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It’s Time to Build (a16z.com)
1820 points by jger15 on April 18, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 1008 comments



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.


Thanks, agree, great book. I think of it as "Why Nations Succeed" instead. Inclusive institutions = economic generativity = non-zero sum. A more philosophical version is https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse-ebo...


> 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.

Sure, but is this actually a high order blocker? I'd argue that it's not even a first order effect. The problem here is not that we don't have enough insurance capacity; the problem is that we don't have enough ventilators. And it turns out, actually building those things to spec is hard. Intellectual property and regulatory capture are bad things to be reduced, IMO, but they're only part of our current equation.

The moneyed classes of America don't like redundancy and they don't like long term investments. Since they hold such a huge chunk of wealth compared to the rest of America, their preferences (which I might note, Marc represents professionally) make these decisions long before patent troll lawsuits or building inspectors can rain on any parade.

> 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.

Litigation is the most costly way to settle these things. Your idea would require even more startup capital per small business to overcome the legal obstacles you seemed eager to abolish.


We’re not necessarily talking about litigation here. Like another commenter pointed out, other legal system allows you to ask the courts for decisions without an opposing party.


We're actually not running out of ventilators anywhere. Existing installed base is sufficient and moreover, it turned out the federal government had a large stockpile anyway, which rather invalidates the central thesis of the article re: lack of preparedness.

The claim about ventilators was one of the first dodgy claims I noticed but really the entire first part of the article is a pack of lies. Andreessen says:

"We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents"

This isn't amazing. The amount of testing being performed has scaled exponentially over the space of just a few months, from a standing start. In fact there's a lot of evidence that the supposedly exponential growth of the virus was really due to an exponential growth in testing, when positives are viewed as a proportion of overall tests done. It's not an indictment of "the West" that materials run out after such a vast acceleration - if anything I'm amazed it didn't happen earlier!

"We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds"

All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.

I've been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don't understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn't aware of this.

"We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses"

Vaccines can't be created for a virus that doesn't exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn't remarkable: it's inevitable. As for therapies, that's what ventilators and CPAP are.

"then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production"

Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.

"it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives"

I'm actually on Marc's side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill. But this claim is also nonsense. FDA allows fast-track approval bypass for cases where someone is going to die without treatment anyway, and Ebola disappeared after 2014 - according to CDC the next time it was spotted was Zaire in 2018 with a grand total of 8 cases. That's not even close to "many lives".

"A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most."

Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.

"At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard"

In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can't be rapidly scaled up.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-factories-cant-keep-up-d...

Headline is literally "Factories are scrambling to make 20 times more face masks a day to keep up with demand amid coronavirus outbreak, but the masks are surprisingly difficult and expensive to make"

As for money, transferring money is easy. Figuring out the right amounts and the right people to send it to, without creating an explosion of fraud and waste - that's not so easy.


The number of tests done so far is about 4 million. Aren't you surprised to find we didn't have 4 million cotton swabs? Barely 1 swab per 100 people?

For reference, Q-tips come in packages of 500 for about $5 at your local pharmacy. They sell around 20 billion per year. Test swabs are somewhat more special and individually wrapped, but 4 million shouldn't cost a lot.


I want to make sure you know that this post is full of bizarre falsehoods. New York and Seattle definitely have ventilator shortages. California had a shortage and that federal reserve of ventilators netted us a small number of broken devices that had to be repaired. Lucky us, the State had a corporate partner that could do it.

I especially want to take issue with this falsehood:

> All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.

ICU beds are definitely in short supply. It doesn't matter if a bed exists in another state, folks who need ICU beds aren't usually fit to travel. That's part of why their care is intensive.

But also, only large hospitals have significant ICU capacity. So saying it's only limited to hospitals that have ICU capacity seems very disingenuous to me. It's like saying, "There is no shortage of ICU beds at local clinics." That's true, because no one expects substantial ICU capacity at local clinics. If they had it, it'd be welcome right now.

> I've been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don't understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn't aware of this.

Where are you reading this? I have relatives in healthcare in NY. They do not relate your story to me.

> Vaccines can't be created for a virus that doesn't exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn't remarkable: it's inevitable. As for therapies, that's what ventilators and CPAP are.

Who would CPAP machines be for? Why bring them up?

> Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.

The medical literature is in fact saying the opposite. But now I'm morbidly fascinated what the "reopen the economy" and "it's just the flu" crowd are circulating as "scientific literature."

> Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.

None of which are actually effective in the face of historic unemployment.

> In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can't be rapidly scaled up.

Making masks which reduce individual aerosol dispersal is easy. N95 masks are harder. We definitely could scale them up rapidly if we wanted to. This is the territory where things like IP law do matter and do cost lives.


Where are you getting your information?

Re: Ventilators in New York.

New York doesn't have a ventilator shortage and never did. It had a predicted shortage based on bad simulations, but never a real one. In fact it's now sending ventilators elsewhere:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ve...

"On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.” Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away: On April 15, he said he was sending 100 of them to Michigan and 50 to Maryland. On April 16, he announced he was sending 100 to New Jersey."

I'm morbidly fascinated by what you're reading that has led you to this belief.

Re: ICU beds: I was talking about the world generally rather than New York specifically. For example in New Jersey on April 8th only 3 hospitals were load balancing to others:

https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1247920918640410624?...

In New York city (vs state) the field hospitals that were built have hardly been being used.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/16/coronav...

"the field hospital constructed inside the massive Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Hudson Yards, had 340 patients as of Tuesday afternoon ... The facility has a maximum capacity of 2,500 hospital beds. As of Tuesday afternoon, the Javits Center hospital had treated about 700 patients"

Even on April 1st, the New York Post visited an ICU and found it was only handling double the normal case load, well within capacity (13 patients normally, 26 then):

https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/a-look-inside-an-nyc-hospital-...

Certainly there are cases where single hospitals ran out of space and started load balancing onto nearby hospitals. But, that happens during normal times too.

Where are you reading this? [empty hospitals]

The essay isn't only about New York, it's trying to generalise not only to America but the whole western world. And across the world hospitals are laying off staff due to underload:

https://news.google.com/search?q=hospital%20furlough&hl=en-U...

Who would CPAP machines be for? Why bring them up?

CPAP - the pressure type, not the sleep machines - is now a common therapy for treating COVID-19. For example the British Prime Minister wasn't put on a ventilator but rather given only CPAP (basically, a mask connected to the hospital oxygen supply). This is because there's a growing belief in the medical world that ventilators can cause more harm than good for COVID patients.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928156

None of which are actually effective in the face of historic unemployment.

That's not a rebuttal. Systems to distribute money exist. The idea they've never been built, as the essay argues, isn't right.

If you want to argue they aren't designed for sustaining a world under house arrest, by all means do so, but no country on earth has created schemes specifically for that.

Making masks which reduce individual aerosol dispersal is easy. N95 masks are harder

Andreessen was talking about medical-grade masks designed to protect doctors from patients, not ad-hoc home made things. And for those masks the point stands: it's hard to make them but he says it's easy.

As for medical literature, go read the links to papers and studies here:

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

There are many links to papers, comments and articles by doctors and other specialists who are arguing that the virus is clearly not as deadly as feared. For example, the serology survey that's in the first link under the April 18th update was discussed here on HN just recently.

That's good news, by the way! Don't you hope they're right? My experience is that some people posting on HN don't actually want to study what people bringing good news are saying.


Sorry, I already have decided in another post your "Swiss Doctor's" summary isnt't very credible and that National Review article seems to have an awful lot of hedging in it.

Thank you for the effort, but I don't believe there is much more to say on the subject.


> Thank you for the effort, but I don't believe there is much more to say on the subject.

You were wrong about what you claimed. That certainly needed to be acknowledged given your responses here.

The parent answered your false claim, with what Cuomo said and what is actual fact: NY does not have ventilator shortages.

Politico: "New York sending 100 ventilators to New Jersey"

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/0...

ABC Grand Rapids: "New York, California send Michigan ventilators for coronavirus relief"

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/new-y...

ABC Baltimore: "New York sending 50 ventilators to Maryland"

> "In our hour of need, other states stepped up to help us. We promised we would do the same," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Twitter Wednesday.

https://www.wmar2news.com/news/state/new-york-sending-50-ven...


I'm sorry, you're right. There was a narrow window where there were concerns, but that passed. New York DOEs face ICU bed shortages.

My response here was mostly dismissive because the poster above is clearly trying to downplay the crisis for reasons I can only speculate on. After taking a lot of time to read through the poster's previous links, I'm quite frustrated with how much time I wasted on disingenuous garbage links.

But yes, I lumped Seattle (which briefly did have a ventilator shortage) in with New York on ventilators. This is pretty much the only thing I was wrong about and I'll take this opportunity to own up. But I won't engage earnestly with the previous poster any further.


You're failing to take into account the triage onto palliative care pathways of many older people.


Please could you link some of the papers you mention on the scale of the coronavirus problem? I'm not doubting they exist, I'd just be interested to have a read.


This page has many links to such papers:

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/


"A swiss doctor on COVID-19," huh? Well since it's written by a doctor we should give it the benefit of the doubt and read the page and the links. But I confess, upon doing so I find that this is a page full of good (and in some cases, familiar) resources presented in a way that reminds me of a well-produced climate science denial websites.

That's an incendiary claim, so please let me provide an example. Here's point 4 on the overview:

> The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality. Up to 60% of all Covid19-related deaths have occurred in particularly vulnerable nursing homes.

"Nursing homes" is highlighted and links to an article talking about mortality in nursing homes and long term care facilities. It is both cautious about its claims (pointing out data is not very good yet) an doesn't make the point that nursing homes are in fact the fatality concentration point. It's not clear how we'd draw a larger conclusion from this.

Another example, next point:

> Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 have proven to be false upon closer inspection. Many of these people either (did not)[1] die from Covid19 or they in fact had (serious preconditions)[2] (such as undiagnosed leukaemia).

Firstly, I'm not sure anyone has disputed that young people are much less likely to die of the virus. But there are two links in this point, one to a Daily Mail article about how a coroner is waiting for a toxicology report before ruling the cause of death is COVID-19. This is probably the right call, but an infant testing positive for COVID-19 appears to have died over respiratory distress. It's difficult to just shrug and go, "Oh well that's SIDS not the virus even though the nature of the death is identical."

Really, these points read like someone with an agenda trying to make a lot of cites for legitimacy. But there isn't a lot of evidence of a larger pattern here, just a lot of data which is then presented in a leading way to facilitate a narrative.

Another example of this:

> The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are (misleading)[3], since the number of tests also increases exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to total tests either remains constant between (5% to 25%)[4] or increases rather slowly.

This is another really misleading bullet point. Looking at [4], we see indeed that the over-time ratio of tests has remained at an average of 25% positive by country (this is of course averaged, hotspots see totally different numbers). But the author has previously pointed out that testing administration has risen exponentially, so this is a constant proportion of an exponential population. If we decline to extrapolate from this, the author cannot make their point. But if we do, we see an exponential growth in COVID-19 cases.

I see more examples but I won't further belabor the point. This resource is written by someone with an agenda they want to execute on. It doesn't appear to be someone honestly engaging in inquiry and arriving at a data-driven conclusion.

[0]: https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-co...

[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8193487/Coroner-ref...

[2]: https://sports.yahoo.com/spanish-football-coach-francisco-ga...

[3]: https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/coronavirus-irrefuhrun...

[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200415203945/https://mobile.tw...


.


> I really can't help but appreciate the irony of alleging agenda in the above poster's sources, while simultaneously citing the Daily Mail, Yahoo Sports, and Twitter.

The post you're replying to did not use those as sources. They were criticizing the website for using those sources (and including them here for reference). Look at the locations of [1] thru [4] in their comment: they're all in the body of quotes.


Thanks for pointing this out, I'll remove the above comment.


> I'm actually on Marc's side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill.

As I understand it FDA didn't approve Pandemrix, while EU regulators did give it fast track appeal.

Pandemrix causes narcolepsy in 1 in 60,000 people who take it. (so, for the entire US that's about 5000 with a life long debilitating illness that requires constant care.) The risk is very low, but it's there and we need to be careful about exposing a population of hundreds of millions to these risks just because we have an ideological opposition to any form of government regulation.


It's hard to form an opinion on that case without knowing more about Pandremix. How many people did it help? Is the illness it treats worse than narcolepsy? How many people are wrongly prescribed it?

I also wonder what kind of study found such a tiny effect size. 1 in 60,000 would require a staggeringly powerful study to successfully link it to Pandremix.

Not saying you're wrong about any of that, and I suppose I could go research these questions myself. But based solely on what you wrote I don't think there's any way to tell if that decision was good or bad.


> The moneyed classes of America don't like redundancy and they don't like long term investments.

This class denigrating language does nothing to elevate the discussion and it is absolutely false (in the sense that it is only a "truth" within your worldview and the worldview of others who share it), and it is false in the sense that it doesn't accurately describe the behaviors of individuals in the "moneyed class".

The "moneyed classes" as you call it if anything have more redundancy and longer term investments that most other classes. It is incredibly rare for anyone in the "moneyed classes" to not have a balanced portfolio of investments that add in fiscal redundancy in case one investment goes bad. The portfolios are also balanced insofar as balancing short term and long term growth depending on their investment horizon.

The problems you've identified have far more to do with a coordination problem than the vices of individuals.

The "moneyed class" is not one coordinated hive mind mass that all conspire with one another to avoid redundancy and eschew long term investments.

The "moneyed class" like the "unmoneyed class" are all individual actors each acting in their own self interest and trying to figure out an optimal solution given limited imperfect information and handicapped by many cognitive biases.

Any system that is going to solve the issue of redundancy and long term investments needs to acknowledge the reality of limited imperfective information and cognitive biases and the impact these have on human reasoning and the subsequent actions of individuals.


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.


Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is https://donotpay.com/


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.


Are bugs discovered and corrected faster today in law or in code?


The key part is that the court system can correct for a bug before the law itself is changed; it's a way to fix things as the code is being executed for a particular case, before the developers have even identified how/if the bug applies for other cases and figured out a general fix, much less implemented one.


In each case it may depend upon the 'application'.

For easily-understood fields undergoing well-scrutinized legal code changes it's (presumably) likely that legal drafting issues can be caught and fixed early.

Conversely, in software projects (even open source ones) where the users and authors are few and/or fail to pay attention to mistakes and errors, it could take years to report and fix issues.

All that said, in the presence of a mindful, careful and effective engineering team with responsive users, it does seem that software - or at least software processes like source control, code review and the democratized ability to contribute code changes - has an evolutionary advantage.


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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

(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?...

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


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?


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.


> 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.)


>government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words

The only solution is mostly forbid government regulation except for critical things, of which "sale of cabbage" and ten of thousands others now currently regulated are not.

In order to do that within a Democracy, you have to dispel the unconscious notion (that a lot of modern voters have), that the government is a father/mother figure that has unlimited resources, can't make mistakes, and its operated by saints with the "common good" in mind 24/7.


Maybe force the lawmakers to include a text explaining the "spirit" of the law, also including indicators to the law effectiveness. For example, a law is implemented to bring down then "car accidents per million" indicator. If one year later car accidents are the same or more then the law is scrapped.

What you propose of robo-lawyers and law as code sounds as the script for a futuristic Kafka's "The Process" as an episode of Black Mirror.


This made my day! Wish you all the best and hope that this will materialize. Who needs skyscrapers and stuff (Marc is writing about) if you can have computational law?! In the meantime I will try to escape the country that will adopt such techniques the last: ol Germany


Sure, but is immutability more important in law or in code? Updating a smart contract seems to be as tedious as changing a law.


Yes


“Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great.”

I’m not sure it is always great.

Studies show racism[1] and hunger[2] and can impact sentencing judgments.

> When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.

How is that different than software?

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-b...



Law should be objectively decidable. Thousands upon thousands of pages of enigmatic legalistic nonsense make it impossible to predict a legal decision. When there is this much law, it becomes a paradox where the result is actually lawless - it becomes the whim of a judge's interpretation.


I’m a big fan of anything that will bring effective legal access to everyone. Technology will definitely play a role, but so will legal deregulation. Lots of jurisdictions are experimenting with opening up certain areas of legal practice to people who aren’t lawyers. And they’re rebuilding systems (alongside technology) to make them easier to access without attorneys.

The troubling part is that at some point, we need to tackle electoral reform. Even if we tackle the legal system and provide effective legal access to everyone, we’ll still be a long ways from tackling mass disillusionment. Hell, in lots of cases, disillusionment and/or disenfranchisement are logical results of history!

Anyways, good comment!


A piece of this is to eliminate the friction of legal text by open sourcing legal templates, in a graph, on GitHub. The key word here is "source." Legal documents currently are blobs, not source. See github.com/CommonAccord/ Lots of exampless, including the YC SAFES, Series Seed, GA4GH data sharing, etc. It's not full algorithmic, but compatible with algorithmic approaches, like Mike Genesereth's and Meng's.


It seems donotpay can get you into a legal engagement easily, but the other party can tie you up in more legal battles that donotpay doesn't yet handle and then you are screwed if you can't hire and pay expensive lawyers.


This is also a failure to build. We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner and the legal profession too often gets fat fees for slow-walking legal proceedings when technology exists to make expeditious dispute resolution much faster. For example, I can think of no reason why we can't mandate that discovery must use electronic format unless the information was never before recorded in an online electronic system. Given that I have never seen a functioning typewriter in a corporate office, I imagine that would smooth things a bit.

Also, just as a matter of how the US legal system works, the presumption is that someone is innocent until challenged, whether by the state or by a private party. A prospective business could not file a petition with a court asking if their conduct was legal or not, since it's not really a controversy. But businesses will always do loads of due diligence with lawyers beforehand, who should help identify areas of legal risk.


Read "Why Courts Don't Work" by Richard Neeley, who used to be chief justice of the West Virginia supreme court. Courts don't work because a lot of people don't want them to work. If you could get a judgement in a week in a minor labor case, employers would have to obey labor law, for example.



> We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner

Is it being lazy or rather having tons of work that needs to be done too?


This is exactly how two of the biggest startups of the past 15 years - Airbnb and Uber - were built.

Airbnb and Uber built products that were in a legal gray area. Lawmakers are still catching up to them.


Key to their strategy was having deep enough pockets to fight many simultaneous legal and PR battles.


Which is enabled by VC funding, which IMO makes them complicit on a systemic level. It's arguable whether you can blame a particular investor for Uber's thoroughly rotten and antisocial business model - but once you see more of such startups getting funded left and right, it's fair to ask the question, "why such business model is even a possible option".


I don't agree that Uber's business model is fundamentally "rotten and antisocial". Short range point to point transport (cabs) was awful before Uber and Lyft. The rides are easier to get, the drivers are less likely to screw you over, and you know in advance just how much things will cost.

I'm glad they took on a legal gray area because cabs had completely used regulatory capture to get away with being a terrible service to the public.


I'm talking about the "it's better to force forgiveness than ask for permission" part, and they weren't in grey area - in a lot of places, they were doing plainly illegal business. I'm talking about their business model of "let's do illegal business and use deep pockets to keep regulators at bay, until we get enough public support to make ourselves invulnerable". Also known as totally unfair competition. I'm also talking about insurance and worker rights shenanigans, and a host of other sociopathic behaviors their management exhibited (all reported on in detail over the past years).

On top of that, cabs were awful in some cities in some places around the world. They worked well enough in others. Over here (Kraków area, Poland), we had private point-to-point transport companies that managed to change the law through a proper court process, like civilized people do.


>rotten and antisocial business model

What's rotten and antisocial about providing cheap, reliable transportation ?


It's about how it's being provided. The history of Uber's sociopathic and often outright illegal behavior is long and well-documented.


Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted, regardless of legality. Very few lawmakers want to aggressively go against public sentiment just because the law says they should.


> Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted

The people who want the service are not necessarily the same as the people who are affected by the externalities of the service.

Everyone loves having AirBnb available to expand selection in NYC when they visit, but how many New Yorkers who aren’t AirBnb hosts love having tons of short term rentals in their building?


I agree that people didn't really understand what they were getting into fully when they initially agitated for it, but it's definitely the case that there was broad initial public support which is what allowed the companies to get a foothold.


Seems like a good approach to me. Imagine if they waited and we were still stuck with taxis.


Technology innovation: "Can it be done?"

Market innovation: "Should it be done?"

Regulatory innovation: "May it be done?"


I also don't think you can just ask a court to answer a hypothetical in a binding way. You basically need to get into the legal problem first.


This is an American doctrine, that there must be an "actual case or controversy" - Canadian courts can and do issue advisory opinions to interpret regulation.


Which are still usually advisory and not legally binding advice.


I would hope they go a long way towards reducing your responsibility if you follow one and then run into a legal problem because of it.


Pre-enforcement lawsuits do exist to answer questions for parties prior to taking actions that would result in liability. One was just recently decided in favor of the ACLU.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/13055544225/dc-co...


Not a court, but government agencies can and do issue "guidance" documents after receiving feedback. For example, the EPA guidance on Class VI (CO2) injection wells [1] and IRS guidance on 45Q CO2 capture and storage credits [2]

[1] https://www.epa.gov/uic/class-vi-guidance-documents

[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-provides-answers-and-a-safe....


is that what suing for "declaratory relief" is, or is that only for civil law?


Problem is, the faster courts are, the more likely people are to actually wait for them, which ends up a net slowdown. Really the only path to success is, take a risk to try to beat the competition and hope the courts side with you in the end. And if you're successful, they probably will.


Build more courts until they can deal with the volume, or fix so your laws so that less people need to go to court


IMO this is a classic case of loss aversion. Enforcers of law are put in a position to make subjective decisions that impact them personally. They don’t want to make a decision. They want someone else to make a decision. Decision stew until they can be disassociated with any person or group. This takes time. Usually the decision is tempered to absolve all parties and thus be convoluted and misinterpreted. Rinse and repeat.


I don't get why everybody is raving about "Why Nations Fail". Their definitions of inclusive/extractive institutions seem hopelessly muddled. It is almost as if they've collected all the stuff they liked in prosperous countries and called it "inclusive" and then did the same with all the stuff they disliked in impoverished dictatorships and called it "extractive". If you try to distill a succinct definition of these concepts and then apply it, you run into contradictions such as (borrowing an example from Fukuyama): "The Indian political system is so inclusive that it can’t begin major infrastructure projects because of all the lawsuits and democratic protest, especially when compared to the extractive Chinese one."

If the thesis is "institutions are important for prosperity", it is kind of obvious. But the book does little to explain exactly what kind of institutions.


thank you, _Why Nations Fail_ is partisan hackery.


> 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.

Very often regulation starts lean, then inevitably some assholes take advantage of it to their profit, so the regulation becomes more and more specific and complex. Rinse and repeat.

It starts at individual level. In France, health insurance providers started reimbursing eyewear, with a rule "one pair of glasses each 2 years". Now everyone buys new glasses every 2 years, sharp, because "I'm paying for it", even if they don't really need new glasses. Stuff like this make insurance price go up for everyone as a result, which incentivizes you even more to be an abuser. The rules are now more strict about the how much is reimbursed, because people obviously go for most expensive Gucci frames allowed.


Insurance is not meant to cover routine purchases, it's meant to cover purchases that are unexpected and too large to cover.

We have a publicly paid health system in Norway, but we still have: * Copays until you reach €200 * No dental coverage for routine operations (only major surgeries) * No eyewear coverage (I assume if you have some eye illness requiring surgery or similar it will be covered)

Seems to work fine, and that France should change what insurance does cover


I think the single biggest roadblock to building new things is regulation. How do we eliminate most regulations, and simplify the rest to fight off regulatory capture?

What if we had a github for laws and required that anybody who worked on a law use their real name and if they were paid by a company they had to list how much?


Regulation is all about stopping people from getting taken advantage of, or hurt, usually by their own decisions.

Financial regulation is mostly about stopping people from selling dodgy investment schemes that are some variant of Ponzi.

Health and Safety regulation is mostly about stopping people from doing stupid things that might kill them.

FDA is about stopping Snake Oil salesmen. And y'know, making sure the drugs we're sold don't make us worse.

You can see it coming in the Cryptocurrency world - people lose money on stupid bets and then feel that someone else should have done something to stop this. Someone being the regulatory agencies.

So what would a solid set of regulations for crypto look like? What process would you devise that would result in a set of rules that prevented most of the crooks from profiting from their crookedness, while allowing honest folks to make some money investing in crypto?


"Use GitHub for lawmaking" is something I've had in mind for a long time. However, not sure how this could work in practice.

I've heard from a friend of mine who used to work for Deloitte (or similar kind of company) that on practical level, lawmaking often happens in those private consulting/lawyer's offices - it's not like a MPs sits down and write stuff down themselves. So the git commit would say "John Smith the lawyer" which tells you nothing.

There's probably also so many patches and reverts and rewrites going on that history would be really bloated. Or if you want nice history, you lose all those important nuances you wanted in first place ("who exactly put this comma here which changes the whole meaning?").

It would also probably horrendously slow down the law making process. (which might actually be a good thing in many scenarios!)


so when (extra) cost goes to zero, the demand goes to infinity?


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.

I agree with your overall point, but you have the regulatory differences between the US and Europe exactly backwards. Europe (excluding England somewhat) has a statutory legal system. Things are either legal or illegal according to laws that have largely been written down ahead of time that anyone can go read and figure out.

In the US we have a common law system where much of our law is written by the courts in response to specific cases where judges interpret the general principles described in the "simpler laws" you speak of.

In practice this means that, under many circumstances, things move a lot slower in the US because of the time and expense of litigation (and even the threat of litigation). This is one of the reasons that it's harder to build things in the US. Our public transportation systems (trains, subways, etc) cost on the order of 5-10x more than similar ones in Europe. Our different legal systems is one of the big reasons why.


I may not have expressed that point very well, but it seems like the common law system would encourage less explicit regulation rather than more, so that seems like a bit of a contradiction. Does the need for more litigation drive a desire to be more explicit in how statues are written?


As the parent notes. The issue is if you have a simple law say "Do not dump harmful chemicals into waterways used for drinking, shipping, etc." this leads to a lot of litigation regarding what is a "harmful chemical". If instead you have it all spelled out "harmful chemicals being one of coal ash, hydrochloric acid, asbestos, ..." (don't quote me on these). Business's know what the variables/costs effecting operations are up front. Only reacting and being liable if the list changes through the political process.

The parent was saying the US approach instead define what a harmful chemical is after the fact. Leaving companies to need "insurance"/a cost benefit wager before something is built. Otherwise they could be screwed later after litigation.

IMO, I can see both sides but preferably I would want simpler laws from political processes which are then refined into explicit interpretations by subject matter expert strong government institutions. But we have lobbying/revolving door government employees and trashy textualists in the US so it doesn't work out that way...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textualism


I think the modern US version is different:

A federal 3 letter agency unilaterally writes detailed regulations, that are for practical purposes law.

One problem is that the regulatory agency gets captured by the industry, which means the regulation ends up being a way for the established industries and companies to make competition unfeasible.


The regulatory capture conversation from the likes of pmarca is always about advocating reduction of regulation because otherwise the regulator starts working in favor of the big guys against the little guys. But to me that is the wrong way to look at regulatory capture. The antiregulation politicians are the ones that tend to put big business lobbyists in charge of regulation. We need good regulation, not less. Good regulation that evens the competitive playing field and protects exploitation of externalities. without regulation the bug guys lock in the rents with no space for competition. We need good regulation. But you don't vote for the antiregulation guy to get good regulation, he's trying to destroy regulation not improve it. Less government is a red herring, we need better government.


Thing is, good regulation is extremely tough. A good regulator needs to deeply, deeply understand the industry, where it has been, where it is going, and what the problems are; they need to deeply understand the spirit of existing laws rather than the letter of the law and be ready to thoughtfully and creatively deal with edge cases; they need to have some risk tolerance to allow for growth while still protecting people; they need to be able to balance the interests of competing groups; they need to be able to be proactive / innovate rapidly in the face of changing conditions meaning they need to understand the bleeding edge and be consulting with the groups at it; they need to see big problems like pandemics coming and push people in the right direction; they need to resist the calls for deregulation for deregulation's sake from industry as well as resist the calls for regulation for regulation's sake from politicians who want to appear like they're doing something about a problem; they need to deeply care about the users they are charged with protecting; Finally, they have to have brass balls. They have to be unafraid of standing up to politicians / the public / industry and saying you are wrong or sorry, we were wrong.

It's really tough to find lots of people who can do all that for not much money / acclaim potential.


I believe what you call pmarca's view is also the view of researchers in the field. The term "regulatory capture" comes out of the Public Choice branch of Economics.

> We need good regulation, not less

The result of the research is that that is, in general impossible. Sure, some regulators do good work for some period. But the general forces and incentives in play push quite strongly towards the regulator being captured.

The better working alternatives are laws, where disputes or guilt are decided by courts. Since there is no regulator to capture in this scenario, things work pretty well. Of course, lawmakers can also be captured, but that's harder.

One fascinating* thing with the field of economics is that so m any thinks their opinion is worth as much as the expertise of professional in the field.

You routinely hear people confidently claim the economics field is wrong about things they've studied for decades or centuries, because of simple arguments that are all thoroughly accounted for in the beginner literature.

* or "infuriating", if you are an economist :)


Sorry but an argument from authority in the field of economics is not even a little bit convincing to me. Not only is economics a "social science", which are notorious for lack of rigour, but economics itself is purposefully bifurcated into biased partisan "schools". There are many economists which study solutions to regulatory capture who do not suggest that regulators should be cut, if you're only aware of one school of thought in this area then you've been looking in a limited bubble.


We'll see how long that continues to be the case. Chevron deference is under fire from our whackjob supreme court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....


Not sure that is how the cookie crumbles, rather: it will be decided that chemical X is harmful at a certain dose, which leads to some permissible concentration Y of X, and that Y can then be used for regulation of disposing X.

A place that needs to dispose a certain volume of X with concentration >Y then pays a sort of a mixologist to dilute X to a concentration <=Y before dumping it all anyway (unless it would be less expensive and more practical to react X away).


This is a great description. And, to be clear, I"m not really advocating for either system being better. Just pointing out some of their differences.


It means power is captured by those who can afford lawyers, and lawyers are expensive. There's no way to plan your risks up front in an area with not a lot of case-law, because you don't know them - your business plan now gets to be "hopefully we win this case in our favor in the next 3 years, but if it goes all the way to the supreme court..."


Lawyers are expensive only if _you_ have to pay for them. In English law (UK/EU) loser pays most lawyer's fees. This also disincentivizes businesses to start unwinnable cases in order to ruin other businesses with legal fees.


Correct. Common law = less explicit legislature passed regulation. We have far less regulation of this kind in the US than in Europe BUT we have far more common law regulation.


Yeah, but when the practice of this is different with it often being up to regulators what actually is allowed and what isn't. The obvious recent example is that GDPR enforcement is (often intentionally) not strictly following the letter of the law.


Well, GDPR is not actually a law, but a framework that must be used by EU member states to implement their own laws. That may be one cause of local enforcement being not fully aligned with GDPR.

But yes, the local GDPR laws do seem to be intentionally underspecified, like you said.


Because a law is a machine to compact thousands of hours of ethical thought into an actionable doctrine. It's designed specifically to take the subjectivity and bias out of executing policy, which is introduced by a single (or small group of) human brain(s) working on a problem for a few weeks, at most. Courts are a last-ditch effort to jury-rig a conclusive plan of action to rectify whatever dilemma come before them; as with similar tasks, they're more expensive and time-consuming at-scale than just planning correctly at the outset.


> why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts

What incentives do lawmakers have to make laws simpler?


This is why judges cannot be the highest power - the people still need to be able to hold them accountable to ensure that the legal institutions don't become inaccessible to the common man.

(Not that they are accessible now... but it could be worse.)


That was Scalia's point in his dissent of the gay marriage decision:

Scalia argues in his opinion that the court is increasingly creating policy rather than serving as a neutral arbiter.

“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” he writes.

“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/246249-sca...

People in one part of the country go to the courts, and force their will/values on the rest of the country. Activists across the political spectrum do it.


It’s funny since that specific ruling is what stopped a minority of the US population from imposing their will/“values” on the rest of the country.

Clearly the electoral college and legislature is not setup properly to reflect the will of the people at this point in time, so we have a better chance of it happening from 9 Supreme Court judges.


Supreme Court judges are not reflecting popular will. They dont align with what the majority of population think.


How can we change incentives for lawmakers?


Campaign finance reform, same day primaries nationwide, vigorously prosecute bribes and conflicts of interest, make corporate lobbying illegal, prevent industry careerists from holding office, prevent outgoing politicians from working in the industry for some cool off period

These things aren't hard they're just blocked by years of propaganda by incumbents.

Edit: forgot ranked choice voting


Introduce a rule that any new law should be submitted in the handwriting of its actual authors. And not the handwriting of interns, or staffers of the official authors, the author themselves.


Congress has a 20% approval rating, polled weekly for over the past decade. Yet we vote every two years for the same folks who give us the same results. The problem isn’t them. It’s us.


Why does US Congress approval rating matter? If I considered my congressperson 100/100 and everyone else 0/100, the House would get an overall rating of around zero.

Obviously since I can't elect members of the House of Representatives from other districts, I could totally approve of my congressperson and senator and it still not be my fault for the other guys in power.


I'd say the problem is one of competition. "We" cannot choose better legislators unless better legislators come forward for selection, but the incumbents - and by that I mean parties elected or not - have so much money and machinery behind them that to turf them out would be nigh on impossible.


The problem is that each “we” is pulling to benefit themselves at all costs.

Hence giant military fighter jet contracts that span multiple congressmen’s districts around the country, and while being terrible for the future of the country, is untouchable politically as not a single person will vote against their economic interests.


Exactly. It's hard to have collective reform without there being a collective.


I was going to say the same. Lawmakers are elected officials. They're incentivized to do what gets them votes. And voters are concerned with the complexity of laws. Perhaps what we need is better education to create more informed voters. But if lawmakers are in charge of that, too, I'm not super hopeful.


voters say they want that, but do they ever monitor the complexity of any particular bill and vote differently next time strictly because of it?


Doing this is very difficult and exhausting.

Several years ago I signed up to follow 3 politicians I cared about using this site https://www.govtrack.us/. Give it a try, and I think you'll see the deluge of laws, bills, and opinions is too much for a mere mortal mind with a 9-5.

I think this is why we talk about congresspersons' army of staffers and interns. You would not want a single person trying to deal with the complexity of all this information they need to have an informed opinion on in order to vote for/against.


I misspoke. It's more likely that the vast majority of voters don't care about this issue, and in fact aren't even aware of it.


For any new law submitted, two others have to be removed


This just leads to longer laws, you need to restrict number (and range, eg only stuff in the dictionary) of words.


Lawmaking word golf must be fun.


I said it was necessary; I never said it was sufficient.


I thought the "remove two regulations to add one regulation" was an interesting hack.

Don't know if it's political rhetoric or even viable.


The inclusive vs extractive institutions mentality makes sense but I think in the exact reverse way then you suggest.

It's precisely because of the Wests (and like Marc says it really is the West) failure to respond to this crisis. It's the excess of inclusivity that leads to short term, ballot box decision making in response to crises, and it is the short term, market logic that leads to loss of autonomy and neglect of long term goals that Marc talks about in the piece.

It's the politication of a healhcare / virological crisis that renders responses ineffective. When the American president gins up armed protesters during a pandemic that is the direct result of the inclusivity praised in the book. It's crisis response turned into a media spectacle and an election campaign.

Efffective resopnse to the crisis was visible in East Asian countries in which 'elites' can govern without constant interference, and that's not a glorification of China, but also of democratic countries like Taiwan, or so-so democratic countries like Singapore. What they all have in common is that decisions are made by leadership which can act with the necessary degree of autonomy.


> What they all have in common is that decisions are made by leadership which can act with the necessary degree of autonomy.

No, what they have in common is that they've been through this experience before with SARS, learned from it and setup procedures so they could act faster next time.


All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia.

I really wouldnt give much praise to the great governing elite that failed to prevent this in the first place, despite scientists telling them about it a long time ago.


Not only is that factually incorrect as the other user pointed out, but you may be surprised that more than half of the worlds population lives in this circle (https://i.imgur.com/CK6aONG.jpg), so the fact that a lot of diseases originate there isn't as surprising as you might think.

Not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere, making the response to a pandemic significantly more important than trying to shift blame for what is essentially a game of chance.


It's still pretty surprising, and probably has more to do with cultural practices of eating all kinds of wild animals, than with population density.

How many diseases originated in India?


>factually incorrect

It's not. SARS is from China.

>not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere

>essentially a game of chance

It's 100% preventable. Just cut contact with wildlife that spreads these viruses.

I'm only correcting the fallacy of praising any goverment that fails to address the root causes of these problems.


>All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia.

That's not true. Swine flu came from Mexico and MERS, as the name implies, started in the Middle East


I do mean SARS which first surfaced in the 2000s in China.

Swine flu has been around for much longer, at least for 100 years.


Having one example and phrasing it to sound like multiple is misleading, imo.


Sorry about that. It wasn't the point, as SARS is caused by many different strains of the same type of virus.

The first outbreak of SARS-CoV was identified in Foshan, Guangdong, China, in November 2002.

Thats almost 20 years ago.

Also Swine Infulenza does not originate from Mexico.


The flu colloquially known as swine flu from 2009 did start in Mexico.


"Why Nation Fails" is a phenomenal book. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time to think of US institutions as reasonable examples of how the author portraits creative destruction and extractive institutions.

I understand there might be some broken things in your nation's systems. Still, the fact you're able to discuss them here or work towards changing them through legal methods, shows the US is far off on the right track of constitutional rule and pluralism.


Yeah, I generally agree. The book does highlight how much of it is hinged on contingency, though. The US has strong institutions, but the dynamic of having elites opposing change is still present, obviously. High barriers of entry is a prime example of how it can be done when other options are unavailable.


Any recent example of a societal issue affecting American lives got fixed in American system?


Medicare Part D coverage of prescription drugs. Seniors now have subsidized coverage for not a lot of money and the program costs less than the forecast.


A bunch are changing in real time right now. For example, telemedicine being full legalized and paid by government insurance, same as in person doctor visits.


I can think of 1

It used to be very expensive to travel between US cities because a govt agency (forget the name, maybe the board of air travel?) set the who what how could fly planes from a to b, and at what price. Think mad men times, panAm, etc.

That agency was eliminated circa 1980 by some stroke of luck and perfect alingment of planets. Ticket prices plummeted and this opened flying to the poor.

That was also the last time a US regulatory agency was disbanded.


This wasn't because of regulatory overhead, it was because they had created regional monopolies for the airlines. It's exactly like insurance (or prescription drugs, if you're thinking internationally) is now, and that industry wages a life and death fight every time that"deregulation" comes up. It's corporate welfare created by federal corruption.


Right, the way the government regulated airlines is by creating monopolies.


Is it possible that extremely high costs to enter the business, as well as extremely high operating costs mean that only the biggest airlines, with the most network benefits survive?


Sure. It's not an either/or. An airline company is hard to start regardless of what the gov't does. However, parsing out routes and giving airlines monopolies on them adds a significant number of bricks to the wall.


We might soon have another federal regulatory agency disbanded but considering which one it is I’m not sure if that will be a good thing for anyone but banks.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/10/justices-to-review-consti...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/us/supreme-court-consumer...


If that agency is disbanded, it will also be good for payday lenders.


You are confusing regulation that protects the oligarchy, throwing spanners in the wheels of potential independent competitors, with regulation that effectively protects the health and safety of the people.

The US might have the former, but when Europeans refer to a lack of regulation in the US they mean the latter.


I have no doubt that money drives burdensome regulations, but most regulations are put into place because someone screwed up and hurt people.

Yeah, there are a ton of regulations If you want to bring a new drug to market. That makes it super expensive to do.

But in exchange we get pharmaceuticals that work, are reasonable safe, and are based solid data.


Totally, spot on. I think a great next step would be democratize the system that performs those tests and works with the regulatory institutions so new pharma companies can focus on innovation. A reasonable analog are the fintech startups that provide APIs and say essentially "were regulated so you don't have to be". That stuff is important and we should DRY it up so we don't have to copy/paste it every time we start a company.


> 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.

I think the difficulty involved in spinning up an insurance company probably has literally nothing to do with those 6000 pages of documentation, but if I suspected otherwise, it would seem like what is actually on those pages is a lot more relevant than how many of them there are.


And what would it solve? If you can enter the market but later on you are judged in the court for doing something wrong - you are better to be forced to think about it before you even start it.

The problem here is growing complexity, which governments doesn't recognize as a problem for some reason. There should be some institution in the government body, which primary goal would be to reduce complexity of governance.


Funny enough, adding such role/institution adds complexity in itself


If it was just health insurance and similarly "risky" industries that required the 6000 pages, it wouldn't be so bad.

Earlier this year Lambda School (an online school where you watch videos and learn things) got fined $75k by a California regulator for the crime of teaching without a license. One single state license application required "2177 pages and weighed 25 pounds," and they're having to do this for many states.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555351 [2] https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1153450365712388096


I respectfully disagree about what it takes to be approved as a health insurance COMPANY (as opposed to a broker). In fact I am quite happy that regulators require you to show that 1) you know what you are doing 2) you have a massive balance sheet to protect your customers if they need it. The point 2 is super important in the context of VC-backed companies. There is simply no way to build a massive insurance company that way, the return on equity is too low. Unlike airbnb you just don’t go out and raised $2B in debt because you are running out of money and you can’t pay claims. Regulators would step in way before, and they have done that multiple times.

Witness what is happening today: I have not heard from any health insurance company requesting a bailout (unlike most companies). State regulators are a pain in the neck, are conservative but - in your interest - they control how the insurance company uses their capital (you grow too fast = you must add more equity, a bit like working capital), and how you invest your money (they restrict the amount of equity you invest in). All in the interest of the consumers.

Think for a second: if the balance sheet of your health insurance company looked like the balance sheet of Softbank’s vision fund? Would you like to hear “we are sorry, we’ll have to stop your cancer treatment, we are out of money”.

Health insurance companies are regulated at both the State and Federal level. The goal is to make sure that they are fair and will pay the claims when you need that down the road. Like everything in financial services (your savings, your retirement fund, your health for you and your family) this is not the place for fly by night startups. While it is visually appealing to see a better UI, you hear startups "disrupting this dinosaur industry" but very few of them succeeded. And maybe it would be nice, but smart investors (after say series B or C) realize that the returns are not that great and the company requires a massive amount of equity, in fact locked in low risk investments/stable bonds.

Sure, you can target a very young workforce and ignore the sick, the old, the crippled, those overweight or whatever else there is. And you can make money within the startup ecosystem, when everybody works out, eats well, and is super healthy.

But it is simply illegal and my advice for you is to buy insurance from an old, stodgy company. Maybe a mutual company? I don't care if wework is out of money, I can always find space somewhere else. When you have cancer, or when you child is disabled, you don’t want to deal with insurance regulators who have seized the assets of your shiny new health insurance company startup.

There is no room for mistakes when it comes to your health and your savings.

Disclaimer: I have Kaiser, I never use them, but I am sure they will be there when needed.


I wonder what you think about the necessity of the health insurance industry? Seeing as how apparently it began as a sort of subscription service to keep hospitals afloat when beds were empty... It is a lot to wrap my mind around, but I have the general feeling that insurance drives the prices of health care way up and we would be better if we could all pay out of pocket for most things, but be covered by a true 'risk mitigation' insurance solution that would kick in when indeed we got cancer, or got in a car accident or the like.


Insurance companies are kind of a costco, they buy stuff in bulk , sell it retail, and manage to get a 5% margin.

My humble opinion: the health care system in the US is totally screwed up and nobody wants to recognize that (except those paying maybe, and I am not even sure of that because they are conned into thinking "that we have the greatest healthcare system in the world").

Everybody is trying to pull the blanket their way. It is obscenely too expensive with little results (worse results than Europe and 4x the price). This is pathetic and a total failure.

Go medicare at scale, and for everybody? But the government does not know how to control the costs on medicare either.

Then religious beliefs get in the way: if 75-85% of the cost of insurance is wasted in the last year of your life, you understand why they keep you artificially alive so everybody can milk the system: never ending MRI's, super expensive drugs, etc...Hospitals, doctors, medical devices providers, everybody feeds on the system, and blame the lame insurance companies/costco of the healthcare world.

This is sad because so many people do not have the means to pay for that, few have access to the type of healthcare engineers have access though work.


I've never looked for data to back this up, but I had a teacher outline the following theory of healthcare costs.

Insurance companies have out-sized bargaining power and will only pay a fraction of the list-price for a procedure.

Doctor's know this, so prices inflate to the point where the negotiated price is in line with what they'll actually do it for.

Everyone who is not insured or not covered for that procedure ends up paying massively inflated costs.



I had not seen that one. Lots of truth indeed!

AND you have not looked into the arcane world of pharmacy bids company. Stick your nose into their billing, you are guaranteed a 20% discount (Oh, sorry we discovered several mistakes). But this is boring stuff for 2020 startups who "want to disrupt the industry".

Now you wonder why the Democrats are pushing TONIGHT last minute negotiations in DC to add another $250B in stimulus money. We'll sign ONLY if you carve out, say $50-100 Billions or additional money for...HOSPITALS!

You get it now?


Simple - politics is about control. Laws are a form of politics.

Why would anyone give up control once they had acquired it?


100% it’s politics, it’s self-interest. The reason why we don’t have Musk’s Alien Dreadnought factories throughout the US is related to the reason Elizabeth I rejected weaving machines; the people who have power will not gain enough from it and may even lose. Elizabeth I feared the consequences of creative disruption on her constituents, and the knock on effect that might have had to her tenuous grip on power. Today in the US we see silly policies that are pushed to make a few people rich at the expense of society as a whole. The more we are able to dismantle monopolies, and weaken the capability of incumbent industries to skew legislation in their own favor, the more society will move forward.


Who would gain? Politicians try really hard to pull in facilities. Look at the GLobalFoundries spending debacle in NY. Or the Panasonic/Tesla battery facility in NV at, what 2m in grants per employee. Or Foxxcon in WI.

These facilities aren't that economically beneficial. Capital investors aren't, as PMA implies, stupid: they don't build because there isn't much money in it.

Politicians bend over backwards all the time. Massive subsidies are the problem, not lack of interest.

The reason people go elsewhere is to play regulatory arbitrage. To avoid the inspections, the pollution rules, and the long term environmental costs. The Bay area is filled with Superfund sites. Same for the Puget Sound, Boston Harbor, and the Hudson. No one should eat too many fish...because worlrdwide Mercury levels are high.


I feel like all the replies comparing legal system differences between the US and the EU miss a crucial element - the difference in the characters of the people participating in each society.

I'm now going to make a couple of broad generalizations. Note, that I'm aware they do not apply to every person, or even state in the US, or member nation of the EU.

However having lived in both for a number of years, I do have some personal insight.

Europe and Europeans are a cohesive society where the ideal is a flat society without too many outliers. Standing out from the field is not promoted. And career aspirations are about attaining a work life balance and produce meaningful work. The overall societal system works, offers many opportunities for education and entrepreneurship, but within a well lit path. Europe is a fast moving train.

As a result, people look for ways to succeed within the system.

The US is a "land of opportunity" in all the best, and all the insidious ways that this implies. People are looking to separate themselves from the pack, to be "insanely great" in some way or another, and see society and laws as just impediments to that goal. The US is a rocket powered supercar.

As a result, people look for ways to succeed in spite of the system.

This is why both the US needs a common law system (because the population would never tolerate a restrictive "write everything down" statutory system because would consider it overly restrictive to their liberty), and also why it fails. Because people and corporations abuse the common law system to violate the spirit of the law as much as possible to succeed and thrive in the short term. So half the country is constantly tries to create more regulations and the other half is trying to tear down existing ones.

This is why in the US the most innovative companies and people can succeed on a 5-10 year timeline, and so the biggest public companies in the world are there, but why Europe is much better at building 20-50 year projects and so have better infrastructure. (I'm ignoring China completely here because China is better than both at everything now, but is also an authoritarian dictatorship, so it's even harder to compare that apple to the other oranges).

Ultimately my point is that the EU raises a certain type of person and attracts a certain type of immigrant, and the US another.

I'm Canadian, so I frankly think both extremes are distasteful. I find the US a post-apocalyptic every-man-for-himself dystopia. And I find the EU a restrictive stifling nanny-state. Canada is just right for me.

But I appreciate that the world has both extremes.


I think trying to put all of Europe into one EU in your argument is already where it breaks down.

Europeans don't live in a cohesive society. Italians, Germans, Swedes live in a cohesive society in their small california-sized countries.


I’d say Italians, Germans and Swedes have much more in common with each other than with the US. The way of life is slightly different, but the philosophy is the same.


Neither do Californians, Alaskans, Alabamans, Montanans, or West Virginians.

But they all have more in common with each other than Europeans, and vice versa.


As a Californian, I resent the accusation that we have anything in common with other Californians.


Well then, California is california-sized as well, so if that approach does not work for USA in its entirety then perhaps it can fix the healthcare system in California?


Yes, perhaps. That's what California is attempting. Unfortunately social security in US is national, so you can't operate a closed system.

E.g. only Danish people can get Danish social security


>Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it?

This will _never_ happen. The vast majority of people are too intellectually challenged to see the benefit of simplicity. The earlier someone understand this fundamental fact about the vast majority of people, the earlier they can probably channelize efforts in the right direction ( what ever that might be), rather than hopelessly toil to make laws simpler. Democracy=tyranny of the masses.


> 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.

Because regulation in the US is rarely the problem.

We have a US mask manufacturer sitting outside Dallas who never went 24/7 in production because NOBODY WOULD PAY HIM.

Billionaires shouting "Hey, we'll pay for preproduction on vaccines" because they know they won't have to deliver isn't helpful.

Handing a small business $10 million so he can go full tilt would be helpful. But then these billionaires would have to cough up actual CASH.


Answer is pretty easy. People are assholes.

Those rules and regulatory frameworks exist for a reason, and with something like health insurance you don’t see better outcomes in states with lower regulatory burden.

Same with the financial burdens that companies cry about. Enron, GlobalCrossing, etc all demonstrated that corporate governance required the federal stick to behave.

Anderseen’s article is pretty lame with respect to why we can’t do things. We can and we have. The difference is now that you have executive leadership that is batshit crazy people have taken over the government. That happened because of the absence of regulation that gives extremists like Alex Jones, who were relegated to public access cable and weird newsletters in the 1980s access to the public at large.

Taking off what rails remain isn’t a strategy for success.


The system is working great except there isn't enough censorship?


That reason being capturing the market by means of regulation.


"I'm in the process of reading the book _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions.

It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture."

However if we actually look at the pages of that book from 2012, the authors never use the US, or any present day "Western" country, as an example of one that had or has extractive instutitions. Instead they cite examples such as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, Liberia, Egypt, North Korea, Nepal, or Haiti.

According to the authors, the US currently has inclusive institutions and uses the example of the software industry as a success story to support this argument. This industry is in fact the blog post author's area of focus as a former programmer turned venture capitalist.

To quote from the book:

(Note the bit about fraud. The US had serious problems with fraud 100 years ago, and still does. Consider that is why the SEC exists. Many would argue it has very limited powers of enforcement to deal with modern-day fraud.)

"Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But he ultimately responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers. Those institutions also made the financing of their projects feasible. The U.S. labor markets enabled them to hire qualified personnel, and the relatively competitive market environment enabled them to expand their companies and market their products. These entrepreneurs were confident from the beginning that their dream projects could be implemented: they trusted the institutions and the rule of law that these generated and they did not worry about the security of their property rights. Finally, the political institutions ensured stability and continuity. For one thing, they made sure that there was no risk of a dictator taking power and changing the rules of the game, expropriating their wealth, imprisoning them, or threatening their lives and livelihoods. They also made sure that no particular interest in society could warp the government in an economically disastrous direction, because political power was both limited and distributed sufficiently broadly that a set of economic institutions that created the incentives for prosperity could emerge. Secure property rights, the law, public services, and the freedom to contract and exchange all rely on the state, the institution with the coercive capacity to impose order, prevent theft and fraud, and enforce contracts between private parties. To function well, society also needs other public services: roads and a transport network so that goods can be transported; a public infrastructure so that economic activity can flourish; and some type of basic regulation to prevent fraud and malfeasance.

Though many of these public services can be provided by markets and private citizens, the degree of coordination necessary to do so on a large scale often eludes all but a central authority. The state is thus inexorably intertwined with economic institutions, as the enforcer of law and order, private property, and contracts, and often as a key provider of public services. Inclusive economic institutions need and use the state."

The US approach to business does have its flaws. However the book "Why Nations Fail" does not address them. To the authors, the US is a nation that "succeeded", and continues to succeed, by having inclusive institutions, not one that "failed" or is failing today.

A book like "Why Nations Fail", and there are many others like it, arguably encourages readers to view the US, irrespective of its flaws, as the shining example of what a country could/should aspire to become. There are no present-day comparisons of the US with Western Europe in books of this type. Such books are arguably part of the reason for certain institutional problems that will forever remain unfixed in the US, e.g. regulatory capture and complexity, because books like these have themes that support the idea that America's "solutions" are not just different but better than all the others.

This book really has no relation to any criticism of US institutions. If anything, it supports the idea that the US has the best formula for creating a rich country, i.e., a country where "anyone can be rich". They compare how Bill Gates became wealthy versus how Carlos Slim became wealthy.

From a presentatation given by the authors:

Acemoglu Robinson (Harvard) Why Nations Fail June 6, 2011 8 / 36

Main Concepts Inclusive and Extractive Institutions

Towards a Theory of Institutions

Extractive economic institutions: Lack of law and order. Insecure property rights; entry barriers and regulations preventing functioning of markets and creating a nonlevel playing field.

Extractive political institutions -- in the limit of absolutism: Political institutions concentrating power in the hands of a few, without constraints, checks and balances or rule of law.

Inclusive economic institutions: Secure property rights, law and order, markets and state support (public services and regulation) for markets; open to relatively free entry of new businesses; uphold contracts; access to education and opportunity for the great majority of citizens.

Inclusive political institutions: Political institutions allowing broad participation pluralism and placing constraints and checks on politicians; rule of law (closely related to pluralism).

But also some degree of political centralization for the states to be able to selectively enforce law and order.

Acemoglu Robinson (Harvard) Why Nations Fail June 6, 2011 36 / 36

Why Nations have and Do Fail

Because they have extractive political and economic institutions.

These are difficult to change though they can be successfully challenged and altered during critical junctures.

The roots of modern world inequality lie in the emergence of inclusive institutions in Britain and the fruits of this - the industrial revolution - spread to those parts of the world that had similar institutions (settler colonies) or quickly developed them (Western Europe).

Other parts of the world languished with extractive institutions which have persisted over time and thus remain poor today.


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.


In San Francisco, at least, YIMBY is the organization that is organized around ending regulatory capture in housing, and The Neoliberal Project (in SF YIMBY Neoliberal) is organized around broader dismantling of regulatory capture.

We mobilize people in support of reform-focused politicians and have even started running our own (Sonja Trauss in 2018 and myself in 2020).

Happy to talk more about it -- steven.buss@gmail.com Happy to talk more about it


Thank you for the work you do! Zoning is the new redlining. This generation has to fight for the right to affordable housing and economic opportunity.


I find it interesting how affordable housing must be very near high economic opportunity.

Seems to me it's a fight for convenience too.

They built Las Vegas in the desert to avoid restrictions, what's preventing this generation to build new cities?

The whole Covid problem will make quests to increase population density more difficult. But perhaps will also spread opportunities around, or move them online, so this zoning struggle will stop being important.


I fight for both market rate and subsidized housing in high-opportunity cities because it's the easiest way to life people out of poverty.

Being able to live near high-income jobs is the most direct path to the middle class in America. If we want people to not live in poverty, then it makes sense to subsidize their access to opportunity. That means subsidizing education and housing.

I've had fun nights talking with friends about starting a city. It's really fun to think about how we'd design the city to maximize opportunity, but there's no getting away from the value an existing city provides. Fixing a city with already high opportunity is just fundamentally cheaper than starting a city from scratch. All we need to do is win a few elections -- we're talking less than $100MM. A new city that is aiming to compete is a $100B+ project.

As engineers we often think the best way to fix something is to build a new version. But this is rarely true in institutions. Think of governments as legacy systems: they've been built up over time and have a ton of hacks keeping it running. Think of Spolsky's generally good advice: "Don't rewrite code" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It is easier to fix an old and broken system than to replace it wholesale. Let's focus on fixing government instead of replacing it.


Education already is subsidised through state and private scholarships. And I believe rent is also capped in many places.

Seems a tautology that access to high-opportunity would help an individual. But if rent is too high as to be unaffordable, then the place is not so high-opportunity. Cost of living can't be excluded from the opportunity calculation.

I get that some sort of 'jump-start' in life might be required but can't help but feel that deep down this will hide a dysfunctionality somewhere.

Maybe something like Lambda Housing would prove this economical theory. Signing an ISA for subsidised housing if this proves to significantly raise the person's income seems a no brainer.


"Being able to live near high-income jobs is the most direct path to the middle class in America." 100%


Thanks! 100% agreed that zoning is just redlining. We've given municipalities the ability to discriminate based on wealth rather than race, but wealth is a proxy for race in America: https://www.thebalance.com/racial-wealth-gap-in-united-state...


I've read about YIMBY groups before, particularly the one called BARF (if I remember correctly). This is a great start to the type of work that needs to be done.

However, I have to ask: What is your group's funding situation? Who is bankrolling the effort? Is it grassroots funded, or are there wealthy benefactors who agree with the objectives (or, from a more cynical perspective, might be using your group for something)?

For the record, I believe both approaches can work. We have obviously seen the wealthy fund politics in favor of their interests and successfully get their way, but there have been grassroots successes as well. In particular, I am thinking of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with its cause, the NRA has 5+ million dues-paying members and it has been extremely successful at deploying those funds to achieve its very specific political objectives.

On a more abstract note: the founders of America may have originally envisioned a system where various interest groups debate the issues and arrive at a governing consensus, but the system has [d]evolved into one where those groups compete to raise funds that can channeled to lawmakers to encourage them to implement preferred policies. Some groups recognized this long ago.


I’m what would be considered a major donor to the YIMBY effort and I’ve donated in the low 5 figures.

It’s generally grass roots though I know some wealthy individuals have donated much more of the total funds.

The progressive camp of SF politics often tries to discredit the YIMBY movement by claiming AstroTurf. But it’s simply not true.

This was started by motivated individuals who started organizing and then went and started looking for donations.

The reality of SF housing politics is all the “local control” has given a lot of power to local groups that can hold a new development hostage. So developers have to essentially pay them off with “community benefit” to keep each group from delaying your project through years of appeals.

This sets up a system where a small number of developers have the relationships and know how to work the system to get their projects done. Limits local construction competition.

We also have local politicians (Aaron Peskin) who own significant amounts of rental properties, and find ways of opposing new housing supply. A policy they directly and personally benefit from.


Thank you for your donations! All of my work is in a volunteer capacity, so your donations help pay for our office space, pay for the few full-time staff we employee, and fund outreach, education, and direct advocacy to move municipalities in our direction.

Your summary is correct. Most of our donations are small dollar from individuals. A few people donate more, and that's because they agree with what we're doing and they have the means to contribute. We're grateful for all support, and donations never influence any of our decisions about what to advocate for.


In order to fix regulatory capture at the structural level you have to fix campaign finance in the US. It's the only way.


What do you mean exactly? SF races all have contribution limits of $500 and it hasn't helped.

What campaign finance reform would solve regulatory capture, because low contribution limits isn't helping.


I have a harder time believing this after 2016.


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.


Isn't Uber kind of the opposite kind of building the OP refers to?

Uber externalizes so many costs to its drivers. It relies on someone else's healthcare system to care for its drivers. Someone else to pay to maintain the cars.

So far the gig economy is maybe, half building something which has potential social benefit,half building something which clearly does not.

Now, if Uber was lobbying hard for universal healthcare, then that'd be a different story :). But IIRC they mainly avoid or flout the law altogether.

In summary I don't think Uber is a good example of a company that has tried to 'build' in a prosocial way.


The only thing uber has built really, is a way to extract more money from workers with less overhead while circumventing existing worker protection by acting as if they were just the messenger between customers and drivers.

I have the feeling that the real building of the past two decades lies in ever cleverer bussines schemes focused on lock ins, extracting user data, doing as if you are open while there is no practical way anybody could take what you did in any significant way and improve on it. The exiting things always seem to happen outside of that space however.


Ubër has also built a service that I, for one, strongly prefer to traditional transportation services. Customer experience is far superior.


They did what's the equivalent of selling $10 bills for $1. No surprise customers like it, they get decent service priced at well below the market rate. For a while, that is, because it's only a way for them to leverage VC money to kill off local competitors. Once that's done, Uber's service tends to degrade, and it eventually will even more so, once their money runs out.


This is only true for their first 5 years. The prices you pay now in US are absurdly profitable for Uber


There is no free lunch, so either the service went down, or prices went way up, or there are no competitors anymore, or all of those.


>Ubër has also built a service that I, for one, strongly prefer to traditional transportation services.

This is a big reason why things are the way they are: despite all the obvious externalities Uber (and AirBnb) foists on the public, the rich support if because it benefits them.


Uber has lobbied for gig worker healthcare and social benefits in Europe. I think it's a perfect example.


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.


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.


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.


I think the analogy is a little short-sighted. Having a universal building code doesn't mean every building has to meet the same standard in every way. They can contain conditional logic. Flood-resistance would only be required if the building is in an area with a likelihood of flooding above some threshold.


My point is that you get increased complexity when trying to handle all of the various different situations local solutions were specifically adapted for. Adding the type of logic you describe in that particular example might seem manageable, but there’s a real risk of it ballooning and making what used to be simple rules for a given area require a lot more paperwork/checks/etc, much of which would be irrelevant.

Like with all things, you need balance; some standards can work universally while remaining simple. Others can’t. But in general I think trying to impose universal, robust standards leads to a lot of the over regulation the article and other commenters fault for the lack of building in the west.

Fewer, minimal standards decided by people on a local level seems generally better, imo. There will still be incentives to use universal, simple standards where appropriate, as that typically enables access to a wider range of products and services, and the complex logic of deciding when certain standards should apply vs when they shouldn’t can be distributed/allowed to be flexible and adaptive.


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).


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...)


> 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.

This has been tried and it doesn't work. What ends up happening is that more and more people decide that their pet issue is more important than regional autonomy.


> 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.

That's nice, but seeing how the wast majorities of crimes against humanity are made by too powerful nation states against their inhabitants I am not very exited to see what atrocities an even more powerful would do.

At least now if the local government are trying to kill you there's a small chance that you might manage to escape to a safer place.


one world standard is not the same as one world government.

one world full bureaucrats regulate-everything-to-death government is a dystopian nightmare.

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread" --Thomas Jefferson

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

--Ronald Reagan


> "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread" --Thomas Jefferson

This wound up being completely false by the early 1900s. Turns out people like to eat and get paid consistently more than they like imagined freedoms.

> "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Ronald Reagan

Also pretty ironic coming from someone who raised taxes 11 times after fomenting a giant populist tax cut that the country couldn't afford.


That's great if you are Napoleon and have the power to just force the matter. EU comes to mind... But I don't want your rules. I want my rules. There's plenty of world to take from in order to do just that, without trying to impose yourself on the rights of others. In the end, Lidl didn't respect Norwegian conditions. Moreover, they didn't respect Norwegian customers and so most were quite happy looking the other way once things started to go badly for them. In the end, that's on them. Because they wanted to impose their rules, instead of respecting ours. Outside of that, I think we can come to an agreement on petty things like which side of the road to drive on (the Right side, of course ;) ), and what kind of electrical plug to use (I've noticed that the British one could seem a little safer). Perhaps we could come to a compromise?


> EU comes to mind...

No it doesn't, any examples? EU laws are voted on by the member countries and some even have veto power.

> and what kind of electrical plug to use (I've noticed that the British one could seem a little safer).

They're not, they're more expensive and designed in a time when those safety features were still relevant.


1. First of all, they're not voted on by "member countries," but by representatives, who's only of secondary importance to peoples who already have to vote in local and government representatives in their respective countries. Second the EU processes are opaque to most EU citizens, and as such decisions made in the commission (where representatives aren't elected but hand picked, btw) and parliament are usually done under their nose, without their knowledge or input. That isn't democratic. That's bureaucratic, and many will agree it's even bad. The veto power complicates things further, only leading to more bureaucratic stand-still and indecision. The same goes for the so-called laws and regulations the EU passes, which are often so monolithic that they are more confusing than helpful. A great example is how trade in many instances simply broke down in Europe during the Corona crisis, due to different interpretations on common laws agreed upon in the EU parliament. 2. They are still relevant in countries who predominantly have older wooden buildings, just as one example.


Deal. The world will drive on the right hand side, and convert to using BS 1363 electrical plugs. See, we’re making progress already! :D


I sympathise, but you don’t need one world government, just agreement and consensus between governments. That’s hard work though, it requires sacrifice and compromise, and recent history (Trump protectionism, Brexit) is against compromise or sacrifice.


Yeah, I guess what I envisage would be a very minimal federal government, rather than a central point of failure for decisions about every aspect of people’s lives. Very hard to get agreement at that scale though, as you say.


I look to Belgium as an example of the ideal world government. Trying to explain Belgium's government would require a wall covered in newspaper clippings and string, but the short form is that there are 6 independent governments with the same power as the federal government, with very long-standing cultural and linguistic strife between them. As a result, it is very hard to do much of anything on the federal level and instead, most decisions are made locally. As a result, despite Gent, Antwerp, and Brussels being about as far apart from each other as San Francisco and Palo Alto, each has a very different culture and regulatory environment regarding daily life. In Gent, it is completely normal to close one of the major roads into city center for a neighborhood festival. In Brussels, it requires weeks of fighting bureaucracy to legally block a side street for a few hours at 6AM with a moving van.

Even larger issues are handled locally. Until last year, even immigration and work permit issues were handled provincially. It would take 3-6 months to get my work permit renewed in Brussels, but after I moved to Gent, it took 2 weeks.

This all works because it is very hard to get national agreement on anything. Everybody knows that they're not going to be able to push their views on the country, so they work to change their local environment instead.

This is all despite the government being (IIRC) the largest employer in Belgium:


More importantly, Lidl didn't have Norwegian newspapers when they arrived and while some of the things they sold were great a number of others just didn't feel right. A lot of the food they try to sell just didn't work because we aren't used to it at all.


I think you're overgeneralizing "people". I for example would be in favor of world-government structures that have actual power.


> People don’t want one-world-gov

Speak for yourself. I would personally love this. We’re long overdue for a one world government.


Imagine if a dictator rises to power, but this time s/he has power over the entire world.


They'd have to completely undermine the world government to turn it into a dictatorship, and get the countries underneath it to go along. Is that much easier than getting power over the entire world the old-fashioned way?


I mean, sure, if you want a toothless world government with no power that wouldn't be able to keep countries in line. In which case I'm happy to report we already have this: its called the UN.

For anything else you would call an actual government, the highest body has the power and physical force to keep those under them inline. Even in the USA, where states rights are a thing, the federal government could easily force them to do basically whatever they want.


Huge countries like India, the US, and Russia have come under the thrall of men whose position in the feature space is near words like “deranged” and “terrifying”... there’s no reason to believe that the same thing could not happen to a world government


Imagine if there's a revolution, but it's world population - 1 this time.


Fully fledged totalitarianism isn't overthrown by revolution, a worldwide totalitarianism isn't some kind of necessary stage before universal peace -- it would rather make peaceful, dignified relations of people to themselves and another completely impossible, and maybe for good.

> At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? In the United States and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now -- recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censor­ship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that govern­ment of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts.

-- https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html

It's not that we now have less risk for the things that were described by thinkers in the 20th century, it's that we became more complacent and cowardly, less ambitious and more comfortable, and are rationalizing it. We don't know more, we just are less able. We don't rise to the occasion, we pull it down into the gutter with us. This is the whimper our betters have seen coming.


Will never happen, unless it’s authoritarian.

There is way to much cultural, and thus political, diversity in the world.

Not everyone wants the same thing out of their government.

Hell, even small countries are usually strongly divided on politics.


To believe in a one-world government, I think it’s almost a prerequisite that you don’t care about what people actually want. The only line of reasoning I’ve seen sincerely put forward for creating a central world authority to rule over all people is that some people think they know what’s best for everybody else. Not only does what actual people want not matter, but in order to achieve their utopic vision, they must protect people from themselves when they want the wrong thing.


Yup. Just look at how Communist countries view dissent. It's not "this person has a different opinion", it's "this person is broken and we must fix them".


I've been thinking along similar lines - in my mind it boils down to that these days we have problems that only a global government can solve. And you can see this through history - tribes, cities, states, countries, X.


As long as it's $MY_POLITICS, I would love a one world government


One could view this as Uber making a novice mistake. Instead of just fighting to get rid of employment laws that slowed Uber's business, they should have fought to replace them with laws that entrenched its position.

For example: they could have persuaded legislatures to make gig work legal, but only in the context of "licensed and qualified" platforms. Reaching that status might require submitting forms to government agencies, drafting reports for publication, instituting certain internal policies, having certain credentialed staff on payroll, etc... All tasks that Uber, who would essentially write such a law, would be naturally able to fulfill while newer competitors might not.


Uber only did it because their investors really believed they could capture the market.

Most situations are not like that.


This is a long asked question, and the recent book Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty spends part of the book exploring the emergence of a new political coalition that fights this: the YIMBY groups and associated groups. They are very young and inexperienced, but their existence is making huge waves.

There was an affordable housing builder interviewed on the housing podcast Gimme Shelter recently singing the praises of this movement, because it is such a big change from the past.


Milton Friedman did his thing from a university founded by John D. Rockefeller in a Department of Economics that is now named for Kenneth C. Griffin of Citadel Securities. I think it's safe to say that capital does spend on its policy interests, and quite effectively.


Was he right?


This is great observation and speculation on what could happen and where would it come from.

I've had multiple conversations with top-10 VC firm partners during our unsuccessful pitches where one of the sticking points is 'unfair-advantage'. 'How can you lock $user_group/$partners into this transaction/partnership?'

Peter Thiel: "Monopolies are a good thing for society... The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices."

What the world needs is perfect competition. VCs profess that they live in a capitalist system and work within its constraints, but just about all want to capture some part of it, preventing competition from coming in.

One way to limit competition? Get the government to do it for you. Regulatory Capture.

So, excuse me, if I don't buy this coming from a VC. And I won't buy it from any other VC as well. They are arguing for them to be in control of capture. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.


Most of the companies we fund are trying to go disrupt someone else's "dominant market position".


So that they can take over the dominant market position, eventually using the exact same tactics to keep entrants out. Anything less would run afoul of shareholder primacy so unless VCs take an active role in promoting ethical behavior from their portfolio, those words are empty as this blog post. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday knows that human beings won't do something that is in direct opposition to their interests (the exceptions to this rule became nurses and doctors and social workers, not VCs) and without an honest to goodness change in laws, reasonable people know that VCs won't change their behavior. Since most portfolio companies are in competition with someone - a fact almost every investor in the industry is cognizant of - anything short of actually spending money on lobbying to change laws and promote their enforcement is an empty gesture.


You'll never guess what happens next.


And none of them try to lock customers, partners or decision makers from going away in any underhanded way, right? Just pure offer-the-best-and-they-will-stick-with-us. And if someone does it better than us and takes them away from us, shame on us!


Nah. Most often a16z, as other VC's, invest in platforms.

What do platforms often do: take an industry, served by many businesses, often small ones, and concentrate it.

Than, the platform does most of the repetitive, scalable, work, while leaving entrepreneurs with doing all risky work, and little place for hiring employees.

As for the employees, their work is commoditized, they get ton of competition which to leads to really deteriorating pay and work conditions, and labor laws are often broken right and left.


> who will actually do the political work to fight against it?

The virus is doing a pretty good work so far


> Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues

How is it even possible to isolate capitalism from regulatory capture? Capital accumulation inherently creates power and influence, so regulatory capture is surely just the perfectly logical second phase?


Now I can't speak for other government systems around the world, but here in Australia a big step forward would be as simple as having open and transparent government.

Currently we have a Federal Government that loves slapping 'secret and confidential' stickers on as many of it's documents, just to keep them secret.

Add to that they spends large amounts of time, money and effort fighting to keep these details secret by vigorously challenging freedom of information request.

Then we have the problem where all layers of government love getting into bed with big business, while keeping the details of these arrangements secret using 'commercial in confidence' contracts.

Just one example of the later is how the New South Wales Government entered into a secret deal with a private toll road company, agreeing to make major road changes (i.e. closing public roads) in an effort to force traffic through the new toll road tunnel.

None of this was made public at the time and would never have been released to the public had the toll company not gone into receivership.

This brought the matter before the courts and the court forced the government to hand over these secret documents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_City_Tunnel

To me this is a classic example of the problems with modern governments, where they are more interested in working for big business, rather than serving their constituents.


Yup, I agree. I just can't really see how it's possible to incentivize this at all. To _not_ pursue regulatory capture seem to require an altruistic mindset, which I'm not naive enough to expect from businesses.

In Sweden we luckily still default to making almost every government document, including e.g. all police investigations that reaches the courts, public for all who requests them. It requires special circumstances to make them confidential and nothing that can be done in the loose manner you're describing.


Reading the Wikipedia article, the lack of government transparency is crappy, but I don’t blame the tunnel company for asking the government what their plans were for the existing roads. You can’t build a traffic tunnel on the hope that people use it.

You’d need to figure out what’s happening with the rest of the roads, then make a call to build or not. If the plans for the other roads change, the value of your tunnel might go to zero.


> You can’t build a traffic tunnel on the hope that people use it.

What you are describing is a level of planning and in this case I seriously doubt this project was planned.

The only reason I brought up this one particular example is I still remember it very clearly.

I'd walk home from work and I was constantly amazed as to how bad the traffic would flowed. Every street was full of cars and on many occasions I'd notice I was actually walking faster than the cars on the street (i.e. I'd see the same car at multiple intersections as I along the street).

But on the day the tunnel opening all that changed and the traffic turn from walking pace to gridlock.

The road closure had created a situation where now no cars where moving.

Prior to the tunnel, the driving public had faced 40+ minute traffic delays trying to get out of the city but after the opening that delay jumped to 1.5 hours.

So obviously, who ever signed off on those road changes was never acting on the best interest of the driving public.

If they had been working on some sort of plan on improving the traffic flows they failed miserably.


This isn't just a big business problem, there is plenty of regulatory capture on behalf of other interest groups (eg doctors keep the supply of new doctors low).

There is no enduring structural answer to this problem, it is fundamental to democracy.

The only answers are to struggle for our goals in the political and cultural arenas to hope to marginally improve the situation.


While it's true that there will always be special interest groups, it's not true that the current situation is even close to "more or less the best it can get". There's too much power in far too few hands due to capital accumulation. This is not a natural law.


I was not arguing that this is the "best it can get", just that there is no structural answer to these challenges. There's no way to setup our institutions such that they cannot be influenced by interest groups, so the only thing to do is be vigilant and fight the good fight.

If you look at the whole range of regulatory capture we see, it's not just billionaires who have managed to get what they want, it's all sorts of interest groups who have succeeded in enshrining the interests of incumbents into law.

Good for you for being riled up about the concentration of capital, but addressing that is nowhere near a magic bullet for addressing regulatory capture.


You separate democratic procedure from capital. This is why the Citizens United ruling was such a disastrous decision for the US. However, capital doesn't necessarily mean election wins or regulatory influence, even now. Bernie Sanders raised immense amounts of money, more than Joe Biden did, but Sanders still was not able to win out in most states. There's more to politics than money, though money can definitely raise the volume of one's voice.


Yes and no.

I agree there's more to politics than money, but, I think it is fair to say that, whatever legitimate reasons many Democratic Party voters may have had for not voting for Sanders, there is a general media and institutional bias against the Progressive political movement Bernie Sanders represents.

And, not surprisingly, the root of much of that bias is money, in the form of industries which stand to lose (healthcare comes to mind) if the U.S. elected a politician with a Progressive agenda.


I think separating the two is harder than it seems. A big part of government work is economic in nature, so there inevitably is overlap between the two.


> You separate democratic procedure from capital

Uhm, that's very easy to say, but how is that even possible? Even here in Scandinavia, where money interests isn't as blatantly involved in politics as in the US, most of the media are aligned to corporate interests and vast amount of money are spend by corporations to fund and campaign for right-wing business parties and policies.

Why would Biden need money in competition with Sanders when he got the entire establishment on his side?


When voters in South Carolina go to vote, did they listen to money, to their own hearts, or to "the establishment"? In any case, they did not listen to capital. And this is one way that politics is separated from capital.

There can never be perfect separation, all of society is connected to all of its parts in tricky ways, but part of maximizing that separation is to discover and acknowledge where capital has control of democracy and come up with ways to separate. No ideal is achievable, we can only strive to improve.


its actually very easy.

1) regulatory capture exists is because you give power to individuals to make decisions for the collective. 2) freedom of speech will always mean if I have money, I can spend it any way I want. That will never change. Therefore, it is impossible to limit money in politics.

Once you understand these 2 principles, its very simple to understand the solution. Money will always impact politics. You simply need to raise the price enough so that you won't end up in regulatory capture.

1) Dillute power. Cause representatives to govern a fixed number of people. For example, 1 house member for every 50,000 people. So the house would go from 431 to 6500. That would make it very expensive to hire lobbysts to capture.

2) Limit power. Term limits for aggregate public service so people can't peddle power of public office. This makes lobbying expensive since you can't permanently buy favor.

3) Randomize outcomes. By far the most powerful. Introduce uncertainty into election successs. Randomly switch winners for the house with state at all levels. So for example, a citizen from VA running for president could end up instead as a state senator for VT, or FL (and vice versa). Same thing for vice president, and any other public post. You want to make sure the "bet" on a candidate win is a very long tail in outcomes so that lobbyists don't really know what power they are actually buying by contributing to the candidate's campaign. Given that we had people like Bush, Obama and Trump in highest office, with varied levels of public office "experience", I think it is a given that there is no real qualification for running for X, other than being a US citizen of a certain age, and actually winning.

That's how you fix the current corporatism running amok in america.


Jonathan Tepper wrote a great book about this, the Myth of Capitalism


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.


>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.


> Force big companies to have offices outside the big cities

Do we really want this? Personally, I love it that last time I changed jobs, I didn't need to move (the new office was literally 3 blocks away from the old one), and that I'm free to change jobs again without having to plan relocation.


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