
Why We Can't Build - saeranv
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus
======
greendave
"In a grotesque way, Florida’s disastrous UI system represents the successful
completion of a project: They intended to build a UI system that failed those
who needed it, and they very much did."

This is the lens that needs to be applied more generally. Just because a
system is not achieving its stated goal does not necessarily mean it is
failing - it often means that the true goal is simply something different. To
take an obvious example, the US healthcare system is not failing in its
primary mission, which is to transfer wealth from the population at large to a
specific group. It is in fact spectacularly successful.

Andreesen's article entirely ignores this. Things are not the way they are by
accident. Ignore the reasons why and you are either being disingenuous or
ignorant.

~~~
avmich
This misses the point.

It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare
system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd
you argue it's not the case? I, for one, know this is my idea of the system.
Will you prove that those who proposed the system had other ideas? Can you get
in their heads? Can you get in the heads of those implementing the system?
They'll perhaps bring enough words trying to convince you otherwise - and some
would be sincere.

The problem is that a big system is a collective work - and different agents
have different goals in mind. Sometimes they can have compromises - agreements
on goals, partial or final. Sometimes they can trick each other into doing
something which benefits some agents' goals, but not others. You can't make a
big system realistically without many agents - so how can you make sure they
all work with similar goals?

We talk a lot about possibilities, but sometimes not enough about intentions -
and especially verifiable goals. Politicians can promise many things, but it
could be expensive to elect somebody who's stating something meaning something
completely different - and this idea holds on various levels of public (not
only public - see e.g. office politics) decision making.

~~~
r00fus
> It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare
> system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd
> you argue it's not the case?

No, that's the entire point greendave was trying to make. The system's goal
has been _perverted_ or _coopted_. This is a logical result of a corrupted
system.

Relevant imagery: zerg infestation.

~~~
avmich
> The system's goal has been perverted or coopted.

I think that's a good description. We can use this model to work on fixing the
problem.

------
narak
I suspect the most practical way to reform our institutions is through
increased competition in governance, just like we "fix" stagnant institutions
in the private sector. We already have this baked into our constitution:
States rights and their ability to pass amendments. There's a movement
happening around this. [0]

Justice Brandeis said it best: "state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a
laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the
rest of the country." [1]

Imagine if States could try different healthcare systems, or basic income,
etc. Citizens would be able to vote with their feet and move to the best
systems. This should be a bipartisan movement.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy)

~~~
Barrin92
Localism is rarely the answer. The housing crisis is the primary example of
this. The US has one endemic problem, which is local interests successfully
lobbying federal government and putting the interests of the few ahead of the
interests of society at large.

It's local homeowner associations, the tendency to litigate everything, the
inability for large actors like government or business to purchase and develop
land. The one person who symbolizes the reason why modern America can't build
for me is Erin Brockovich. A person without any formal training in the legal
field suing an entire project into the ground, although as it turns out
there's actually no scientific evidence for any of the claims, yet she's
celebrated as the little guy who stuck it to the man.

Devolving power to the states may only weaken the federal government whose
resources and knowledge are needed to provide large scale infrastructure. The
deficit here isn't in the billions, its in the trillions.

I'm not in principal opposed to experimenting with local democracy or whatever
but it needs to happen on the back of a federal government with sufficient
capacity and competence and power to act quickly.

For the "states as laboratories" thing to work you actually need a mechanism
to ensure that the things that work actually get adopted. I don't see this
happening in the US. There's way too many inmates running their own asylums.

~~~
nickff
Perhaps the interstate highway system is a federal issue, but a metro subway
or bus system isn't. Seattle's mass transportation system has no impact on
Miami's; I doubt either has an impact on Portland's.

What resources and knowledge does the federal government have that the states
don't? If the federal government has such knowledge, it should probably
publish the papers, so that state and municipal experts can determine how to
apply it to their region.

If the federal government lowers taxes, the states can raise theirs, and
accomplish whatever objectives they need to. It's a many-billion dollar state
issue in many states, which looks like a trillion dollar federal issue when
you add up all the states, but there doesn't seem to be any economy of scale
which makes the federal government better suited to solving the issue than any
given state.

~~~
xxpor
>Seattle's mass transportation system has no impact on Miami's

This is only true if you look at it in the absolute shallowest way. Seattle's
increased output due to its subway system helps the entire country.

95% (to pull a number out of my rear end) of the use of interstates in a city
are for private vehicles belonging to city residents. I-5 in Seattle doesn't
"help" Miami either.

~~~
bhupy
You can apply this thinking to the entire world, then. We ought to all be a
part of one global country, and London's increased output helps us all!

If only cooperation and decision-making were so simple.

------
ar813
I think the points raised are reasonable and, to my mind, not particularly
partisan (though I would argue one party is more responsible for the current
chaos by several orders of magnitude than the other one..).

The deeper issue this raises is, I suppose, a constitutional one paired with
Long Now Foundation-type questions. How do we design institutions that can't
themselves be changed too easily due to majoritarian whims, yet _can_ evolve
over decades and centuries as societies change. We certainly shouldn't expect
the institutions and norms of today to precisely meet the needs of our
descendants decades or centuries from now.

For the here and now though, my observation is this: Americans in general are
allergic to learning from what other countries do. But really, as a very large
country, we should be studying what smaller countries do and using them as
experimental points of data and testing them out here. There are plenty of
implementations of better, more responsive governance out there. Nothing's
perfect, but saying 'we're number one' and plugging our ears is no solution.

------
thundergolfer
I would highly recommend the author's new book, Why We're Polarized. The model
of the USA political system that he's built reminds me of the model Ben
Thompson of Stratechery built to analyse the technology sector.

Just as Stratechery takes the latest happenings in tech, applies the core
model, and spits out an article, Ezra Klein here has taken Andressen's blo,
applied his model, and spat out an article.

In my opinion, if you want to know why the USA didn't respond properly to
COVID-19 and why its national infrastructure is failing, ask Ezra Klein
instead of Andressen.

~~~
coffeemug
I haven't read Ezra Klein's book, but as far as I can tell Ben Thompson's
articles are mostly just-so stories[1]. His model seems to be able to predict
everything that happens in tech, and when your model predicts everything that
usually means it isn't very powerful at all.

Here's a thought experiment: can you use aggregation theory to make
sufficiently powerful predictions to beat the stock market in the tech sector?
Can Ben? My strong guess is that the answer is to both questions is no.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-
so_story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story)

~~~
xxpor
The problem is you're not able to test the alternate unless you're a VC:
companies that don't follow the model (or are in the wrong part of it)
probably fail before they ever become public.

------
generatorguy
I recently read that the CCP only accepts the top students whereas mostly i
see the top students avoiding government bureaucracy in favor of private
industry as it is more lucrative and there are not many prestigious positions
in public service.

I believe the atmosphere within these institutions isn’t conducive to action
either. Put your time in and get your pension. Do nothing and nothing bad will
happen, try something big and it might fail and you look worse than everyone
who did nothing.

So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just
like programmers in California.

~~~
Consultant32452
>So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just
like programmers in California.

I agree with this, but you have to accompany that with making it just as easy
to fire a public servant as it is to fire a programmer.

~~~
xxpor
Au contraire, it's far too easy to fire people in government for issues that
have systemic root causes due to the nature of politics and public pressure.
So the poor schmuck who pushed the button gets fired, and that's the end of
it. No deeper evaluation or reports on how to prevent the issue from occuring
in the future.

This leads to extreme aversion to any risk taking and creates bureaucracy.

This is opposed to the classic stories about junior engineers who lose their
companies money, go into the bosses office expecting to be fired, and the boss
says "why would we fire you? we just spent $X training you".

~~~
stx
I see many of these same problems in large companies. Every one just tries to
avoid being blamed. Those best at avoiding blame while assigning it to others
rise up. Its politics.

~~~
xxpor
And I would guess that the companies that have "blame" cultures end up doing
much worse than companies that have "fixing" cultures.

------
cmrdporcupine
I don't think I buy the thesis here. There are plenty of western countries
without the "vetocracy" structure of the US's republic. And yet they still
haven't built much infrastructure or accomplished much in public works for the
last 30-40 years.

The reason is simple -- there's no money. No public money. There's more
private wealth than there's ever been, but public sector investment is a
fraction of it. The state has lost the ability to collect reasonable tax
revenues from private entities, and it's lost the ability to efficiently spend
it.

And in large part this is because of a protracted ideological war that one
side has effectively lost and another side has effectively won.

Excessive partisanship is a symptom of this ideological divide, not the cause.

~~~
apsec112
I don't think you can say "there's no money" in eg. France. French tax revenue
is 45% of GDP.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I actually don't know much about how well France functions as a nation. My
European experience is mostly in Germany where my dad's family is from, and
infrastructure there is 50x better than in North America.

I'm speaking more from the Canadian perspective; we have a Westminster
parliamentary system without vetoes (well there's the senate but that's mostly
rubber stamp) and yet we have the same "getting things built" dysfunction that
the US has.

~~~
MattGaiser
That's a procurement and implementation problem.

We order projects, but they become enormously over budget and poorly thought
out, causing people to restart again or just oppose the project.

I'm a government developer. I can easily see how our bureaucracy leads to the
Phoenix pay system. It is less a vetocracy and more about an overload of
features.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Thing is, I've worked in a few BigCorp private entities that have similar
kinds of dysfunction, and things also blow up and are done inefficiently.

In both cases I feel it's a broader cultural problem. In companies, it's often
putting career or team or self interest ahead of company success [empire
building, self promotion, etc.]; in government it's often a lack of
responsibility and ethics of citizenship.

I've been involved in bidding for government projects before, and associated
with he non-profit sector to boot. It was awful to see how people think and
behave.

------
jimhefferon
Since 1980 the consistent message in the US from one party is that its
objective is to shrink government until it can be drowned in the bathtub.
Because of this we are unable to act in common, since government is the
closest thing we have to common action.

~~~
apsec112
This doesn't explain problems on the state and local level, even in liberal
cities:

"If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a
housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have
better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t.

To put the question simply: Why is Penn Station, the flagship rail station in
New York City, such a dump? Why can’t the richest city in the richest nation
in the world have, at the very least, a train station with seating, some nice
restaurants, working elevators, and an absence of human waste falling through
the ceiling?"

~~~
grumple
Cities are relatively broke. See the NYC budget:
[https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget....](https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget.pdf)

I know some would zoom in on those pensions, but those are basically social
safety net / 401k investment replacements. And the 18% wouldn't make or break
large projects. Building is more expensive than ever for many reasons, which
include permits and lawsuits, but also labor cost.

Efforts to raise taxes are usually thwarted by threats of business and wealthy
citizens fleeing.

------
cryoshon
unfortunately this article ignored around the elephant in the room: one of the
two dominant political parties has an entire platform devoted to stopping
institions from expanding while also eating away at the existing capabilities
of those institutions. they pursue this platform relentlessly, and have done
so for roughly the last 40 years.

faced with staunch refusals to consider any type of revolutionary building at
the institutional level, would-be builders reduced their hopes to incremental
changes, bringing us to the current state of affairs.

after enormous legislative efforts, incremental and generally insufficient
changes are made to support the strength of US institutions. then, as part of
the dealmaking necessary to make any changes whatsoever, other institutions
are degraded incrementally in trade. the system of the country's institutions
never becomes stronger in terms of its total sum of capabilities, it only
reshuffles them.

imagine trying to build a house when half of your building team never lets you
purchase any new materials, only permitting you the use of bricks that are
already built into the house. you have to remove a brick from the foundation
to place it on the top of a half-constructed wall. that's the situation the US
is in. it's untenable.

there isn't going to be a tidy legislative solution to this kind of
intractability anytime soon because the people with the most money prefer the
current situation and fund politicians accordingly.

lest you think that the point of my comment is to blame republicans or
democrats, let me tell you that it isn't. my point is that america cannot
build because it cannot accept that building requires spending, as spending
would require contradicting the will of the political donor class. we needed
to get money out of politics back when occupy wall street was calling for it.
the next best time is now.

in a nutshell, the rich need to do their part to contribute to society and
accept that their influence must be curbed if the country is to flourish once
again. as we know, there's no chance of them doing this of their own accord.
i'll leave the details of how we can get them on board with rebuilding the
country to the imagination of the reader.

~~~
apsec112
The article discusses projects that fail despite large budgets. Eg.

"Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn
Station, a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding.
Each time, the story was the same: Plenty of people who wanted to build, and
plenty of money with which to build, but too many people with vetoes who
simply didn’t want the building to happen."

~~~
pas
But that's not actually true. That hefty sum was nowhere near sufficient!
Sure, it was hefty, but the parties involved were not ready to do real serious
work. NYC could have used eminent domain, and yes that would have likely gone
to the courts, but that is how it is supposed to work. Or they could have
bought the thing, but that was too much money again!

------
twomoretime
The US political system only works if some critical mass of politicians are
operating in good faith.

I skimmed the article and searched for "pork" to no results, so I assume there
was no mention of what I'd say is the real problem - I don't think _any_
modern bills come without pork, and that's part of the idiocy keeping our
political system from working efficiently. Bills have exploded in size out of
purely selfish political gaming wherein sponsors will attach dozens of pet
projects as riders and as an added bonus, anyone who votes against the
_riders_ can be smeared later as voting against the primary topic of the bill.
On top of that, because of this practice our politicians aren't even reading
most of what they vote on. It's totally broken but short of a collapse I'm not
sure how to convince a few hundred senators/congressmen to stop this idiotic,
scummy practice.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_\(legislation\))

------
xkcd-sucks
"Polarization makes America ungovernable" is an interesting thesis -- It was a
concern of the USA's founding fathers; it was how the American Civil War was
considered inevitable from 1800s-1860s; it was thought for a time to have been
resolved by the Civil War; and now here we are. Maybe governments are best
scoped to groups of people who mostly agree, and "union at all costs" is a
dangerous fantasy.

~~~
malandrew
Have a union around those things upon which you agree. For those things upon
which you don't agree, every state is a laboratory for trying out those ideas.

~~~
kn0where
One problem is that states-as-laboratories are not closed-loop systems. We
have free trade and freedom of movement across state borders.

If state A starts using its own tax revenue to house the homeless population,
nothing stops states B through Z from then deciding to bus their homeless
populations to state A. The other states then don’t have to pay for homeless
services, and suddenly state A has a far larger homeless population to house
(while its tax revenue hasn’t increased at all).

~~~
bhupy
> One problem is that states-as-laboratories are not closed-loop systems. We
> have free trade and freedom of movement across state borders.

Both of these are true in Switzerland, as well as the European Union, and yet
they are both body politics that are fully capable of effective
decentralization.

~~~
ilikehurdles
One drastic difference between the US and almost every other system is the
first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system of representation. A party
receiving 5% of the votes in a German vote can receive 5% representation. A
candidate winning 49.3% of the vote in a US race wins 0% of the representation
for their party. The US system is not built for coalition-building or
decentralization. Power is concentrated in the singular candidate rather than
the collective party.

~~~
bhupy
On the surface, you're right, but in all of those systems, you still need a
governing majority. In parliamentary systems, coalitions are formed after the
election. In America, the coalitions are formed before the election. The two
major parties, really, are big tents comprising a handful of minor parties
within them.

You can see this manifest in the ideological breadth of representatives within
the same party, across different constituents. In a parliamentary system, some
of those constituents would elect the same representative, just under the
banner of a more appropriate political party.

------
Symmetry
I really liked this article looking at another of how it got to be hard to
build things from the perspective of Penn Station in New York and how the
reaction against Robert Moses caused so many problems.

[https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-
stati...](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-station-
robert-caro-073564)

------
dj_gitmo
Since this is a US-centric article it's worth noting that the US spends half
of all federal discretionary spending (i.e. everything except Social Security
or Medicare) on the military. Almost a trillion dollars a year.

If even half that money were spent on an actual industrial policy we would be
in much better shape. I maybe shouldn't be surprised the Vox article doesn't
mention this.

~~~
creddit
The problem isn't lack of money and that's a huge part of the point of this
article and the Andreesen blog post.

------
stx
It has become clear during this latest crisis that if we do not have the
ability to make things inside our own borders we are sitting ducks. Its not
accurate to think that when we need PPE and all sorts of other medical
supplies we can suddenly build factories. Its not just a matter of keeping
jobs in the USA its also a matter of security. Its a matter of self
sufficiency.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Absolutely. This article is simply another example of the fall of American
exceptionalism.

It has been assumed for a long time that the US could easily win any major
conflict, but is that really so true anymore?

NATO is as weak as it's ever been. Europe is less likely than ever to trust
the US or to support it. Key allies are now looking more inward than outward.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were large scale blunders that cost trillions
for little benefit. US manufacturing capability has gone down dramatically.
There are not enough with trade no-how to support a large scale war-effort.
Any war of attrition is likely a losing one - it will be too costly if it's
possible at all.

Key positions of government and diplomacy go unfilled because of the Trump
administration's refusal to do so, severely limiting US soft-power across the
globe.

A captain of a capital ship was publicly relieved of command by acting SecNav
(Trump has yet to fill the position permanently, still. The Secretary of the
Navy. Still no permanent leader.) in embarrassing fashion after a COVID19
outbreak onboard. That is extremely telling.

A huge portion of military-service eligible citizens are far too overweight to
serve. Numbers more are disqualified for other reasons. Waging war requires
smarter soldiers - which are not in abundant supply.

Misinformation has been weaponized by Russia and China and the current
leadership has done nothing about it because it benefits them.

The polarization divides the country sharply - if one party or the other goes
to war, would the rest of the country support it?

There are significant cracks in the armor.

------
Press2forEN
"As I’ve argued for years, we should prefer the problems of a system where
elected majorities can fulfill the promises that got them elected to one where
elected majorities cannot deliver on the promises that the American people
voted for."

Does that include building the wall, privatizing social security, eliminating
the income tax, or implementing school choice? When you live in a country
where one side just wants to undo the policies of the other, there's a deeper
problem.

Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan 1309, and I'm paraphrasing, if you want to
build a good system, give it to your enemy for 10 years.

We can't build because the idea of "we" needs to be reevaluated.

~~~
RoboticWater
The argument is that the electorate can't vote on policy unless they can see
those policies in action. Voters can rest on the dogmatic idea that private
markets solve everything without ever having to experience the effects of
privatized social security.

Elected officials can rely on dogma too, styling themselves like sports teams,
knowing that because actually accomplishing something is off the table for
both parties, they have to appeal to voters almost entirely by signaling their
virtues.

Yes, it would mean rapid fluctuations in policy, but the idea is that we need
to inject some volatility so we can see what works and what doesn't.
Obviously, this can lead to problems, like a majority party implementing
policies which restrict the electorate or affect populations that can't form a
strong voting coalition, but I'm not sure this is worse than what we have
already.

Further, I'm not really sure how we're supposed to reevaluate "we." That's a
neat soundbite, but what does that mean? What are you suggesting we actually
do? Alter the electorate? Split the union?

~~~
bhupy
> Further, I'm not really sure how we're supposed to reevaluate "we." That's a
> neat soundbite, but what does that mean? What are you suggesting we actually
> do? Alter the electorate? Split the union?

There's no need to split the Union if we just follow the US Constitutions as
the Framers intended: a Union of States with powers broadly vested in the
States (see: the 9th and 10th Amendments).

The more we take out of the purview of the Federal government and the more we
allow States the leeway to enact whatever systems they wish (democratically),
the more the States coexist harmoniously. The United States begins to look
like the European Union.

------
jessriedel
Klein conflates vetos by many small minorities with slight supermajority
rules. That you can't build in SF w/o satisfying a thousand parties extracting
their pound of flesh is very different than the 60% de-filibuster. Giving 51%
majorities unhindered power is not the answer.

------
avmich
> If even the government is forced to turn a constant profit on its programs
> and to avoid anything that might look like a boondoggle

Exhibit A of government boondoggle program is most expensive NASA programs.
SLS (Space Launch System) - and its predecessors have spent so much that
humanity could have a sizeable buzzing town on the Moon for that kind of
money.

The problem is that government both too afraid of responsibility in some
places and very irresponsible in others, and there is no working mechanism to
timely deal with that.

------
qnsi
In short, author thinks US should build more liberal institutions

~~~
neilk
You should read the article to the end where he explicitly disavows that. Or
for that matter, the beginning of the article, where he blames progressives
for overly-empowering public consultations.

Ezra Klein is indeed left of center by US standards (which means he’s a
centrist anywhere else). But he’s making a different point.

I listen to his podcast, and with characteristic understatement, he’s been
saying something like “I think the government should be able to enact a
program, and have voters judge if it’s a success.” He believes that because of
vetocracy that parties now escape accountability as well, they never get to
fully implement their idea so they gain electoral success by demonizing or
blaming the other group. Klein is saying that he’ll even take a right wing
idea (like education vouchers) as long as they get to really do it and own the
success or failure. Over time he thinks we’ll get better policies that way &
less empty ideological posturing.

(I believe I have fairly characterized Klein’s views here. They are not my
own.)

~~~
qnsi
Sure, I just think this is a liberal or neophyte idea about how institutions
should look like. Conservative or neophobe idea is to keep the democracy as it
was

~~~
neilk
Perhaps I am being trolled here, but the opposite of neophobe is neophile, not
neophyte.

~~~
qnsi
Sorry English is my second language

------
cryptica
There is definitely a problem with funding which is harmful for value
creators.

Funding which is not optimally allocated is much worse than no funding at all.

Imagine if there are two people:

\- PersonA who has the potential to produce a lot of value but is useless when
it comes to pitching ideas to investors because they spend all their effort
thinking about how to solve problems.

\- PersonB who is useless at creating value but is really good at selling
empty ideas to investors because they spend all of their effort thinking about
their pitching techniques.

In our economy, PersonB will beat PersonA every single time. What this means
is that PersonA cannot get any funding at all and they end up being forced to
work as an employee of PersonB who doesn't know what the heck they're doing
because the only thing they are good at is attracting investors and telling
them what they want to hear.

In reality, it would be more efficient to let PersonA get all the funding and
put PersonB on welfare (because PersonA would be smart enough to not hire
them). As good as PersonB is at talking and convincing people to give them
money, the reality is that they are less than useless for the economy.
Unfortunately, we cannot BS our way to a stronger economy.

If you watch some interviews by Masayoshi Son of Softbank, you will understand
this. The guy is a genius at convincing people of the most fanciful,
outlandish ideas - But he added no net value... He just distributed the
funding he received to other snake oil salesmen like himself. The biggest VC
in the world didn't know what the heck he was doing and was giving money to
other people who also didn't know what the heck they were doing.

I think it would be better if the activity of investing or loaning money would
be made illegal. People should just get rich and retire; let the next person
have a go.

Getting rich and not retiring is immoral IMO. These people have every tool
necessary to enjoy the rest of their lives but they prefer to stay in control
and dedicate their entire careers to preventing other people from getting the
same opportunities as they got.

Because of them, our entire economy is now founded on the arbitrary top-down
picking of winners instead of bottom-up value creation.

~~~
Nasrudith
While bullshit is certainly a problem there are some major problems with your
proposals.

1\. How can you tell type A from type B before seeing them to ensure the
"right" people get all of the funding?

2\. Part of the reason the rich are encouraged to work is because they have
proven high value of sort - regardless of the basis of the evaluation. The
immorality assumes a smooth transition of similiar expertise would be trivial
- along with experience not mattering. To be frank that is seldom the case.

3\. Capital availability allows for upscaling which gives massive efficency
over the small scale - it is why the megacompanies can retain dominance. If
they could only produce product at a worse margin and quality then dealing
with a mass of small scale producers would be a way to get concrete gains.

~~~
cryptica
>> gives massive efficency over the small scale - it is why the megacompanies
can retain dominance

I don't buy this argument at all, especially when you consider that history
has shown that they need to get bailed out every 10 years or so. They're
successful because they're all running on free credit - Either credit that
they took themselves against their own collateral or credit taken out by other
entities who fund them (either as investors or as customers).

It's very simple. Entities which have capital can use that capital as
collateral to receive bank loans which they can use to multiply their profits.
There is a nice interview on YouTube where Steven Schwarzman from The
Blackstone Group (with assets of $500 billion) explains how this works (and
has worked for 30 years as he openly brags):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kThTbLUQdU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kThTbLUQdU)

Basically whatever capital you have to invest, you can go a bank and take a
loan against it and double how much of the underlying asset you can buy with
the same base capital... Effectively this allows you to supercharge your
ROI... Your $1 million which would have given you a ROI of 10% can be used as
collateral to secure an additional $1 million loan so that you end up holding
twice as much of the asset and 20% ROI (relative to your original 1 million).
You just hold the asset for a year or two, then dump and repeat. Can small
business without any capital compete against that? No because they're on a
different playing field; one where 20% returns are simply not possible.

You could argue that these people are taking a risk, but guess who the Federal
Reserve Bank chose to execute the bailout for the covid19 financial crisis? A
group called 'Blackrock'
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/blackrock-
federa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/blackrock-federal-
reserve.html) \- If that company sounds like 'Blackstone', it's no
coincidence, the two companies share a common history. Search for 'Blackrock'
in the Wikipedia article about 'The Blackstone group':
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blackstone_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blackstone_Group)

When you consider that this credit is printed by banks out of thin air, it's
no mystery why the rich get richer. The surplus ROI which they derive from
access to free credit is basically just free money.

------
buboard
Where in the world can people build?

------
lazyjones
If vetos are the reason, then enough people don't want to build what the
author is suggesting. It's not a failure to simply not do what he (and not a
clear majority) thinks is good.

~~~
breischl
>enough people don't want to build

If the problem was that 51% of people didn't want those things, well that's
just democracy. For a true veto, one person is "enough people." That's an
exaggeration in this case, but the point he's getting at is that it takes a
very very small minority to prevent things from moving forward. And there will
almost always be some people invested in the status quo, or even just trying
to block things in the hope of getting some kind of payoff in return (trolls,
basically).

~~~
greendave
And 51% is quite misleading. 24% of the US population lives in the 30 smallest
states. That means that effectively 12%* of voters are responsible for a
supermajority of senators. Or if you consider the filibuster, 41 senators can
represent as little as 11% of the US population and are elected by 5.5%* of
U.S. voters.

*Assuming a uniform population-voter proportion across states, which is undoubtedly not quite the case, though I don't have the exact numbers handy.

~~~
hanniabu
And good ol' gerrymandering and voter suppression helps solidify that 5.5%.

------
ThomPete
So close to being an amazing essay just to end by making the very mistake it
so eloquently showed through the essay is hindering any form of change.

You can't change the system from within. You have to crush it and build
something completely new or you just end with the same filibuster situation
just about what system of systems to build.

You can't change a system with the very principles that create the system to
begin with.

