeah, let's not do that.

<comment><USER186> why not? It's our only truly scalable low carbon source right now

</comment></comment><comment> pcj-github Did anyone else come away with this article thinking Marc Andressen is overrated and completely out of touch?

<comment><USER187> I partially did. I think the article puts its finger on the main "pulse" of the general problem most people feel with American, perhaps more broadly Western, society- but doesn't offer anything more substantive then a vague "call to action"

if I had to make succinct guess to this "general problem" \- I'd wager simply that most people feel like our current institutions are failing to meet most of their needs, and there doesn't appear to be any sense that these problems will be readily addressed anytime soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER188> > I'm with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of > people we don't know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and > should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for > the investor and the customers who are served.

I'm not familiar with Nicholas Stern, and will look him up, but does anyone here want to elaborate as if you were talking to a five-year-old?

<comment><USER189> At this point in the essay, Andreessen is wondering aloud why more building hasn't happened in the United States to solve problems in fields like education, manufacturing, and transportation.

He asks what the reasons could be, and lists several rejecting each of them. One reason that he rejects for why more building hasn't happened is capitalism.

Andreessen thinks capitalism can't be the reason for us not building because the fields he mentions are places where it's profitable ("highly lucrative") for businesses to operate. Replacing capitalism with another system (say communism) wouldn't solve our inability to build, in Andreessen's view.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Communist societies build less, and somehow also pollute more.

<comment><USER190> Citation needed. The USSR and PRC both went from agrarian societies to industrial powers in under 50 years.

<comment><USER191> You'd need to argue that they did it faster because of communism. In fact, China starting growing when opening up to markets. Oh and tens millions dead each. And the pollution & resource use is worse too. See [https://www.amazon.com/More-Less-Surprising-Learned- Resource...](https://www.amazon.com/More-Less-Surprising-Learned-Resources- ebook/dp/B07P5GPMTY)

<comment><USER190> No, that would be moving the goalposts. The GP post claimed that communist societies "produced less" (I made no claim about "polluted more," which the GP post also stated). I gave 2 examples showing very large countries that went from zero to world industrial power in 50 years. China is very near the top in world GDP right now. The USSR put both the first human and the first artificial satellite into space in that timeframe. Show me a capitalist country that's accomplished so much so fast.

<comment><USER192> The reason you are talking about growth over a 50 year span is because your basic capitalistic countries like the USA didn't get to play catch-up, because they were always riding the front edge of technological advancement.

Since the PRC's timespan was post-WWII, it's fair to compare them to the Asian tigers and Japan. It's easy to see which did better. Edit: Same goes if we're talking about "building more" rather than doing better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER193> > We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in > all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?

There are lots of dense cities, with beautiful buildings and streets, 5 story high.

</comment><comment><USER194> In my view, we're great at building private wealth, but have lapsed at building public wealth. As a society, we can be as wealthy as before the COVID, but we should think about how our wealth is distributed.

</comment><comment><USER195> I'm a founder, this piece stirs my heart.

However, build what exactly? I don't disagree with building hospitals and important public infrastructure. However:

1) More exponential growth isn't by definition for the better 2) We need to ask ourselves, brutally and honestly, what actually needs building, and what doesn't?

Aside from the obvious tangible tech and infrastructure we can build, there are also many tacit things we should be building and investing in, but that are difficult to measure: International cooperation, resilience, creativity.

There's no point in building more infrastructure (Andreessen) or trying to populate other planets (Musk), if we continue having paralyzing social inequality and international conflict, which destroy what we build.

<comment><USER196> > _[...] if we continue having paralyzing social inequality and international > conflict, which destroy what we build_

"We" (meaning the US and other developed Western nations) don't have "paralyzing social inequality". Social inequality, yes, but it's far, far from paralyzing. Also, "we" might be involved in international conflicts, but these destroy only a tiny fraction of what we build.

Your if-condition evaluates to false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER197> What I want to build is not attractive to short term investors. I want to build towards long-term growth. My challenge and current quest, is to figure out what that thing is.

</comment><comment><USER198> The problem is not the builders. The problem is those who hold them back: government red tape, bureaucracy and investors who prefer to put their money on another cat app.

</comment><comment><USER199> Just today I was on Twitter reading a thread where they were dismissing Chomsky as a "neoliberal shill". Couldn't imagine how.

The things we need to build will probably require deep involvement of the government, or at least the exit of cronyism and political wave bending on the part of the government. And the vision of a 20, 50 and 100 year plan.

Not sure I see that in our immediate future, here in the US.

<comment><USER200> Sounds great! But how do we separate cronyism and government? More government?

<comment><USER201> There seems to be a lot more cronyism in governments that don't do a lot of useful things. I'm sure there's favoritism in South Korea but at the same time their industrial policy is first rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER202> Building live here [http://www.youtube.com/c/TonyWorm](http://www.youtube.com/c/TonyWorm)

</comment><comment><USER203> Is he willing to pay taxes to fund all of that.

That is the core issue - we know what the problems are, the rich are just are unwilling to fund it with tax dollars.

</comment><comment><USER204> Workforce is like energy, difficult to store.

Boomers did build a lot because they needed a way to store this workforce, and building is the way. Capital was short and workforce abundant.

Now it's changing, we have lots of goods and savings to invest, but nobody to take them and actually DO something. Now is time to make sure that people that can create something actually do it. Interest rates are super low, and the economies are flooded with money.

What's the problem here. ZOMBIES! ZOMBIE companies that just drag resources and never die. If you don't let them fall and you never restructure the system gets sick. And that's what happens now, saving everyone ass is not clever, but printed money is going to those holes.

</comment><comment><USER205> > .. but why has so much manufacturing been offshored to places with cheaper > manual labor? We know how to build highly automated factories.

Western consumers have been voting with their wallets for decades - they want lots of cheap products.

If you want to get a new product produced today you'll likely be able to produce it much cheaper abroad, where there's a more efficient supply chain and cheap labour and with much less initial overhead.

Make your product more expensive you'll likely be out of business before the next global pandemic.

</comment><comment><USER62> _I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here's a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There's an excellent chance I'll agree with you._

It's interesting that he manages to say completely uncontroversial things, yet do so in such a way that even he finds them controversial. Is there a word for this phenomenon?

Reworded in a way that doesn't generalize quite so intensely and that doesn't use such an ineffective tone, this 'essay' (I don't really think it counts as one; it's more what you'd expect to hear in a speech) might have actually had legs.

<comment><USER27> I don't have an issue with the ideas. I agree with many of them.

I just find it a bit absurd that one of the top 1000 people capable of putting them into action is telling other people to go do it while he spends his time investing in them.

Capital is obviously helpful and crucial for building companies, but he is obviously satisfied waiting for solutions to walk in the door rather than chasing them himself.

<comment><USER206> You realize he's one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet as we see it today right?

Then you somehow proceed to say "well why is Michael Jordan talking about how X player isn't performing!? He should be out there playing right now"... uh what?

So a player moves to becoming a coach or some support character after decades in the game and that's your great comment?

<comment><USER27> > You realize he's one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet > as we see it today right?

I know who he is.

> Then you somehow proceed to say "well why is Michael Jordan talking about > how X player isn't performing!? He should be out there playing right now"... > uh what?

If he is on the bench and is talking about how performance is desperately needed, yes. Michael Jordan is old. He can't play as well anymore. Marc Andreessen is in the best position to be a builder in his life.

> So a player moves to becoming a coach or some support character after > decades in the game and that's your great comment?

Players generally stop playing once they for some reason can't (injury, age, etc) or begin to have other priorities and don't view the effort of playing as worth it.

I don't see a reason that he can't, so this is of lesser significance to him than the essay alone would indicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER207> _We also don't have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses._

This doesn't seem like a fair criticism. How do you create a vaccine for a disease you've never encountered? We have a hard enough time guessing the right flu strain to vaccinate against let alone a virus like Covid.

And people seem to ignore the flip side of this - spending money to prepare for something that never happens. I've seen plenty of people criticizing the government for buying tens of millions of doses of Tamiflu and Cipro that just expire unused.

</comment><comment><USER208> I launched Ask HN: It's Time to Build[0], Basically they are concepts you'd build often with a deep level of thought.

You should publish high fidelity ideas that keep you up at night.

Make a list of "n" things you'd do if qualifications and time and history and salary were no object.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912293)

</comment><comment><USER209> And this happens after trillion-dollar tax cuts to the rich and giant profitable multi-national corporations.

</comment><comment><USER210> I hope a16z puts money where their mouth is. Investors can own and drive a lot of what "we" want.

</comment><comment><USER211> Who watches "Westworld" and their takeaway is that our cities should look more like theirs?

</comment><comment><USER212> > Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits > involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are > hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard.

Maybe because investors think that every company will be a fintech company in the future? ([https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a- fintech-...](https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech- company/)).

> The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things.

> What's the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a > family you can provide for.

The top tier in the U.S. is enjoying a rather good living. They have houses, cars, cheap imported stuff, groceries delivered, accountants and good health insurance. They will also travel to some place in Europe or Asia for a nice vacation to avoid the bad and expensive service in the U.S.

The bottom tier (which is getting larger) surely wants these things. But they are hopeless and both the top tier and the government has given up on them. On other countries (i.e.: Singapore) the government think about the larger population. So they build some public transportation. In the U.S., there is a strong police force, so these things are under control.

</comment><comment><USER213> It's because we're reactive. Who wants to spend money on something which might happen.

</comment><comment><USER214> Elegant sophistry with the end goal as always to convince governments to tear back regulations.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's Time to Think.

This is a complex question, and the answer is not "we are a weak and lazy civilisation, if only we'd build build build instead".

We've put the world's mask factories where it made the most economic sense, and anyone willing to go out on a limb and move production to where it makes the least economic sense will be crushed by fellow capitalists.

I sometimes wonder if nerds are subconsciously benchmarking our technological and economic progress against science fiction staples, which are great for firing the imagination but are a monumentally poor benchmark of actual progress. It's very easy to utter the words "let's colonise the galaxy", but the logistical and technical barriers are formidable: in reality this undertaking is impossible for our civilisation, because we lack the knowledge that might allow us to do it (assuming that it is possible).

Commercial innovation is a very thin crust on top of a large body of fundamental research, which is required to make things like economic supersonic flight a reality for millions. So before we can "build build build", we must invest in fundamental research.

</comment><comment><USER215> The way cities are talked about like utilities in NA seems utterly bizarre to me.

</comment><comment><USER216> > Why aren't we building Elon Musk's "alien dreadnoughts" — giant, gleaming, > state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at > the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our > country?

> Where are the supersonic aircraft?

From an interview[1] with Sarah Lacy in 2018, Marc Andreessen already had the answers:

Q: Is there a way Andreessen Horowitz could stop backing more apps and throw some of the money towards the next SpaceX?

Andreessen:

The capital efficiency of having a small group of software programmers that build amazing software, who then go in and do something in an industry that's 100 billion or trillion-dollar industry, existing venture capital structure and framework is very good at doing that.

It works very well when it works, and I think that's very valuable. I always accuse Peter of dismissing all that stuff out of hand, which is probably an overstatement.

The part that I struggle with, and I'm on the verge of agreeing with, it's SpaceX, it's Tesla. The trenchant critique comes from Larry Page, Elon, and Peter. It's like, "OK, software. Got it. What about electric cars? What about the Hyperloop? What about the SpaceX private rocketry?"

What about these bigger, more transformational things? In particular, what about the things that operate more in the real world? What about the things that are really going to affect natural resources, pollution, livability of cities, and all the things that are outside of whatever's running on the screen?

I think that there's a validity. Google is doing the self-driving car. The self-driving car is going to work. By the time it works, it will have cost hundreds of millions, and possibly billions of dollars to make work. The self- driving car is not a lean startup. Not in any way.

SpaceX and Tesla were not lean startups. They were very big, ambitious. They raised a lot of money. The big question, the question I'm noodling around, is what about the efforts where you have to say, "This thing is going to take $300 million?" It just is. There's no shortcut and there's no minimum viable product. It is going to take $300 million, and that $300 million has to be reserved ahead of time.

Those companies have to be run completely differently because the stakes are so much higher.

What kind of entrepreneur can do that? Elon has proven he can do it. There are not a lot of other people in the Valley today who have done things at that level of scale.

There's a different kind of entrepreneur. There's a different kind of idea. There's a different kind of financing method. I think we'll all collectively figure it out, but we don't actually have it today.

What you get is you have a very special entrepreneur like Elon, and then he can do it. What I always say is, "OK, who is the next Elon? And then we'll talk."

\---

We need more VCs to bet on these ambitious ideas. No more Tiktok, please.

\---

[1]Original source: [https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/marc- andreess...](https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/marc-andreessen)

[1]Snippet: [https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying- car.ht...](https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying-car.html)

</comment><comment><USER217> The essay takes it as a given that we should have no confidence in democracy.

[Some] government regulations are bad. How do we fix them? Answer: rich people should manipulate the government even more! Clearly, that must be the answer.

But isn't that how we got here in the first place?

Believe me, I know [our] democracy sucks. I've been to planning meetings in San Francisco. I've seen democracy sucking first-hand.

Our democracy systematically rewards the people who have the means, time and incentive to participate much more often than the average citizen. Anyone who visits enough town halls can tell: you see the same people over and over again, speaking louder than anyone else.

When you have a system that repeatedly gives bad outcomes in a variety of different situations, it's not enough to try to force new particular outcomes. You have to change the way the system works. That doesn't mean you try [and fail] again to get disengaged people involved in politics. Those people aren't involved in politics for a reason. They're busy; they're not rich or charismatic; they don't have strong motivations.

What you _can_ do is change _the situation_ around the disengaged people. The easiest facet is money. Most people do not spend money on politics. Only a small fraction do.

Andrew Yang had a proposal to give citizens a hundred dollars each that could only be spent on political campaigns. It wasn't near the top of his list of proposals, but I thought it was the best idea he had offered. Most people don't have the time or the desire to _participate_ the way that social theorists imagine that they should. But what's great about money is that it is very easy to pool together.

The other thing that's great about money is that you have a lot of bandwidth for your signals. In an election, even a ranked-choice election, you submit maybe a few dozen bits of entropy to the great machine that rules the world and it tries to make something useful out of it. The advice bits are few; the world bits are many. The machine struggles. As the world becomes larger, the machine struggles more. Money is different; money can be spend in many, many different ways. The bandwidth becomes much larger; the machine can _at least in principle_ function better.

In order to actually make sure that money is used in a positive way, though, you need to have a model of the people as they relate to the system of government. Economists like to talk about how the market aggregates information. So too should a democracy. But where a market aggregates information about people's activities, a democracy aggregates information about their opinions.

In other words, in order to fix democracy, you need to find the best way to aggregate people's opinions.

My theory here is simple: most people have a fair understanding of a few things and a poor understanding of most things. If the system could be organized so as to encourage people to spend money on issues they understand better than the norm, the information quality will be higher.

Some of this will have to depend on goodwill. The most clearly lucrative way to spend your money on politics will probably still be to lower your own taxes. But if we give people the _opportunity_ to choose to spend their money on issues that relate to _them, specifically_ , they might feel more included and more inclined to participate honestly.

There is a crisis of institutional trust in America.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/22/key- finding...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/22/key-findings- about-americans-declining-trust-in-government-and-each-other/)

Improving democracy seems, to me, to be one of the best opportunities to rebuild this trust. People won't spend money -- "democracy dollars" \-- in a positive and conscientious way if they don't actually believe it will work.

How do other large organizations build trust across diverse populations? They _fragment._ The Catholic Church wields its immense cross-cultural power through a network where most end-users are much more concerned with their local clergy than with the goings-on at the top. This isn't necessarily a model to be copied in its entirety. What's important is to understand how the architecture brings people in.

People are less frightened by small organizations than large ones. What's needed is a mechanism to connect people to those small organizations so that their unique personal knowledge can be propagated through the system.

</comment><comment><USER218> Sadly I find so many things wrong with this "blog post".

When Silicon Valley embraced Wall Street, you signed your own death warrant, and basically said F* disrupting the status quo.

You can't possibly try to make this message politically agnostic and sound genuine (or informed).

</comment><comment><USER219> >I expect this essay to be the target of criticism.

It smells like an utopia. Chasing utopias already ended very bad.

One of the most important points of the communism was that everyone should have all goods and services he needs.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" said Karl Marx

>Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own!

My proposal would to let people, society and humanity live according to their natural rules and cycles. Trying to coerce people to do something "for the greater good" would never end up well.

Capitalism has it's problems, but we don't know any better system. And capitalism has the great advantage that it's a natural system, fitting society in an organic way.

To be sure that capitalism won't do much harm, we just have to make sure it is fair: no monopolies, fair competition and so on.

</comment><comment><USER220> I'm really looking forward to what he is going to build.

</comment><comment><USER221> Push aside your interlect for a second everybody, stop discussing, start building. Make groups for ideas - you did not understand the article, it did not ask for your opinion but for YOU taking action, if not now then when?

</comment><comment><USER221> Push aside your intelect for a second everybody, stop discussing, start building. Make groups for ideas - you did not understand the article, it did not ask for your opinion but for YOU taking action, if not now then when?

</comment><comment><USER222> >> The right must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly buybacks

Wow I never thought I'd see this on a blog of Andreessen Horowitz. I was starting to think that nobody cared about value creation anymore.

</comment><comment><USER223> Interesting essay, but more of a feel good elite speak that anything else. Feels like he skips over the main part on why "building" anything is difficult. That is because we have worshipped at the altars of capitalism for so long that we worship our one true god - SHAREHOLDER VALUE. This is not some rocket science on why we offshore, or why we invest in photo filter apps. Because that generates most returns in capital and creates much larger shareholder value. Building flying cars do not. Looks how much capital was required for Tesla to produce at any scale. And it is still struggling, what 15 years after it was founded ? Now look at Facebook, which was founded at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER224> This is the mindset we need in order to change.

</comment><comment><USER225> I expect a decently big infrastructure spending bill in the near future. It was even one of Trump's campaign promises and interest rates are near zero. I'm fiscally conservative, but I've seen the evidence from Southern Europe that Austerity is not the way forward. Many Southern European countries still have not fully recovered their GDP from 2008. I see many people weary about the future and I think it would do us wonders to see people excited to create a future with Sci-Fi level transportation, advanced manufacturing and cheap, abundant and renewable energy.

</comment><comment><USER226> This is a monumental piece. I loved it.

</comment><comment><USER227> People are by nature curious and eager to build. But we also love stories that are too good to be true.

We gave the lazy guys, good story tellers, all the power, and thereby the power how money flows and works.

Money is such a story: There exists some artificial thing, that can be turned into anything we want. What in reality doesn't exist, unless people work for it. Its seams more a trust relation turned into a fetish.

Obviously the stories turned everything in to giant circus pyramid game to generate more magic stuff, and everybody can have it. Well the poor without power, we keep stupid and poor, we can outsource to them, to do all the work and we all become story tellers.

Technology developed by curious nerdy scientists (also bad story telleres btw), could be used that a few are enough to feed and build for many many story tellers. Looks like magic, money can work for itself, hey more magic.

People who actually do something like women and artist and builders are continiously undervalued in this pyramid system as they are not 'usefull'. The working slaves all produced a lot of useless stuff. And as the majority became lazy guys, hey why change anything that is the way the world 'works'.

No, a little virus shows all was big story. In fact there is no magic stuff. Money is no value in it self. Now the few able to build are somewhere far away and take care of themselves.

Now the undervalued, who do the work are suddenly in high demand. Oh we clap and say thank you, thank you, but giving them power, mmmm do we really have to? Can we not just move on, go back to slavery fast.. Suddenly doing became interesting but hey please help can't do any more. I can generate trillions of magic paper if you want, eh trust me, please help. Lets get back fast to the time when the pyramid system worked, and we have to keep dreaming and move on.

It is likely that, we want to keep going on. Allthough it was just fun for a few. Humans love to continue to follow the path they are used to go.

Money is an invention and the way it flows is an expression of power but without trust it is useless. It doesn't do anything.

We all need food, a shelter, health, love, relations and a lot curious people solving hard problems, learning what makes a virus go around and how to stop it.

We should start to transform the rules and redefine how money works. For some this idea is so strange as this is a well known constant from heaven. It is not.

What if we give everybody some of this fuel. As long as you live you get money=trust every week just by existing you don't have to earn it and otherwise starve to death and die on the street. Then you can use your power, your vote to tell who you trust to send you a product or service. Oh but it becomes worthless over time. If you don't spend it, it becomes just paper. So no interest rates, no accumulation not inheriting wealth. Only one will have to pay for it, the earth we all together. What if...

What if we all share our knowlege for free..

Mmm now we have time to think. Some people don't like that. ..The long we think the more they yell to go back back...

A nice little story to good to be true.

</comment><comment><USER228> Great. After flogging for 10 years that software is eating the world and that hard sciences and physical world doesn't matter, a16z now is asking us to build? Color me surprised.

</comment><comment><USER229> I know this comment might be voted down, but I cannot help it: in times of crisis, ideology is not the answer. Capitalism works great in stable conditions. But it doesn't manage externalities very well. Hence the need for a strong public sector and safety net that can reel things back in line in times of crunch.

</comment><comment><USER230> If everybody is going to university no one is going to build anything

</comment><comment><USER231> It's depressing this receives this much attention on hacker news.

An extremely wealthy person making an imperative to less wealthy people to "ignore partisan politics and focus on results!"

To this person I would ask... who had the capacity, the agency, the capital, the resources, (and given this article, presumably according to them, THE VISION) this entire time? You did. So rather than make an imperative to everyone with less to "get back on the horse" and "put aside petty differences"– why don't you examine the decisions you made, and examine the systems you were party to, which led to this colossal failure.

"I'm with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don't know"... Uhhhhh people you don't know are dying everywhere meanwhile speculative finance i.e. markets i.e. your entire business is doing great. Fuck off

</comment><comment><USER232> I don't think capitalism is the straight up answer. If you are rousing people to create new startups so you can fund sure, but reality is the politics in the country should change. Politicians should be less self-serving and be able to think long term about the good of the people. Companies cannot create the infrastructure or planning needed for pandemics, that should come from the government. Sure companies can make the daily lives more resilient but the initiative should come from the government.

</comment><comment><USER233> I'll repost my Twitter thread here, which I wrote in response to Marc's post. Have great respect for him — and other technologists who believe in the power of progress (as do I); Though unlike Marc, I don't believe that greater effort and less regulation is needed; rather, we need to reexamine, methodically, the ROOT causes of what creates unaffordable housing.

Here, in summary, my Twitter thread. [https://twitter.com/heyMartinAdams/status/125166810880624230...](https://twitter.com/heyMartinAdams/status/1251668108806242304)

1/ Naturally, many entrepreneurs tend to believe that the insufficient supply of housing is either due to lack of willpower, insufficient belief in progress (see article below), high building costs, or due to restrictive zoning regulations.

2/ I hurt a little every time I read an article like that coming from well- meaning and intelligent people since these analyses are based on a core assumption: that if only those aforementioned constraints were removed, the supply of housing would increase in proportion to demand.

3/ This assumption, though, is incorrect, even though it's wide-spread and relatable, especially with entrepreneurs, who solve problems by building new things! (I love solving problems by building new things too!) However, the housing market works differently.

4/ Notice the open-air parking lots in most urban areas: they're hardly developed, used only for a few cars — even though (and this is crucial) there is an _exceptional_ demand for housing in those areas.

5/ It's not that these lots are not zoned for housing, or that it's too expensive to build any kind of housing on those open-air parking lots. None of these things are true. The reason these parking lots exist is because property ownership incentives are flawed.

6/ A person who owns an open-air parking lot often makes more money over time through property appreciation (even minus property taxes), and is therefore not incentivized to put this property to its optimal use, i.e. to use it to provide more housing.

7/ The core problem is that the land market (and therefore the real estate market) is, in actuality, an entry monopoly; an entry monopoly occurs whenever a market is closed to new participants because supply (i.e. land in prime locations) can't be increased.

8/ See, the market for automobiles (or software, etc.) is different: if there is a greater demand for cars, more cars can, and will, be created.

9/ New land in good locations, however, cannot be made; so if property developers want to build more housing in a good location, they have to buy land from someone who already owns land in that location (if they choose to sell, that is!).

10/ This artificially increases cost, artificially diminishes supply, and drastically limits the supply of affordable housing across the board. Unlike software, the housing market is not a free market. It is a monopoly. Like the game.

11/ There's a lot more to this topic, but I've done my best to summarize a small part of it here in this thread. As you can tell, it's a topic of great concern to me (to the extent that I wrote a book on it: [http://unitism.com](http://unitism.com)).

12/ I hope that what I was able to share has given you some pause; I feel a bit of a pang every time I read an entrepreneur saying "we can solve the affordable housing crisis by simply building more things with more effort." This hurts. And it's also uninformed in my view.

</comment><comment><USER234> Pay attention. This is how you rant.

</comment><comment><USER235> This is great. We are really playing the victim with this virus. I think we should be attacking it on all fronts.

Let's spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine in three months. Maybe have a national reserve of people standing by to participate in vaccine trials during a crisis.

Don't have some of the technology? Invent it! Rules don't allow it? Change the rules!

<comment><USER27> > Let's spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine > in three months.

The big problem is that we have to test it long term on a bunch of live human beings to make sure it doesn't deform babies or something. That is the major delay.

Build whatever system you want, but a perfect vaccine ready today would still be well over 3 months from deployment due to the need for safety checks.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/coronavirus- va...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/coronavirus-vaccine-when- will-we-have-one-covid-19)

<comment><USER235> How about a crisis only approval. During which time you don't give it to babies, pregnant women, etc.

It would still be enormously valuable for first responders and elderly. You make sure they have all the information about the unknown risks and let them be consenting adults.

A terrible idea for normal times but maybe ok weighed against the cost of doing nothing in a crisis.

<comment><USER236> One problem with this idea is that the coronavirus just isn't that severe. If the mystery treatment has a 5% rate of severe complications, then the cure would be worse than the disease. Even 1% might be too much: consider that not everybody will contract the coronavirus, and the people most at risk from it (elderly or with comorbidities) are also likely to be at the highest risk of complications from some novel drug. A 5% risk of serious complications isn't unusually high: thalidomide was around 50% for pregnant women.

If the coronavirus death rate was comparable with the Spanish flu - around 10% instead of 1%, and severe in young healthy people - we'd be a lot more justified in rushing through untested treatments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER237> Tech bro with the wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER96> I would expect Mr. Andreessen to have a more rounded understanding of capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER27> You are a billionare Marc. You are probably one of the top 1000 people with the capacity to build in North America.

So, how many of the things you list are you building?

<comment><USER238> The entire article is about top down resource allocation to build society. That can't be accomplished by any single person, organization or state.

Yours is a hopelessly cynical response that I hope you will reflect a little deeper on.

<comment><USER27> The entire laundry list can't be accomplished by one person. Can many of those things be done on a smaller level by a billionaire with his connections and skills? Absolutely.

Could he build just one state of the art dreadnaught factory to supply X for California? Yes.

Could he give a university a team of top-notch developers to create an on- demand bachelor's curriculum that could accommodate a million learners simultaneously? Yep. He could even go to Harvard and do that! They would take his call a heck of a lot faster than they would take mine.

I am not demanding that he do everything. Just that he start to lead the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER239> "Socialist" societies have the things you're asking for.

</comment><comment><USER240> Give me a break! "The problem is desire." You gotta be kidding me. Perhaps the real problem is a simplistic view of the world that fails to account for the dysfunctional forces at work in our society.

Did you even notice the Republican party in Wisconsin so desperate to stay in power they demanded that voters risk infection in order to vote? Have you not noticed the divisiveness that is overwhelming our social and political institutions? Did you notice that we have a generation of young people saddled with debt, while large corporations now line up for the dole? "The problem is desire"?

Sorry, but the condescension is unconscionable.

</comment><comment><USER241> As a non-American, don't vote Joe Biden if you want sweeping changes. Shouldve considered the other Democrats candidates. Youll end up with same status quo

</comment><comment><USER242> "I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. "

With good reason: in the midst of a global crisis, Andreessen launches himself into the billionaire-splaining hall of fame by enumerating a litany of critical projects he thinks others ought be taking seriously, while notably refusing to commit any of his own wealth and influence toward these causes, nor interrogating how his investing record over the last 20 years squares with any of these apparently deeply held principles.

If you think that's cruel, cover up the name on the essay and read it again. It sounds like an op-ed published by an undergraduate in the campus newspaper — anodyne generalizations set against the straw man of "Western life".

Net difference made in the world: zero

</comment><comment><USER243> I doubt Andreesen wrote all this with straight face. This part is especially egregious:

>The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don't like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

No Mark the problem is that American labor is overvalued and the Government does not subsidize it like it does for Agriculture. Why, you ask? Because manufacturing does not get you swing states.

American Manufacturing can rise again if there are no expectations of profit. Which is only possible with Government money. Or if you are Elon Musk, and can convince private investors to lose money for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER244> This is an upsetting article, sadly, I usually quite like what a16z has to say.

"We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?"

NO thank you, we are not part of your ultra neoliberal project.

China is the place with the 'most skyscrapers' and it's a craphole for most citizens.

There is absolutely no reason to 'massively build' other than cram more people in and line the pockets of the investor class.

"We have top-end universities, yes, ... Why not educate every 18 year old?"

Marc, with all due respect, do you remotely grasp the notion of 'class' and what's going on with our schools? (Edit - I'm not saying I agree with it, but it exists for certain reasons)

First - the US sends a huge percentage of it's youth to College - far more than other places.

Second - many of them _do not qualify_ and more and more are having to attend remedial classes. LA County kids were graduating at 55% rate, then 'poof' they lowered the standards to get a 77% rate.

US students are largely NOT ready for elite education. The issue is not 'getting everyone to harvard' \- the issue is 'getting everyone who deserves to go to a decent school - into one'. This actually isn't a huge problem in the US.

Third - we DONT need more college! College was a legit mark of the elite (legitimately) but it's not anymore. We are _failing_ huge cohorts of kids that do _not_ go to college! The 'problem' is that we provide _no path_ for non-college educated kids to get into the system. We also like to most college kids who think they get a free job. Nope.

Fourth - Education will always be at least somewhat elite. There will always be 5% who are considerably more spectacular, and they deserve a place to go. The US system is not perfect, but it's not bad either.

And this Thiel-esque bit: " Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?"

No - this post WW2 vector is the wrong kind of 'brute' Engineering. You know what matters more than 'supersonic flight'? Getting a much cheaper and safer flight. And guess what, that has been happening. The market pushes innovation in a specific direction and sorry, it's not 'to the moon' it's to 'LA to NY' for 1/2 the price.

Finally his bit about factories. I share his concern, but at the same time, he writes as though he completely ignores market realities again. We don't build more factories in the US because we've * externalized human rights* to another nation. If Chinese factories can pay pennies, fire people for going to the bathroom, spy on everyone 24/7, pollute up the yang, have the government back national players with money from the central bank and force international competitors out of business ... when then you see why there are 'few factories' in the US.

The 'answer' to 'more physical building' is something he is unwilling to say and that is a nationalist cause with trade barriers, something that neoliberals absolutely hate.

With issues such as lack of PPE, ventilators and chems. for testing it becomes much more clear obviously.

What would happen if the government literally said 'We declar this, that and this sector to be 'strategically imperartive' and therefore all production must happen within the country'. Well guess what? Those 'fancy factories' would get built. It would still be more expensive than China - but - the huge benefit from that is that this would entail a huge transfer of wealth to the poor and less educated for their doing actual, meaningful work. Which is always better than welfare or UBI.

Now - combine this 'factory' problem with the 'what do we do with all these no-college people' and you start to see how these issues resonate.

So yes we need to be 'building' but we need to be building 'up' not 'out'.

'Building out' is a 19th and 20th century strategy. More more more, bigger bigger bigger. Sorry - we are at least for now more advanced than China et. al. and the plan should be 'better'.

We do _not_ need large scale migration or even construction. What we need is a way to make our system fair, accessible, to make sure that 'everyone gets a spot' in the system that has dignity. All of our institutions to work at a higher level - for example, government IT is a complete mess - our services could be improved dramatically with smart policies. US University Systems could expand in the 5 Billion-person developing world, for example. The US is going to help fare more people in the world by being better on all fronts than just having a bigger body count.

I think we can all kind of agree with the impetus of Marc's rant, but I think this is not particularly well thought out, he could take this one as a first draft.

</comment><comment><USER245> It's time to go deeper?

When faced with an existential crisis, we tend to jump into fix it mode. But fix what? The symptoms or ourselves?

Let's start with ourselves: we have failed miserably at being stewards to this earth. We have failed (not completely but in some very dramatic ways) at building a better future for our children and their children.

We should fix us, first, before we move on to fixing the symptoms of our flawed way of being in the world.

Don't you think?

</comment><comment><USER246> Since you are reading why nations fail I would like to recommend a pairing. How democracies die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. The central thesis here is parties are the gatekeepers of democracies and when they put party before nation they erode the democracy that eventually fails. More often it's a slow degrade than a sudden spectacular collapse. The erosion paves way for leaders that are more "spectacular" in every negative way than the last one. Makes you think if trump is the problem or merely a symptom. GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers. His presidency will lead to future leaders justifying behaving like him or worse and the "norm" Keeps degrading over time to the point where people are fed up and bring into power a person that they don't fully understand and one who plays to their fears and portrays themself as their only solution. The book is amazing to read specially with the context of last 4 - 6 years of American politics.

<comment><USER247> >GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers.

Trump won the primary because he took positions that closely follow the article being discussed here, anti-war, anti-outsourcing (additionally he took an anti-immigration position) while all of the other 18 GOP candidates had the same pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-immigration positions that the party gatekeepers (big donors) favor.

I think Ziblatt and Levitsky don't like that voters agree more with Marc Andreessen and what Trump said in the campaign.

EDIT: People didn't elect Trump because they trust the gatekeepers and were tricked by them. They elected him because he was the only candidate who promised to do what the people wanted who was able to _go around_ the gatekeepers by financing his own campaign. We wouldn't be on the road to neo- Hitler if the gatekeepers allowed sane people with popular opinions into the major parties, but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars, raising wages, lowering corporate profits, and ending the cheap labor glut in ways that will seriously dent the fortunes and power of the gatekeepers.

<comment><USER248> > but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars

Do you want the terrorists to win? >:|

It is a remarkable bellweather of US politics that despite being a relatively peaceful polity the voting public have been unable to drag the country out of a permanent state of expensive and wasteful war. I think both Trump and Obama campaigned as pro-peace candidates so it is a presumably a popular position with voters.

US foreign policy is almost inexplicable when it comes to war. The death, destruction and raising a generation Middle Easterners with _excellent_ motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy. It also doesn't look profitable.

<comment><USER249> > US foreign policy is almost inexplicable when it comes to war. The death, > destruction and raising a generation Middle Easterners with excellent > motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy. It also > doesn't look profitable.

Not for the U.S., not for its citizens, but for a certain set of people the constant war is very profitable. And I think you'll find that those that profit from war have considerable influence over the foreign policy that keeps us in constant war.

<comment><USER250> War is bad for business, unless war _is_ your business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER251> A capitalist blames a lack of demand for the deep socioeconomic flaws that disasters like this shine an ugly light on. By his logic, if people wanted these things, capitalists would be able to make a ton of money off of them, and so it's everyone else's fault for not creating the demand.

And I don't know the original quote, but the idea that "capitalism is how we take care of people we don't know" is a hilarious feat of mental gymnastics to frame such a inherently self-centered economic system as some sort of inherent altruism.

He challenges the public sector to make better things than the private sector without even acknowledging the massive and growing asymmetry in the resources available in the private sector to accomplish these things.

And lastly he attempts deflect criticism like mine by writing off any counterpoint as "attacking" his ideas and instead asking we talk about what we would "build" and therefore take his deeply biased assumptions as axioms.

It's not the only factor, but to look at this problem without critically evaluating capitalism's role is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Now that we are in a point in time where the more wealth and power is being accumulated by an ever shrinking pool of people, capitalists like Andreessen have more power than ever to employ these kinds of changes. If the supposed demand is not there, then maybe take that one of many signs that capitalism is a dead end.

</comment><comment><USER244> The most sorely lacking in self-awareness aspect of his post is that a16z is a _primary driver_ of a flavour economic (and social) neoliberalism that is a 'root cause' of almost everything he lamented.

1) If non-college educated kids had a legit path into the market (like they do in Germany) then surpluses would be more evenly distributed and housing wouldn't be such a problem.

But they don't have path because a) industry won't train and b) the US is an economically liberal place - there is no communitarian impetus (like Japan/Germany) to structure. The US doesn't really care that much about citizen v. non-citizen - the economic benefit in the short term is outsource/insource - there is no consideration for the population.

 _US Citizens are an externality to the business world_.

2) On the college side, the US has already financialized the college race, arguably to a nearly corrupt degree. There are tons of kids going to Uni in the US, many of them ill-prepared, and then will be over-indebted.

3) Silicon Valley VC does _not_ want longer-term risky bets, they want to make short term bits with big near term payouts, with long term outcomes again, irrelevant.

It makes _much_ more sense to invest in something like Twitter/TikTok/SnapChat than most other things in this context.

4) And _who_ exactly built those supersonic planes? Was it VC's? No! It was generally the government, with the impetus of war, specifically WW2 and the Cold War! Literally ARPANET.

5) 'Building here' would entail a coordinated national strategy that is anemic to free-market types they usually can't even contemplate it. It would take something like an economy-destroying epidemic (!) to realize the consequences of their lack of strategic investment at very least in things like specific manufacturing (medical, medicinal) and food production. All of a sudden those farming subsidies start to look a little different!

6) So what issue ties all of Marc's seemingly disparate points together? Why didn't he look deeper at Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore as examples? What's actually going on there at a more fundamental level that's different from the USA?

I'm not necessarily advocating for some big 'state-managed' anything or huge governmental intervention. But I am certainly advocating for rational and specific nationalist intervention, with a communitarian attitude - or at very least the contemplation of it.

The fact someone so enormously intelligent and influential 'didn't even go there' I feel is because the language is literally lost in North America. They have no idea what it even means. Much like entrepreneurialism, especially 'creative destruction' is a really hard concept for many business circles in Europe to get. It's like a foreign language.

<comment><USER252> I don't disagree on the primary point you're trying to make, but I feel like you have a warped image of -at least- Germany. Germany has a housing crisis as well, rent is through the roof in the major metropolitan areas.

> The US doesn't really care that much about citizen v. non-citizen - <USER3> > economic benefit in the short term is outsource/insource - there is no > consideration for the population.

That's very true for Germany as well.

Germany's Nazi-past has left the political climate in a state of explicit denial of self-interest. Obviously, Germany very much _has_ political and economical interests as any nation will. The main difference compared to the US, Britain or France is that it's a big no-no to say so in Germany. Concerns about the impact of decisions on Germany's citizens are considered nationalist and suspect of being far right.

<comment><USER244> I'm a non-German who lived in Germany, the US, and other places.

As you say 'it's impolite' to talk about the citizens in a nationalist way, yes, but Germany (and many other nations) are still deeply ethnocentric - it's by default. Almost everything about Germany is 'German' and when almost all economic, political and social concern on a broader level is about 'Germany'. It actually takes some intellectual effort to go beyond and think in terms of 'Europe' or even 'The World'.

'Not being so nationalist' is a social artifact of many nations these days, and I suggest it's just a healthy dose of self-awareness, but it doesn't change the definition of what the community is in the minds of citizens.

FYI I should point out that I don't think the US in a 'Germany model' would somehow result in the government building rocket-ships, but it would result in healthcare, better employment terms.

<comment><USER252> Possibly, though it's a cultural thing, so I don't believe you can simply say "we're switching to a Germany model". The US is very individualistic, Germany is more collectivist. Individualistic cultures are more unequal, have issues with high taxes, government regulations and so on. They are much more flexible, can react to changes and move fast. And, as the Facebook motto goes (or went), sometimes they break things.

As for the claimed anti-nationalism, I fundamentally dislike it because it's a charade from start to finish. When "I want A" becomes amoral, everything gets wrapped in fifty layers of misdirection and rationalization, and finding compromise gets even harder because nobody can admit to what they actually want. It's a pathological trait in individuals, and I don't believe it's healthy on a society level. I'm not saying "that's how it has to be", rather "that's how it is, so let's not pretend it isn't". At the first sign of trouble, it's becoming evident anyhow, but if our arrangements are built on different assumptions, the damage will be much larger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Ah yes, the lack of success in our nation is purely the individual's fault. Your fault, my fault. There are no structural issues, misallocations of capitals, disincentives. You should be working harder on bigger problems! Quit your job at Walmart, and start working on things that matter.

What the fuck Andreessen? Are you so out of touch with reality that you think if the working class just worked a little harder, a little smarter, then we'd have flying cars?

<comment><USER253> > There are no structural issues, misallocations of capitals, disincentives.

Who created the structure? Who allocates capital? Who creates incentives?

These are not natural phenomena that arise without human intervention. _Someone_ made the decisions that created them and _someone_ has the power to make different decisions. Yes, even decisions that you personally make might contribute in some way.

Instead of throwing up your hands and blaming everything on "structural issues" look for something you can do that makes a difference. Maybe it's a small difference, but large societal change can often be the result of an accumulation of small actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It is interesting to see Marc Andreessen in 2020 to quote Mencius Moldbug from 2013 almost word to word.

To quote Mencius directly -- " One pathology of our age is a childlike credulity in the magical efficacy of complaint. Don't complain, build. We have done well at complaining; so what? What have we built?", which is basically tl;dr of Marc's article.

<comment><USER254> Gandhi's "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." while a little more abstract is essentially the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Curious question: how come Horowitz does not address the successes of Taiwan or Mongolia?

These countries did far better than the West. They also acted quickly. So, it is obvious that to have done better with COVID-19 we simply needed to "build" a Taiwan.

Oh, but that's right, Taiwan has zero trust in the CCP (or their WHO lapdog) and shut out the Chinese way before anyone else ... I mean that could have been the solution too.

> What do you think we should build? There's an excellent chance I'll agree > with you.

Great! Then let's start generating that anti-CCP propaganda sooner than later!

</comment><comment><USER255> Apropos anthem track:

 _It Takes Time To Build (With Skit) 2004-01-01_ \- Beastie Boys

[https://youtu.be/fGv2VqE3xbY](https://youtu.be/fGv2VqE3xbY)

[https://open.spotify.com/track/0JXd86ImsreGIfgQoVsrYt](https://open.spotify.com/track/0JXd86ImsreGIfgQoVsrYt)

[https://www.last.fm/music/Beastie+Boys/To+the+5+Boroughs/It+...](https://www.last.fm/music/Beastie+Boys/To+the+5+Boroughs/It+Takes+Time+to+Build)

</comment><comment><USER256> But for the screwed policies/priorities of Politicians, #Covid19 could have been prevented in Rest of the World if ALL International Passengers were screened in Airports from January 22 [https://archive.vn/mlTxn](https://archive.vn/mlTxn) [http://archive.vn/Z0pzQ](http://archive.vn/Z0pzQ)

</comment><comment><USER257> What was needed for the West was to just get serious about the disease and Lockdown. As early as January or February. A country as populous as India (with 1.3 billion people) has been under lockdown for well over 27 days and counting. Will be under lockdown till May the 3rd (and might get extended too if the curve has not flattened). We went in early unlike Italy or the United States. And it was a complete shutdown and not partial.

Even before the Lockdown commenced, we were testing all travelers as early as January and isolating those who were showing any signs of sickness. The Western countries did not do any of it. These two things alone helped slowdown the spread of the virus. There was no need for large amounts of ventilators, masks or PPE. Just common sense.

What the West got wrong was not "lack of ability" to build things. It was "lack of agility" to respond to the emerging crisis. The West should have gone in for a complete lockdown. The West should have tested (no contact thermal testing would have been sufficient) all travelers at the entry point. This slackness cost so many lives!

I remember having a discussion [1] about this almost a month ago when the first major destructive potential of this pandemic was still unravelling in the West. Many were skeptical about how India would respond and that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But no such disaster happened because of how proactive the Government of India had been since January. This proactiveness has allowed India to have really low number of positive cases compared to the West. This also doesn't put pressure on the medical system.

The lesson to learn here is that you should use common sense. A lot of it. First control the spread of the virus and then work on a cure. You can't let the virus wreak havoc and then expect a vaccine or a cure be available immediately to tackle it. It puts unnecessary pressure on scientists who need crucial time to figure out a cure. But I guess it is too late now and the West will just have to ride the wave. Unfortunately a lot of lives will be lost in the process. Very sad.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609604)

</comment><comment><USER258> This _reeks_ of Hypocrisy. After years of VC companies investing in bat-shit ideas they now cry about not having solutions for bat-borne illnesses. Oh "failure of imagination" when they poured _billions_ into the lack-of- imagination ideas such as WeWork, Uber, AirBnb, and others.

Oh now we need imagination when companies with potential solutions for these problems over the past few decades couldn't get these investors attention, who would much rather throw more money to the same set of well-connected entrepreneurs than ignore the innovation happening all around the world in small cities and mid-sized towns, coming out of universities that aren't in the Silicon Valley / SF are or NYC or Boston.

So, the chickens are coming home to roost. We have societal problems that Silicon Valley VCs haven't done anything to solve. Am I surprised? Hell no. Do I believe this woah-is-us "let's build" BS from the same VCs that have built what we have so far. Hell no.

We need new imagination for investors too. The same class of investors will give us the same class of solutions to the same class of problems. Let's look elsewhere for ideas and inspiration. The solution is not Silicon Valley VC. The solution is not the same profit-driven health care institutions. The solution lies elsewhere. And that's what we really need imagination for.

<comment><USER259> This comment breaks the site guidelines. Most importantly this one: " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "

But note also: " _Please don 't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It's generally better to wait to cool down before posting. That makes it easier to follow the site rules. In addition, you'll think of better points to make your case with, and will be more likely to notice anything untrue or unfair in what you are inclined to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER173> One cynical take on this essay could be that Andreessen is bashing the West in order to please Xi/China and gain access to investments in the East.

</comment><comment><USER260> > Why aren't we building Elon Musk's "alien dreadnoughts" — giant, gleaming, > state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at > the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our > country?

Because we have few of the industrial titans which are required to spearhead that and round up (or possess) the necessary capital. This sort of outcome does not magically self-assemble, it starts with one person that takes action. You actually need hyper competent, hard charging, ambitious, skilled people of all sorts to go after the extreme challenges represented by such a huge re- industrialization. These people and their talents no longer exist in such high numbers among the population as they did prior to the gutting of the US industrial age. They are now rare and the capital that desires to fund them is equally rare.

If you want to produce them, you need to completely alter the incentive structures we arrange our economy around.

We should have 0% corporate tax rates for all domestic manufacturing concerns, to get started. Tax individual income at a higher rate.

Implement a robust system of income tax credits and abandon the minimum wage as it exists today. This is not my idea of course, Warren Buffett is probably its loudest supporter and he is absolutely right. Set the income tax credit system such that it guarantees a higher minimum wage of at least $12. By removing the strict front-facing minimum wage we have today (which blocks labor from the market), all businesses would immediately aggressively seek to hire anyone and everyone they can get their hands on. The workers would be guaranteed a minimum wage by the redistribution income tax credit system and there would be no labor-value blocker (aka the minimum wage) keeping businesses from hiring people.

If a state has a $12 minimum wage, and your labor is only worth $9, you're screwed. This solves that.

It's about absorbing max lower skill labor (where the unemployment problems tend to be over time) into the workforce. You make labor artificially cheaper, while simultaneously paying that labor a fair wage: we subsidize the outcome we want. They produce, they earn a good wage, they build savings and can start to become asset owners. They also start learning new skills (and later might start production of their own based on the accumulating of experience at making goods; an important catalyst in re-industrialization). The combination would unleash epic common-goods manufacturing output the likes of which the US hasn't seen in half a century.

It would make it economical to manufacture low-margin, lower value goods in the US again. It becomes a de facto subsidization for employment and manufacturing.

This would instantly change the US economy for the better.

<comment><USER261> How would that minimum wage replacement work? Wouldn't every minimum wage employer just switch to paying $1/hr or whatever, and let this system pay the rest? That would mean such companies couldn't give their worst a $1/hr raise without paying $12/hr more. I seem to be missing something.

<comment><USER260> That would be true for the absolute lowest value labor. Only about 1% of the labor force earned the minimum wage in 2019. Maybe that would increase to 3-5% under this scenario, with higher real wage compensation covering more people.

The competition for labor - which exists at all times in some form - <USER4> continue to force businesses beyond the floor of the income tax credit line for the extreme majority of labor. A person that now earns the minimum $12/hr via the tax credit system, a business can offer them $12 + their own $3 cost ($15/hr total to the employee), and steal them away for relatively inexpensively versus the old minimum wage costs. The business might have been paying a $10/hr min wage in their state previously, for example; so paying $3/hr for that labor is still a net savings. You could gradually eliminate the tax credit as you step up the income scale (maybe every combined dollar above $12/hr the person earns, one dollar in the credit vanishes; so someone earning $20/hr total, that employee loses $8/hr of the credit, so $16/hr of that has to come from the business; or half that rate of vanishing; you get the general idea). It's entirely plausibly this would massively boost income levels for the bottom half of workers, as businesses would offer over the $12/hr line to lure the best lower skill workers (it would still be net cheaper to the business than the old system, which is why they'd do it). It would also make a lot of small businesses solidly profitable and encourage higher rates of business formation again (most mom & pop businesses operate at very thin margins; would have to implement some new fraud checking and minimum revenue requirements perhaps; have to avoid various fraudulent employment schemes). Also, the credit should apply to lower income waiters also, they can keep tips on top of that (if they yield enough combined income, it would be taxed; a person earning the minimum $12/hr pays zero income taxes, over that we'd have to decide where income taxes begin and how they climb).

We would continue to tax normal corporate income outside of manufacturing (and we could begin by just experimenting by dropping manufacturing taxation to half the normal rate, test the outcomes it generates). The increased personal income taxation pays for the new redistribution model. We would want to reform our personal income tax system further to optimize, maximize it (including treating all income equally for tax purposes).

We could entirely exclude high wage employees from the income tax credit system, so those employees are not subsidized in this (if your engineers are making $125,000 they don't need the $12/hr income tax credit underneath them).

We simultaneously could alter some welfare benefit programs that are no longer as necessary as a larger share of the population is working and earning higher wages (you rebalance the system in other words).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER262> If we didn't have unlimited travel across borders this epidemic would have never happened.

Absolutely nothing would need to be built to achieve this.

<comment><USER165> Considering that even North Korea has infections, isn't this false?

<comment><USER262> Viruses like this can spread very quickly and develop to pandemias only because we can fly from China to New York in one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER263> The core problem is too much regulation and the associated bureaucracy and legal percussions that come with it.

Regulation is always presented as a tool to 'protect the public' but usually just serves to protect the wealth of the leading players.

Anything that is regulated moves into a state of deadlock and now most industries and our society as a whole are in this state. Most don't dare to do anything entrepreneurial, because there are legal percussions waiting for almost any meaningful economic activity you could initiate.

A highly mobile free market capitalistic system is a threat to those in power. They don't want more bold entrepreneurs who could compete and potentially endanger them. They want people who do their jobs 9-5 and then go home and watch TV.

If we want to move out of this society-wide paralysis, we need grassroots political movements who systemically disassemble the regulatory walls that have been built over decades and centuries.

People need to wake up to the fact that regulation isn't meant to serve them but is intended to keep them at the bottom. Because when the current market leaders of an industry rose to power, there was no regulation yet, which made their success possible in the first place.

If you argue that this is how things should be, namely that industries should only be unregulated in the beginning and then become regulated once you have a few dominant market players, it creates a big problem: It means that we carry a long tail of highly inefficient industries with us, because regulation makes new competition so much harder in these 'older industries'.

I think we can see that today with industries like mobile carriers for example. Basically an oligopoly which dictates prices and creates huge shareholder profits year after year.

Each industry is a pillar of society and we need to break open these 'older industries' which were heavily regulated and have them catch up to the status quo through new competition. That means going head to head against a lot of people who have a lot of capital at their disposal to prevent that from happening.

</comment><comment><USER264> > New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as > medical gowns.

Yeah, NY also put out a "desperate call" for "40000 ventilators" in spite of needing only 6000. So that's really not a good indicator of anything.

Not to disagree with the core premise of the article, of course. We must be able to manufacture all critical equipment and supplies on US soil, with significant surge capacity.

> In the U.S., we don't even have the ability to get federal bailout money to > the people and businesses that need it.

False. Our family of 3 received $2900 because my wife and I took 2018 off so to the IRS it looks as though we need help. From which I conclude that everyone who made below cutoff threshold (which is unusually high for this) got money directly into their checking account, even though most people haven't been laid off yet.

And small businesses so far got $350B, with more blocked by austere scholars of pork in Congress.

> We should have gleaming skyscrapers

The utter devastation high density living is causing in NY would suggest otherwise. We need to spread the fuck out.

<comment><USER201> Small businesses were _approved_ for $350B, most of which has not yet been disbursed, and only about 50% of the needed amount has been approved.

<comment><USER264> False. It's all gone by now: [https://www.geekwire.com/2020/federal- governments-350b-small...](https://www.geekwire.com/2020/federal- governments-350b-small-business-relief-fund-runs-money-less-2-weeks/)

I do agree it's not enough though. Take it up with your representative.

<comment><USER201> We said the same thing. There needs to be at least 50% more funds behind the PPP.</comment></comment></comment></comment>