
It’s Time to Build - jger15
https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
======
oxymoron
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.

~~~
tlb
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.

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

~~~
dodobirdlord
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.

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

~~~
mengwong
Things are happening at the bleeding edge of computational law that move this
debate into new territory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
vinay_ys
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?

~~~
mengwong
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.

~~~
kwhitefoot
> 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.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
bsanr2
This is another impediment he didn't mention: a sort of regulatory capture
working on the social level. Harvard's prestige begs the question of why
people want to go there. None of the interested parties want to change that,
because it's to their advantage. To provide a Harvard-level education to
millions (not simply academically, but to open the lanes of opportunity in all
ways Harvard provides) is to destroy Harvard. But then, one wonders what the
utility of Harvard is to the average American.

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

~~~
bsanr2
>If Harvard were catered to all students with capable ability and/or drive
then we'd have a new class of highly paid professionals.

I doubt that.

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

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

------
tekdude
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.

~~~
Jommi
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.

~~~
kebman
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.

~~~
hyko
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.

~~~
didericis
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.

~~~
hyko
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).

~~~
AmericanChopper
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...)

------
jbverschoor
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
bsanr2
This is the kind of response that comes from, and please excuse my language,
someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.

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

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

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

~~~
bsanr2
The parent argument has been made for going on 3 decades now and is the source
of the austerity and institutional divestment that has proven unworkable at
best, and disastrous at worst.

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

Reply to him next. See what he says.

------
chaseadam17
> We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
bsanr2
Third, non-voting legislative house. 1 member for every 3500 citizens,
geography agnostic; get 3499 of other interested citizens together and elect
one of you to represent the group, for whatever policies or interests you care
for. Members of this body are the only people who are allowed to meet with the
Senate during four annual 6-week periods of sequestration. Outside lobbying by
non-individuals is banned. Conversely, "legislative marketing" to the public
by individually-controlled entities is banned.

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

------
3xblah
The author is a VC who almost exclusively funds software-based businesses
where "build" generally refers to intangibles and businesses based on
intangibles. He refers to Western/American effectiveness ("we") in building
computers, including smartphones. His famous quote, displayed prominently on
his website, is "Software is eating the world."

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

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

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

------
cs702
> We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including,
> amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough
> ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough
> surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York
> City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical
> gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

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

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

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

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

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

No amount of exhortation will change _that_.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

\-----

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

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

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

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

~~~
ALittleLight
The US spends about 600 billion on the military and about a trillion on
Medicare and health.

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

~~~
mattigames
That trillion in Medicare is due extremely overpriced supplies that in any
other develop country would be exponentially cheaper.

------
mikedilger
I'm in favor of building things.

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

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

~~~
sanj
I've spent the last month setting up a company to build PPEs, so I hope to
bring an interesting perspective here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
oconnor663
I think power grids have a kind of similar problem, super oversimplifying here
because this isn't my area: Baseload power plants (e.g. coal) are large and
comparatively efficient, but they need to be kept running continuously, and
they take a long time to restart. Other types of plants (e.g. natural gas) can
start and stop more quickly to meet surges in demand, but they aren't as
efficient overall. In order to keep the second type of plant available, but
not constantly running, there's a whole separate contracts market for short-
notice capacity. What could such a market look like for e.g. hospital
equipment capacity contracts? Food growing capacity?

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

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

------
djcapelis
> But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state,
> or city was prepared

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
ImaCake
>Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic,
despite many prior warnings.

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

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

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

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

------
decasteve
I like the sentiment. I like the impassioned tone and the call to action.

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

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

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

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

~~~
kitotik
Thanks for the Buckminster Fuller reference! Such an underrated thinker.

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

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

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

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

Only a massive revolution can change this system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
nopriorarrests
I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight.

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

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

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

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

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

That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.

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

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

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

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

~~~
manigandham
Nobody is denying that. The point is that the government is not lacking for
funding but poorly spending the money it already has.

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

------
danimal88
I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions for
buildings. People do want them. VCs, less so, unless it's as high margin as a
photo sharing app, destructive and lucrative as consumable businesses like
Kurig, etc.

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

~~~
pc86
> I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions

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

~~~
danimal88
Sure. Tbh, I didn't really want this comment to be an opportunity to pitch my
company or make it too specific about our solution as there are many different
types of solutions, categories and problems that could use innovation capital
that are second in line.

flair.co is us.

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

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

~~~
sah2ed
Your post still reads like marketing-speak — it is not immediately clear how
you differ from other home builders.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
danimal88
We are not home builders and our site seems like it makes it pretty clear what
our consumer offering is. I'm not advocating for home builders to take VC
money although there are plenty of construction tech companies with unique
ideas that have taken VC.

------
fxtentacle
The article chalks it up to a lack of desire, but that seems completely wrong
to me.

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

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

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

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

~~~
david927
You're right, America has long given up the notion of what is "for the good of
society" in favor of making money. Walking around SF (until recently) meant
literally seeing both millionaires and people defecating in the street. It's
extreme.

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

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

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

------
mcphilip
I expect my reply to be buried in the flood of others, but I enjoyed the essay
because of the various responses it provokes internally:

1\. Optimistic response.

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

2\. Cynical response.

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

3\. Response as a father

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

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

~~~
StandardFuture
Here Here! We need more reasonable responses from someone not living in the SV
bubble putting on a front.

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

------
cactus2093
Ok, assume I'm bought into this idea - where would I even begin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
supernova87a
Well, the thing about building is that when a people achieve comfort and are
well-fed and happy, there's very little incentive to build. Countries get old.
They get middle-aged and a little tired or complacent.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
otisfunkmeyer
Best response in this entire thread imo.

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

Which gives me pause.

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

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

~~~
bhelkey
> Because we disproportionally fund schools for rich people's kids

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

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

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

~~~
camgunz
There are a lot of factors, but AFAIK the main dynamics are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
gdubs
Definitely feels like an inflection point. With all of the rush to return to
“normal”, I’ve been thinking about a lot of the ways in which “normal” is
pretty busted. And yes, many of us are fortunate to live in this point in
history.

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

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

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

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

Josh Lyman: The personal computer...?

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

------
jimnotgym
Seriously, whilst I agree, what can I do about it.

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

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

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

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

~~~
kshmir
Learn a new skill that allows you to build something that is meaningful to
you.

If you give up, you've already lost.

~~~
honkycat
Working more is not a guarantee to becoming wealthier or living a better life.

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

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

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

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

Things the author says drop rapidly in price:

\- computers

\- TVs

Things the author says skyrocket in price:

\- housing

\- schools

\- hospitals

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

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

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

~~~
bluedino
We don't build TV's and computers. Other countries do.

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

~~~
neilparikh
Are you claiming that most of the cost in building housing is in labour costs?

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

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

------
trimbo
> Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?

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

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

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

~~~
geofft
> _It benefits from federal student loan programs._

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

> _It receives federal research grants._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
bambax
> _But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state,
> or city was prepared_

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

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

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

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

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

------
car
It’s great to see this passion and sentiment. I wholeheartedly agree.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
kortilla
I don’t think there is evidence of European governments being any more
competent during this pandemic.

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

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

~~~
usaar333
The republican stronghold of Texas has one of the lowest covid deaths per
capita in the United States, better than even California (which is doing
relatively well). Deaths per capita at 16/million is lower than almost
anywhere in Western Europe.

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

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

~~~
usaar333
Once you drop the exceptional case of the NY metro area, not really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
walterbell
Some preconditions are needed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you buy it, people will build it.

------
hn_throwaway_99
> The problem is desire. We need to _want_ these things. The problem is
> inertia.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
rezz
Using an example where an outcome (weight gain) is completely driven by an
individual’s (in)action (consuming more energy than expending) is probably not
the best argument for opposing a “try harder” approach to living.

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

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

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

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

~~~
rezz
To what end do we put the onus of an individuals poor decisions on “policy
measures”. Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games? Should we
reinstate prohibition?

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

~~~
IkmoIkmo
> Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games?

Of course, if it was necessary?

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

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

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

> Should we reinstate prohibition?

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

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

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

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

~~~
pmarca
What's happened to the price of Las Vegas real estate since Tony bought his
section?

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

------
anoncareer0212
Let's not build the Alien Dreadnought, though - we wasted two assembly lines
chasing that dream and ended up having to put up a tent in a parking lot to
meet 80% of production goals 3 years later, and we ended up _behind_ our peers
in automation.

Measure twice, cut once, respect our forebears.

~~~
sunstone
A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?

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

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

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

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

~~~
viraptor
I was not questioning the financial part. Just the severity of issues.

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

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

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

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

~~~
setman2
I feel the same way. Hundreds of resources for learning programming online,
but little else. I would love to take a class on "Building plant based
proteins" but can't find anything online.

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

------
faitswulff
This reads very much like the engineer who hears of a political problem and
then wants to write software to fix it.

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

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

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

------
dustingetz
"Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value"

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

------
siruncledrew
The distillation of Marc’s thesis points echoes “ _We should have businesses
coming out the wazoo!_ ”, at least in my mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
hasanas
You can’t just solve everything by “building”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
chrisco255
I don't know why soaring skyscrapers should be viewed as some sort of
penultimate view for the future. With remote work tech, we can rid ourselves
of the need for dense urban cores, and we can decentralize our population
centers more appropriately.

~~~
pmarca
Let's build what we need to make remote work fully practical and available to
many more people!

------
radkapital
Books accompanying Marc’s essay -
[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1251648508655923200?s=21](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1251648508655923200?s=21)

------
throwaway1777
__Westworld spoiler __

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's in?

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

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

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

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

------
john_minsk
Very interesting article. 5 cents from post soviet hole I'm in:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
jakub_g
Really well captured. It's like we all want to have nice things, without
having to make them ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

------
pascalxus
He's right about a lot of things.

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

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

~~~
sunstone
Like addition for example, can be useful in many different contexts.

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

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

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

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

So, what are you building?

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

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

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

------
mensetmanusman
Pre crisis we had <4% unemployment, who is left to build?

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

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

2) stress test public health institutes like financial institutes

3) use the military to war game these events

~~~
alephnan
> who is left to build?

The people who are now unemployed

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

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

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

------
kitotik
Somewhat related, but The New Deal basically invested 40% of the GDP into
‘building’ and paying Americans to do it.

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

~~~
epicureanideal
I think a New Deal style fund for infrastructure and human capital investment
projects would be fantastic.

Some ideas...

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

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

Massively increase STEM research and development funding.

Free technical and trade schools.

More ideas:

Subsidize universities putting their courses online for accredited degrees.

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

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

~~~
MattGaiser
Aren’t most decent Masters and PhD programs paid already?

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

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

------
StandardFuture
Curious question: how come Horowitz does not address the successes of Taiwan
or Mongolia?

These countries did far better than the West. They also acted quickly. So, it
is obvious that to have done better with COVID-19 we simply needed to "build"
a Taiwan.

Oh, but that's right, Taiwan has zero trust in the CCP (or their WHO lapdog)
and shut out the Chinese way before anyone else ... I mean that could have
been the solution too.

> What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree
> with you.

Great! Then let's start generating that anti-CCP propaganda sooner than later!

------
brudgers
Re: Housing

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

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

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

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

------
jl2718
>> If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or
taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into
a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.

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

------
amiga_500
The problem is the failure to differentiate between wealth creation and wealth
appropriation.

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

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

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

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

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

— George Carlin

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

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

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

------
jzer0cool
> "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the
> other part of the problem is what we didn’t _do_ in advance, and what we’re
> failing to do now. And that is a failure of action ..."

The case of being reactive vs proactive.

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

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

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

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

------
ijidak
Sadly, every human attempt at creating a successful system of allocating
capital begins to decay as time passes.

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

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

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

The problem is, the problems are outpacing the solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
jimkleiber
I love building things, especially new things. I've started to see over the
years that while I've built many things, I've failed just as much to maintain
them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immensely hypocritical article.

------
here4U
America has ~16M marketers & sales folks (roughly 10% of all jobs) compared to
only ~2.7M engineers. Source: [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-
occupation.ht...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-
occupation.htm).

------
8bitsrule
"I expect this essay to be the target of criticism."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
gorgoiler
The introduction was chilling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
buboard
> The problem is desire. We need to want these things.

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

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

------
PaulHoule
Marc has to accept some responsibility for this as the decisions by himself
and his industry for 20 years have been part of the problem.

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

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

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

------
sneilan1
What if the problems we face today are harder than the problems people faced
from before roughly 1980?

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

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

------
hysan
They way he glossed over money being the problem really shows how much of a
position of privilege he is in.

 _Of course money is the problem._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
perlgeek
I love the idea of building, but we also shouldn't lose sight of earth's
limited resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
pmarca
Fortunately, VCs have no regulatory protection whatsoever. Build a better way
to finance innovation!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
antoniuschan99
This article was interesting in seeing how demand in these types of
circumstances will eventually wear off and all the buyers will go back to
looking for the lowest cost:

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

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

------
aloukissas
Can't wait to see the same investors praising this essay announce investments
in frivolous startups like TikTok lookalikes and Clubhouse in a few months
from now

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

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

Myth 1: Independence. Reality: Interdependence and autonomy.

------
taurath
One wishes there was a more direct call to action here. It reads like a
general complaint about how things work and doesn’t really get the ball
rolling.

------
known
But for the screwed policies/priorities of Politicians, #Covid19 could have
been prevented in Rest of the World if ALL International Passengers were
screened in Airports from January 22
[https://archive.vn/mlTxn](https://archive.vn/mlTxn)
[http://archive.vn/Z0pzQ](http://archive.vn/Z0pzQ)

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

------
jonstewart
The problem wasn’t foresight. Lots of governments engage in foresight
activities and have highlighted the risk of pandemic for decades.

------
jatinshah
Great article and passionate tone!

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

------
dabeeeenster
So I guess my question to Marc is: how many of your portfolio companies pair
their _morally_ correct level of corporation tax?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
lucio
There was no lack of foresight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andreseen is notoriously conservative and clearly whitewashing reality.

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

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

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

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

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

------
megavolcano
It's time to build - but yet most of us are legally mandated to stay home and
NOT build.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting rid of regulation is the ultimate regulatory capture.

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

~~~
multiplegeorges
My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers
are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
KKKKkkkk1
_Solve the climate crisis by building — energy experts say that all carbon-
based electrical power generation on the planet could be replaced by a few
thousand new zero-emission nuclear reactors, so let’s build those. Maybe we
can start with 10 new reactors? Then 100? Then the rest?_

Yeah, let's not do that.

~~~
kpennell
why not? It's our only truly scalable low carbon source right now

------
andrey_utkin
> Where are the supersonic aircraft?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the USSR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
pmarca
Indeed. Communist societies build less, and somehow also pollute more.

~~~
pmiller2
Citation needed. The USSR and PRC both went from agrarian societies to
industrial powers in under 50 years.

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

~~~
pmiller2
No, that would be moving the goalposts. The GP post claimed that communist
societies "produced less" (I made no claim about "polluted more," which the GP
post also stated). I gave 2 examples showing very large countries that went
from zero to world industrial power in 50 years. China is very near the top in
world GDP right now. The USSR put both the first human and the first
artificial satellite into space in that timeframe. Show me a capitalist
country that's accomplished so much so fast.

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

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

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

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

------
analog31
In my view, we're great at building private wealth, but have lapsed at
building public wealth. As a society, we can be as wealthy as before the
COVID, but we should think about how our wealth is distributed.

------
ed405
I’m a founder, this piece stirs my heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your if-condition evaluates to false.

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

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

------
jasonv
Just today I was on Twitter reading a thread where they were dismissing
Chomsky as a “neoliberal shill”. Couldn’t imagine how.

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

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

~~~
cpursley
Sounds great! But how do we separate cronyism and government? More government?

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

------
verdverm
Building live here
[http://www.youtube.com/c/TonyWorm](http://www.youtube.com/c/TonyWorm)

------
outside1234
Is he willing to pay taxes to fund all of that.

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

------
kimsant
Workforce is like energy, difficult to store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
MattGaiser
I don't have an issue with the ideas. I agree with many of them.

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

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

~~~
whb07
You realize he’s one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet as
we see it today right?

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

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

~~~
MattGaiser
> You realize he’s one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet
> as we see it today right?

I know who he is.

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

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

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

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

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

------
refurb
_We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance
warning about bat-borne coronaviruses._

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
neycoda
And this happens after trillion-dollar tax cuts to the rich and giant
profitable multi-national corporations.

------
bfung
I hope a16z puts money where their mouth is. Investors can own and drive a lot
of what "we" want.

------
birdyrooster
Who watches "Westworld" and their takeaway is that our cities should look more
like theirs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
mingabunga
It's because we're reactive. Who wants to spend money on something which might
happen.

------
fullshark
Elegant sophistry with the end goal as always to convince governments to tear
back regulations.

------
hyko
It’s Time to Think.

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

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

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

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

------
Paianni
The way cities are talked about like utilities in NA seems utterly bizarre to
me.

------
allenleein
> Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming,
> state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at
> the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our
> country?

> Where are the supersonic aircraft?

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

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

Andreessen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

\---

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

\---

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

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

------
scythe
The essay takes it as a given that we should have no confidence in democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a crisis of institutional trust in America.

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

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

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

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

------
unexaminedlife
Sadly I find so many things wrong with this "blog post".

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

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

------
hit8run
I'm really looking forward to what he is going to build.

------
DeathArrow
>I expect this essay to be the target of criticism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
dmode
Interesting essay, but more of a feel good elite speak that anything else.
Feels like he skips over the main part on why "building" anything is
difficult. That is because we have worshipped at the altars of capitalism for
so long that we worship our one true god - SHAREHOLDER VALUE. This is not some
rocket science on why we offshore, or why we invest in photo filter apps.
Because that generates most returns in capital and creates much larger
shareholder value. Building flying cars do not. Looks how much capital was
required for Tesla to produce at any scale. And it is still struggling, what
15 years after it was founded ? Now look at Facebook, which was founded at the
same time.

------
jcisme
This is the mindset we need in order to change.

------
shripadk
What was needed for the West was to just get serious about the disease and
Lockdown. As early as January or February. A country as populous as India
(with 1.3 billion people) has been under lockdown for well over 27 days and
counting. Will be under lockdown till May the 3rd (and might get extended too
if the curve has not flattened). We went in early unlike Italy or the United
States. And it was a complete shutdown and not partial.

Even before the Lockdown commenced, we were testing all travelers as early as
January and isolating those who were showing any signs of sickness. The
Western countries did not do any of it. These two things alone helped slowdown
the spread of the virus. There was no need for large amounts of ventilators,
masks or PPE. Just common sense.

What the West got wrong was not "lack of ability" to build things. It was
"lack of agility" to respond to the emerging crisis. The West should have gone
in for a complete lockdown. The West should have tested (no contact thermal
testing would have been sufficient) all travelers at the entry point. This
slackness cost so many lives!

I remember having a discussion [1] about this almost a month ago when the
first major destructive potential of this pandemic was still unravelling in
the West. Many were skeptical about how India would respond and that it was a
disaster waiting to happen. But no such disaster happened because of how
proactive the Government of India had been since January. This proactiveness
has allowed India to have really low number of positive cases compared to the
West. This also doesn't put pressure on the medical system.

The lesson to learn here is that you should use common sense. A lot of it.
First control the spread of the virus and then work on a cure. You can't let
the virus wreak havoc and then expect a vaccine or a cure be available
immediately to tackle it. It puts unnecessary pressure on scientists who need
crucial time to figure out a cure. But I guess it is too late now and the West
will just have to ride the wave. Unfortunately a lot of lives will be lost in
the process. Very sad.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609604)

------
cwperkins
I expect a decently big infrastructure spending bill in the near future. It
was even one of Trump's campaign promises and interest rates are near zero.
I'm fiscally conservative, but I've seen the evidence from Southern Europe
that Austerity is not the way forward. Many Southern European countries still
have not fully recovered their GDP from 2008. I see many people weary about
the future and I think it would do us wonders to see people excited to create
a future with Sci-Fi level transportation, advanced manufacturing and cheap,
abundant and renewable energy.

------
justinzollars
This is a monumental piece. I loved it.

------
mauritzio
People are by nature curious and eager to build. But we also love stories that
are too good to be true.

We gave the lazy guys, good story tellers, all the power, and thereby the
power how money flows and works.

Money is such a story: There exists some artificial thing, that can be turned
into anything we want. What in reality doesn't exist, unless people work for
it. Its seams more a trust relation turned into a fetish.

Obviously the stories turned everything in to giant circus pyramid game to
generate more magic stuff, and everybody can have it. Well the poor without
power, we keep stupid and poor, we can outsource to them, to do all the work
and we all become story tellers.

Technology developed by curious nerdy scientists (also bad story telleres
btw), could be used that a few are enough to feed and build for many many
story tellers. Looks like magic, money can work for itself, hey more magic.

People who actually do something like women and artist and builders are
continiously undervalued in this pyramid system as they are not 'usefull'. The
working slaves all produced a lot of useless stuff. And as the majority became
lazy guys, hey why change anything that is the way the world 'works'.

No, a little virus shows all was big story. In fact there is no magic stuff.
Money is no value in it self. Now the few able to build are somewhere far away
and take care of themselves.

Now the undervalued, who do the work are suddenly in high demand. Oh we clap
and say thank you, thank you, but giving them power, mmmm do we really have
to? Can we not just move on, go back to slavery fast.. Suddenly doing became
interesting but hey please help can't do any more. I can generate trillions of
magic paper if you want, eh trust me, please help. Lets get back fast to the
time when the pyramid system worked, and we have to keep dreaming and move on.

It is likely that, we want to keep going on. Allthough it was just fun for a
few. Humans love to continue to follow the path they are used to go.

Money is an invention and the way it flows is an expression of power but
without trust it is useless. It doesn't do anything.

We all need food, a shelter, health, love, relations and a lot curious people
solving hard problems, learning what makes a virus go around and how to stop
it.

We should start to transform the rules and redefine how money works. For some
this idea is so strange as this is a well known constant from heaven. It is
not.

What if we give everybody some of this fuel. As long as you live you get
money=trust every week just by existing you don't have to earn it and
otherwise starve to death and die on the street. Then you can use your power,
your vote to tell who you trust to send you a product or service. Oh but it
becomes worthless over time. If you don't spend it, it becomes just paper. So
no interest rates, no accumulation not inheriting wealth. Only one will have
to pay for it, the earth we all together. What if...

What if we all share our knowlege for free..

Mmm now we have time to think. Some people don't like that. ..The long we
think the more they yell to go back back...

A nice little story to good to be true.

------
raybon
Great. After flogging for 10 years that software is eating the world and that
hard sciences and physical world doesn't matter, a16z now is asking us to
build? Color me surprised.

------
hestefisk
I know this comment might be voted down, but I cannot help it: in times of
crisis, ideology is not the answer. Capitalism works great in stable
conditions. But it doesn’t manage externalities very well. Hence the need for
a strong public sector and safety net that can reel things back in line in
times of crunch.

------
refsab
If everybody is going to university no one is going to build anything

------
bbleciel
It's depressing this receives this much attention on hacker news.

An extremely wealthy person making an imperative to less wealthy people to
"ignore partisan politics and focus on results!"

To this person I would ask... who had the capacity, the agency, the capital,
the resources, (and given this article, presumably according to them, THE
VISION) this entire time? You did. So rather than make an imperative to
everyone with less to "get back on the horse" and "put aside petty
differences"– why don't you examine the decisions you made, and examine the
systems you were party to, which led to this colossal failure.

"I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of
people we don’t know"... Uhhhhh people you don't know are dying everywhere
meanwhile speculative finance i.e. markets i.e. your entire business is doing
great. Fuck off

------
yalogin
I don’t think capitalism is the straight up answer. If you are rousing people
to create new startups so you can fund sure, but reality is the politics in
the country should change. Politicians should be less self-serving and be able
to think long term about the good of the people. Companies cannot create the
infrastructure or planning needed for pandemics, that should come from the
government. Sure companies can make the daily lives more resilient but the
initiative should come from the government.

------
heymartinadams
I’ll repost my Twitter thread here, which I wrote in response to Marc’s post.
Have great respect for him — and other technologists who believe in the power
of progress (as do I); Though unlike Marc, I don’t believe that greater effort
and less regulation is needed; rather, we need to reexamine, methodically, the
ROOT causes of what creates unaffordable housing.

Here, in summary, my Twitter thread.
[https://twitter.com/heyMartinAdams/status/125166810880624230...](https://twitter.com/heyMartinAdams/status/1251668108806242304)

1/ Naturally, many entrepreneurs tend to believe that the insufficient supply
of housing is either due to lack of willpower, insufficient belief in progress
(see article below), high building costs, or due to restrictive zoning
regulations.

2/ I hurt a little every time I read an article like that coming from well-
meaning and intelligent people since these analyses are based on a core
assumption: that if only those aforementioned constraints were removed, the
supply of housing would increase in proportion to demand.

3/ This assumption, though, is incorrect, even though it’s wide-spread and
relatable, especially with entrepreneurs, who solve problems by building new
things! (I love solving problems by building new things too!) However, the
housing market works differently.

4/ Notice the open-air parking lots in most urban areas: they’re hardly
developed, used only for a few cars — even though (and this is crucial) there
is an _exceptional_ demand for housing in those areas.

5/ It’s not that these lots are not zoned for housing, or that it’s too
expensive to build any kind of housing on those open-air parking lots. None of
these things are true. The reason these parking lots exist is because property
ownership incentives are flawed.

6/ A person who owns an open-air parking lot often makes more money over time
through property appreciation (even minus property taxes), and is therefore
not incentivized to put this property to its optimal use, i.e. to use it to
provide more housing.

7/ The core problem is that the land market (and therefore the real estate
market) is, in actuality, an entry monopoly; an entry monopoly occurs whenever
a market is closed to new participants because supply (i.e. land in prime
locations) can’t be increased.

8/ See, the market for automobiles (or software, etc.) is different: if there
is a greater demand for cars, more cars can, and will, be created.

9/ New land in good locations, however, cannot be made; so if property
developers want to build more housing in a good location, they have to buy
land from someone who already owns land in that location (if they choose to
sell, that is!).

10/ This artificially increases cost, artificially diminishes supply, and
drastically limits the supply of affordable housing across the board. Unlike
software, the housing market is not a free market. It is a monopoly. Like the
game.

11/ There’s a lot more to this topic, but I’ve done my best to summarize a
small part of it here in this thread. As you can tell, it’s a topic of great
concern to me (to the extent that I wrote a book on it:
[http://unitism.com](http://unitism.com)).

12/ I hope that what I was able to share has given you some pause; I feel a
bit of a pang every time I read an entrepreneur saying “we can solve the
affordable housing crisis by simply building more things with more effort.”
This hurts. And it’s also uninformed in my view.

------
drelihan
Pay attention. This is how you rant.

------
mrfusion
This is great. We are really playing the victim with this virus. I think we
should be attacking it on all fronts.

Let’s spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine in
three months. Maybe have a national reserve of people standing by to
participate in vaccine trials during a crisis.

Don’t have some of the technology? Invent it! Rules don’t allow it? Change the
rules!

~~~
MattGaiser
> Let’s spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine
> in three months.

The big problem is that we have to test it long term on a bunch of live human
beings to make sure it doesn't deform babies or something. That is the major
delay.

Build whatever system you want, but a perfect vaccine ready today would still
be well over 3 months from deployment due to the need for safety checks.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/coronavirus-
va...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/coronavirus-vaccine-when-
will-we-have-one-covid-19)

~~~
mrfusion
How about a crisis only approval. During which time you don’t give it to
babies, pregnant women, etc.

It would still be enormously valuable for first responders and elderly. You
make sure they have all the information about the unknown risks and let them
be consenting adults.

A terrible idea for normal times but maybe ok weighed against the cost of
doing nothing in a crisis.

~~~
dmurray
One problem with this idea is that the coronavirus just isn't that severe. If
the mystery treatment has a 5% rate of severe complications, then the cure
would be worse than the disease. Even 1% might be too much: consider that not
everybody will contract the coronavirus, and the people most at risk from it
(elderly or with comorbidities) are also likely to be at the highest risk of
complications from some novel drug. A 5% risk of serious complications isn't
unusually high: thalidomide was around 50% for pregnant women.

If the coronavirus death rate was comparable with the Spanish flu - around 10%
instead of 1%, and severe in young healthy people - we'd be a lot more
justified in rushing through untested treatments.

------
_pmf_
Tech bro with the wisdom.

------
sunstone
I would expect Mr. Andreessen to have a more rounded understanding of
capitalism.

------
MattGaiser
You are a billionare Marc. You are probably one of the top 1000 people with
the capacity to build in North America.

So, how many of the things you list are you building?

~~~
WoahNoun
The entire article is about top down resource allocation to build society.
That can't be accomplished by any single person, organization or state.

Yours is a hopelessly cynical response that I hope you will reflect a little
deeper on.

~~~
MattGaiser
The entire laundry list can't be accomplished by one person. Can many of those
things be done on a smaller level by a billionaire with his connections and
skills? Absolutely.

Could he build just one state of the art dreadnaught factory to supply X for
California? Yes.

Could he give a university a team of top-notch developers to create an on-
demand bachelor's curriculum that could accommodate a million learners
simultaneously? Yep. He could even go to Harvard and do that! They would take
his call a heck of a lot faster than they would take mine.

I am not demanding that he do everything. Just that he start to lead the way.

------
quezzle
“Socialist” societies have the things you’re asking for.

------
talkingtab
Give me a break! "The problem is desire." You gotta be kidding me. Perhaps the
real problem is a simplistic view of the world that fails to account for the
dysfunctional forces at work in our society.

Did you even notice the Republican party in Wisconsin so desperate to stay in
power they demanded that voters risk infection in order to vote? Have you not
noticed the divisiveness that is overwhelming our social and political
institutions? Did you notice that we have a generation of young people saddled
with debt, while large corporations now line up for the dole? "The problem is
desire"?

Sorry, but the condescension is unconscionable.

------
vatotemking
As a non-American, don't vote Joe Biden if you want sweeping changes. Shouldve
considered the other Democrats candidates. Youll end up with same status quo

------
threepio
"I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. "

With good reason: in the midst of a global crisis, Andreessen launches himself
into the billionaire-splaining hall of fame by enumerating a litany of
critical projects he thinks others ought be taking seriously, while notably
refusing to commit any of his own wealth and influence toward these causes,
nor interrogating how his investing record over the last 20 years squares with
any of these apparently deeply held principles.

If you think that's cruel, cover up the name on the essay and read it again.
It sounds like an op-ed published by an undergraduate in the campus newspaper
— anodyne generalizations set against the straw man of "Western life".

Net difference made in the world: zero

------
muddi900
I doubt Andreesen wrote all this with straight face. This part is especially
egregious:

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

No Mark the problem is that American labor is overvalued and the Government
does not subsidize it like it does for Agriculture. Why, you ask? Because
manufacturing does not get you swing states.

American Manufacturing can rise again if there are no expectations of profit.
Which is only possible with Government money. Or if you are Elon Musk, and can
convince private investors to lose money for no reason.

------
jariel
This is an upsetting article, sadly, I usually quite like what a16z has to
say.

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

NO thank you, we are not part of your ultra neoliberal project.

China is the place with the 'most skyscrapers' and it's a craphole for most
citizens.

There is absolutely no reason to 'massively build' other than cram more people
in and line the pockets of the investor class.

"We have top-end universities, yes, ... Why not educate every 18 year old?"

Marc, with all due respect, do you remotely grasp the notion of 'class' and
what's going on with our schools? (Edit - I'm not saying I agree with it, but
it exists for certain reasons)

First - the US sends a huge percentage of it's youth to College - far more
than other places.

Second - many of them _do not qualify_ and more and more are having to attend
remedial classes. LA County kids were graduating at 55% rate, then 'poof' they
lowered the standards to get a 77% rate.

US students are largely NOT ready for elite education. The issue is not
'getting everyone to harvard' \- the issue is 'getting everyone who deserves
to go to a decent school - into one'. This actually isn't a huge problem in
the US.

Third - we DONT need more college! College was a legit mark of the elite
(legitimately) but it's not anymore. We are _failing_ huge cohorts of kids
that do _not_ go to college! The 'problem' is that we provide _no path_ for
non-college educated kids to get into the system. We also like to most college
kids who think they get a free job. Nope.

Fourth - Education will always be at least somewhat elite. There will always
be 5% who are considerably more spectacular, and they deserve a place to go.
The US system is not perfect, but it's not bad either.

And this Thiel-esque bit: " Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the
millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring
monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?"

No - this post WW2 vector is the wrong kind of 'brute' Engineering. You know
what matters more than 'supersonic flight'? Getting a much cheaper and safer
flight. And guess what, that has been happening. The market pushes innovation
in a specific direction and sorry, it's not 'to the moon' it's to 'LA to NY'
for 1/2 the price.

Finally his bit about factories. I share his concern, but at the same time, he
writes as though he completely ignores market realities again. We don't build
more factories in the US because we've * externalized human rights* to another
nation. If Chinese factories can pay pennies, fire people for going to the
bathroom, spy on everyone 24/7, pollute up the yang, have the government back
national players with money from the central bank and force international
competitors out of business ... when then you see why there are 'few
factories' in the US.

The 'answer' to 'more physical building' is something he is unwilling to say
and that is a nationalist cause with trade barriers, something that
neoliberals absolutely hate.

With issues such as lack of PPE, ventilators and chems. for testing it becomes
much more clear obviously.

What would happen if the government literally said 'We declar this, that and
this sector to be 'strategically imperartive' and therefore all production
must happen within the country'. Well guess what? Those 'fancy factories'
would get built. It would still be more expensive than China - but - the huge
benefit from that is that this would entail a huge transfer of wealth to the
poor and less educated for their doing actual, meaningful work. Which is
always better than welfare or UBI.

Now - combine this 'factory' problem with the 'what do we do with all these
no-college people' and you start to see how these issues resonate.

So yes we need to be 'building' but we need to be building 'up' not 'out'.

'Building out' is a 19th and 20th century strategy. More more more, bigger
bigger bigger. Sorry - we are at least for now more advanced than China et.
al. and the plan should be 'better'.

We do _not_ need large scale migration or even construction. What we need is a
way to make our system fair, accessible, to make sure that 'everyone gets a
spot' in the system that has dignity. All of our institutions to work at a
higher level - for example, government IT is a complete mess - our services
could be improved dramatically with smart policies. US University Systems
could expand in the 5 Billion-person developing world, for example. The US is
going to help fare more people in the world by being better on all fronts than
just having a bigger body count.

I think we can all kind of agree with the impetus of Marc's rant, but I think
this is not particularly well thought out, he could take this one as a first
draft.

------
animalCrax0rz
It’s time to go deeper?

When faced with an existential crisis, we tend to jump into fix it mode. But
fix what? The symptoms or ourselves?

Let’s start with ourselves: we have failed miserably at being stewards to this
earth. We have failed (not completely but in some very dramatic ways) at
building a better future for our children and their children.

We should fix us, first, before we move on to fixing the symptoms of our
flawed way of being in the world.

Don’t you think?

------
quietthrow
Since you are reading why nations fail I would like to recommend a pairing.
How democracies die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. The central thesis
here is parties are the gatekeepers of democracies and when they put party
before nation they erode the democracy that eventually fails. More often it’s
a slow degrade than a sudden spectacular collapse. The erosion paves way for
leaders that are more “spectacular” in every negative way than the last one.
Makes you think if trump is the problem or merely a symptom. GOP put party win
before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They
failed as gatekeepers. His presidency will lead to future leaders justifying
behaving like him or worse and the “norm” Keeps degrading over time to the
point where people are fed up and bring into power a person that they don’t
fully understand and one who plays to their fears and portrays themself as
their only solution. The book is amazing to read specially with the context of
last 4 - 6 years of American politics.

~~~
etrabroline
>GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual
for office. They failed as gatekeepers.

Trump won the primary because he took positions that closely follow the
article being discussed here, anti-war, anti-outsourcing (additionally he took
an anti-immigration position) while all of the other 18 GOP candidates had the
same pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-immigration positions that the party
gatekeepers (big donors) favor.

I think Ziblatt and Levitsky don't like that voters agree more with Marc
Andreessen and what Trump said in the campaign.

EDIT: People didn't elect Trump because they trust the gatekeepers and were
tricked by them. They elected him because he was the only candidate who
promised to do what the people wanted who was able to _go around_ the
gatekeepers by financing his own campaign. We wouldn't be on the road to neo-
Hitler if the gatekeepers allowed sane people with popular opinions into the
major parties, but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars, raising
wages, lowering corporate profits, and ending the cheap labor glut in ways
that will seriously dent the fortunes and power of the gatekeepers.

~~~
roenxi
> but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars

Do you want the terrorists to win? >:|

It is a remarkable bellweather of US politics that despite being a relatively
peaceful polity the voting public have been unable to drag the country out of
a permanent state of expensive and wasteful war. I think both Trump and Obama
campaigned as pro-peace candidates so it is a presumably a popular position
with voters.

US foreign policy is almost inexplicable when it comes to war. The death,
destruction and raising a generation Middle Easterners with _excellent_
motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy. It also
doesn't look profitable.

~~~
huntertwo
> US foreign policy is almost inexplicable when it comes to war. The death,
> destruction and raising a generation Middle Easterners with excellent
> motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy. It also
> doesn't look profitable.

Not for the U.S., not for its citizens, but for a certain set of people the
constant war is very profitable. And I think you'll find that those that
profit from war have considerable influence over the foreign policy that keeps
us in constant war.

~~~
Silhouette
War is bad for business, unless war _is_ your business.

------
lame88
A capitalist blames a lack of demand for the deep socioeconomic flaws that
disasters like this shine an ugly light on. By his logic, if people wanted
these things, capitalists would be able to make a ton of money off of them,
and so it's everyone else's fault for not creating the demand.

And I don't know the original quote, but the idea that "capitalism is how we
take care of people we don’t know" is a hilarious feat of mental gymnastics to
frame such a inherently self-centered economic system as some sort of inherent
altruism.

He challenges the public sector to make better things than the private sector
without even acknowledging the massive and growing asymmetry in the resources
available in the private sector to accomplish these things.

And lastly he attempts deflect criticism like mine by writing off any
counterpoint as "attacking" his ideas and instead asking we talk about what we
would "build" and therefore take his deeply biased assumptions as axioms.

It's not the only factor, but to look at this problem without critically
evaluating capitalism's role is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Now
that we are in a point in time where the more wealth and power is being
accumulated by an ever shrinking pool of people, capitalists like Andreessen
have more power than ever to employ these kinds of changes. If the supposed
demand is not there, then maybe take that one of many signs that capitalism is
a dead end.

------
jariel
The most sorely lacking in self-awareness aspect of his post is that a16z is a
_primary driver_ of a flavour economic (and social) neoliberalism that is a
'root cause' of almost everything he lamented.

1) If non-college educated kids had a legit path into the market (like they do
in Germany) then surpluses would be more evenly distributed and housing
wouldn't be such a problem.

But they don't have path because a) industry won't train and b) the US is an
economically liberal place - there is no communitarian impetus (like
Japan/Germany) to structure. The US doesn't really care that much about
citizen v. non-citizen - the economic benefit in the short term is
outsource/insource - there is no consideration for the population.

 _US Citizens are an externality to the business world_.

2) On the college side, the US has already financialized the college race,
arguably to a nearly corrupt degree. There are tons of kids going to Uni in
the US, many of them ill-prepared, and then will be over-indebted.

3) Silicon Valley VC does _not_ want longer-term risky bets, they want to make
short term bits with big near term payouts, with long term outcomes again,
irrelevant.

It makes _much_ more sense to invest in something like Twitter/TikTok/SnapChat
than most other things in this context.

4) And _who_ exactly built those supersonic planes? Was it VC's? No! It was
generally the government, with the impetus of war, specifically WW2 and the
Cold War! Literally ARPANET.

5) 'Building here' would entail a coordinated national strategy that is anemic
to free-market types they usually can't even contemplate it. It would take
something like an economy-destroying epidemic (!) to realize the consequences
of their lack of strategic investment at very least in things like specific
manufacturing (medical, medicinal) and food production. All of a sudden those
farming subsidies start to look a little different!

6) So what issue ties all of Marc's seemingly disparate points together? Why
didn't he look deeper at Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore as examples? What's
actually going on there at a more fundamental level that's different from the
USA?

I'm not necessarily advocating for some big 'state-managed' anything or huge
governmental intervention. But I am certainly advocating for rational and
specific nationalist intervention, with a communitarian attitude - or at very
least the contemplation of it.

The fact someone so enormously intelligent and influential 'didn't even go
there' I feel is because the language is literally lost in North America. They
have no idea what it even means. Much like entrepreneurialism, especially
'creative destruction' is a really hard concept for many business circles in
Europe to get. It's like a foreign language.

~~~
luckylion
I don't disagree on the primary point you're trying to make, but I feel like
you have a warped image of -at least- Germany. Germany has a housing crisis as
well, rent is through the roof in the major metropolitan areas.

> The US doesn't really care that much about citizen v. non-citizen - the
> economic benefit in the short term is outsource/insource - there is no
> consideration for the population.

That's very true for Germany as well.

Germany's Nazi-past has left the political climate in a state of explicit
denial of self-interest. Obviously, Germany very much _has_ political and
economical interests as any nation will. The main difference compared to the
US, Britain or France is that it's a big no-no to say so in Germany. Concerns
about the impact of decisions on Germany's citizens are considered nationalist
and suspect of being far right.

~~~
jariel
I'm a non-German who lived in Germany, the US, and other places.

As you say 'it's impolite' to talk about the citizens in a nationalist way,
yes, but Germany (and many other nations) are still deeply ethnocentric - it's
by default. Almost everything about Germany is 'German' and when almost all
economic, political and social concern on a broader level is about 'Germany'.
It actually takes some intellectual effort to go beyond and think in terms of
'Europe' or even 'The World'.

'Not being so nationalist' is a social artifact of many nations these days,
and I suggest it's just a healthy dose of self-awareness, but it doesn't
change the definition of what the community is in the minds of citizens.

FYI I should point out that I don't think the US in a 'Germany model' would
somehow result in the government building rocket-ships, but it would result in
healthcare, better employment terms.

~~~
luckylion
Possibly, though it's a cultural thing, so I don't believe you can simply say
"we're switching to a Germany model". The US is very individualistic, Germany
is more collectivist. Individualistic cultures are more unequal, have issues
with high taxes, government regulations and so on. They are much more
flexible, can react to changes and move fast. And, as the Facebook motto goes
(or went), sometimes they break things.

As for the claimed anti-nationalism, I fundamentally dislike it because it's a
charade from start to finish. When "I want A" becomes amoral, everything gets
wrapped in fifty layers of misdirection and rationalization, and finding
compromise gets even harder because nobody can admit to what they actually
want. It's a pathological trait in individuals, and I don't believe it's
healthy on a society level. I'm not saying "that's how it has to be", rather
"that's how it is, so let's not pretend it isn't". At the first sign of
trouble, it's becoming evident anyhow, but if our arrangements are built on
different assumptions, the damage will be much larger.

------
soared
Ah yes, the lack of success in our nation is purely the individual’s fault.
Your fault, my fault. There are no structural issues, misallocations of
capitals, disincentives. You should be working harder on bigger problems! Quit
your job at Walmart, and start working on things that matter.

What the fuck Andreessen? Are you so out of touch with reality that you think
if the working class just worked a little harder, a little smarter, then we’d
have flying cars?

~~~
imgabe
> There are no structural issues, misallocations of capitals, disincentives.

Who created the structure? Who allocates capital? Who creates incentives?

These are not natural phenomena that arise without human intervention.
_Someone_ made the decisions that created them and _someone_ has the power to
make different decisions. Yes, even decisions that you personally make might
contribute in some way.

Instead of throwing up your hands and blaming everything on "structural
issues" look for something you can do that makes a difference. Maybe it's a
small difference, but large societal change can often be the result of an
accumulation of small actions.

------
nopriorarrests
It is interesting to see Marc Andreessen in 2020 to quote Mencius Moldbug from
2013 almost word to word.

To quote Mencius directly -- " One pathology of our age is a childlike
credulity in the magical efficacy of complaint. Don’t complain, build. We have
done well at complaining; so what? What have we built?", which is basically
tl;dr of Marc's article.

~~~
RareSoft
Gandhi's “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” while a little
more abstract is essentially the same thing.

------
paypalcust83
Apropos anthem track:

 _It Takes Time To Build (With Skit) 2004-01-01_ \- Beastie Boys

[https://youtu.be/fGv2VqE3xbY](https://youtu.be/fGv2VqE3xbY)

[https://open.spotify.com/track/0JXd86ImsreGIfgQoVsrYt](https://open.spotify.com/track/0JXd86ImsreGIfgQoVsrYt)

[https://www.last.fm/music/Beastie+Boys/To+the+5+Boroughs/It+...](https://www.last.fm/music/Beastie+Boys/To+the+5+Boroughs/It+Takes+Time+to+Build)

------
rexreed
This _reeks_ of Hypocrisy. After years of VC companies investing in bat-shit
ideas they now cry about not having solutions for bat-borne illnesses. Oh
"failure of imagination" when they poured _billions_ into the lack-of-
imagination ideas such as WeWork, Uber, AirBnb, and others.

Oh now we need imagination when companies with potential solutions for these
problems over the past few decades couldn't get these investors attention, who
would much rather throw more money to the same set of well-connected
entrepreneurs than ignore the innovation happening all around the world in
small cities and mid-sized towns, coming out of universities that aren't in
the Silicon Valley / SF are or NYC or Boston.

So, the chickens are coming home to roost. We have societal problems that
Silicon Valley VCs haven't done anything to solve. Am I surprised? Hell no. Do
I believe this woah-is-us "let's build" BS from the same VCs that have built
what we have so far. Hell no.

We need new imagination for investors too. The same class of investors will
give us the same class of solutions to the same class of problems. Let's look
elsewhere for ideas and inspiration. The solution is not Silicon Valley VC.
The solution is not the same profit-driven health care institutions. The
solution lies elsewhere. And that's what we really need imagination for.

~~~
dang
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Most importantly this one: "
_Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic
gets more divisive._ "

But note also: " _Please don 't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to
emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get
italicized._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It's generally better to wait to cool down before posting. That makes it
easier to follow the site rules. In addition, you'll think of better points to
make your case with, and will be more likely to notice anything untrue or
unfair in what you are inclined to say.

------
jonstewart
One cynical take on this essay could be that Andreessen is bashing the West in
order to please Xi/China and gain access to investments in the East.

------
adventured
> Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming,
> state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at
> the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our
> country?

Because we have few of the industrial titans which are required to spearhead
that and round up (or possess) the necessary capital. This sort of outcome
does not magically self-assemble, it starts with one person that takes action.
You actually need hyper competent, hard charging, ambitious, skilled people of
all sorts to go after the extreme challenges represented by such a huge re-
industrialization. These people and their talents no longer exist in such high
numbers among the population as they did prior to the gutting of the US
industrial age. They are now rare and the capital that desires to fund them is
equally rare.

If you want to produce them, you need to completely alter the incentive
structures we arrange our economy around.

We should have 0% corporate tax rates for all domestic manufacturing concerns,
to get started. Tax individual income at a higher rate.

Implement a robust system of income tax credits and abandon the minimum wage
as it exists today. This is not my idea of course, Warren Buffett is probably
its loudest supporter and he is absolutely right. Set the income tax credit
system such that it guarantees a higher minimum wage of at least $12. By
removing the strict front-facing minimum wage we have today (which blocks
labor from the market), all businesses would immediately aggressively seek to
hire anyone and everyone they can get their hands on. The workers would be
guaranteed a minimum wage by the redistribution income tax credit system and
there would be no labor-value blocker (aka the minimum wage) keeping
businesses from hiring people.

If a state has a $12 minimum wage, and your labor is only worth $9, you're
screwed. This solves that.

It's about absorbing max lower skill labor (where the unemployment problems
tend to be over time) into the workforce. You make labor artificially cheaper,
while simultaneously paying that labor a fair wage: we subsidize the outcome
we want. They produce, they earn a good wage, they build savings and can start
to become asset owners. They also start learning new skills (and later might
start production of their own based on the accumulating of experience at
making goods; an important catalyst in re-industrialization). The combination
would unleash epic common-goods manufacturing output the likes of which the US
hasn't seen in half a century.

It would make it economical to manufacture low-margin, lower value goods in
the US again. It becomes a de facto subsidization for employment and
manufacturing.

This would instantly change the US economy for the better.

~~~
mkl
How would that minimum wage replacement work? Wouldn't every minimum wage
employer just switch to paying $1/hr or whatever, and let this system pay the
rest? That would mean such companies couldn't give their worst a $1/hr raise
without paying $12/hr more. I seem to be missing something.

~~~
adventured
That would be true for the absolute lowest value labor. Only about 1% of the
labor force earned the minimum wage in 2019. Maybe that would increase to 3-5%
under this scenario, with higher real wage compensation covering more people.

The competition for labor - which exists at all times in some form - will
continue to force businesses beyond the floor of the income tax credit line
for the extreme majority of labor. A person that now earns the minimum $12/hr
via the tax credit system, a business can offer them $12 + their own $3 cost
($15/hr total to the employee), and steal them away for relatively
inexpensively versus the old minimum wage costs. The business might have been
paying a $10/hr min wage in their state previously, for example; so paying
$3/hr for that labor is still a net savings. You could gradually eliminate the
tax credit as you step up the income scale (maybe every combined dollar above
$12/hr the person earns, one dollar in the credit vanishes; so someone earning
$20/hr total, that employee loses $8/hr of the credit, so $16/hr of that has
to come from the business; or half that rate of vanishing; you get the general
idea). It's entirely plausibly this would massively boost income levels for
the bottom half of workers, as businesses would offer over the $12/hr line to
lure the best lower skill workers (it would still be net cheaper to the
business than the old system, which is why they'd do it). It would also make a
lot of small businesses solidly profitable and encourage higher rates of
business formation again (most mom & pop businesses operate at very thin
margins; would have to implement some new fraud checking and minimum revenue
requirements perhaps; have to avoid various fraudulent employment schemes).
Also, the credit should apply to lower income waiters also, they can keep tips
on top of that (if they yield enough combined income, it would be taxed; a
person earning the minimum $12/hr pays zero income taxes, over that we'd have
to decide where income taxes begin and how they climb).

We would continue to tax normal corporate income outside of manufacturing (and
we could begin by just experimenting by dropping manufacturing taxation to
half the normal rate, test the outcomes it generates). The increased personal
income taxation pays for the new redistribution model. We would want to reform
our personal income tax system further to optimize, maximize it (including
treating all income equally for tax purposes).

We could entirely exclude high wage employees from the income tax credit
system, so those employees are not subsidized in this (if your engineers are
making $125,000 they don't need the $12/hr income tax credit underneath them).

We simultaneously could alter some welfare benefit programs that are no longer
as necessary as a larger share of the population is working and earning higher
wages (you rebalance the system in other words).

------
qplex
If we didn't have unlimited travel across borders this epidemic would have
never happened.

Absolutely nothing would need to be built to achieve this.

~~~
ggreer
Considering that even North Korea has infections, isn't this false?

~~~
qplex
Viruses like this can spread very quickly and develop to pandemias only
because we can fly from China to New York in one day.

------
pennyintheslot
The core problem is too much regulation and the associated bureaucracy and
legal percussions that come with it.

Regulation is always presented as a tool to 'protect the public' but usually
just serves to protect the wealth of the leading players.

Anything that is regulated moves into a state of deadlock and now most
industries and our society as a whole are in this state. Most don't dare to do
anything entrepreneurial, because there are legal percussions waiting for
almost any meaningful economic activity you could initiate.

A highly mobile free market capitalistic system is a threat to those in power.
They don't want more bold entrepreneurs who could compete and potentially
endanger them. They want people who do their jobs 9-5 and then go home and
watch TV.

If we want to move out of this society-wide paralysis, we need grassroots
political movements who systemically disassemble the regulatory walls that
have been built over decades and centuries.

People need to wake up to the fact that regulation isn't meant to serve them
but is intended to keep them at the bottom. Because when the current market
leaders of an industry rose to power, there was no regulation yet, which made
their success possible in the first place.

If you argue that this is how things should be, namely that industries should
only be unregulated in the beginning and then become regulated once you have a
few dominant market players, it creates a big problem: It means that we carry
a long tail of highly inefficient industries with us, because regulation makes
new competition so much harder in these 'older industries'.

I think we can see that today with industries like mobile carriers for
example. Basically an oligopoly which dictates prices and creates huge
shareholder profits year after year.

Each industry is a pillar of society and we need to break open these 'older
industries' which were heavily regulated and have them catch up to the status
quo through new competition. That means going head to head against a lot of
people who have a lot of capital at their disposal to prevent that from
happening.

------
m0zg
> New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as
> medical gowns.

Yeah, NY also put out a "desperate call" for "40000 ventilators" in spite of
needing only 6000. So that's really not a good indicator of anything.

Not to disagree with the core premise of the article, of course. We must be
able to manufacture all critical equipment and supplies on US soil, with
significant surge capacity.

> In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to
> the people and businesses that need it.

False. Our family of 3 received $2900 because my wife and I took 2018 off so
to the IRS it looks as though we need help. From which I conclude that
everyone who made below cutoff threshold (which is unusually high for this)
got money directly into their checking account, even though most people
haven't been laid off yet.

And small businesses so far got $350B, with more blocked by austere scholars
of pork in Congress.

> We should have gleaming skyscrapers

The utter devastation high density living is causing in NY would suggest
otherwise. We need to spread the fuck out.

~~~
projektfu
Small businesses were _approved_ for $350B, most of which has not yet been
disbursed, and only about 50% of the needed amount has been approved.

~~~
m0zg
False. It's all gone by now: [https://www.geekwire.com/2020/federal-
governments-350b-small...](https://www.geekwire.com/2020/federal-
governments-350b-small-business-relief-fund-runs-money-less-2-weeks/)

I do agree it's not enough though. Take it up with your representative.

~~~
projektfu
We said the same thing. There needs to be at least 50% more funds behind the
PPP.

