
On Cultures That Build - barry-cotter
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html
======
rm445
I have a heuristic. A 'code smell' for social science articles, which is
something like, is all of Western society explained by happenings in the USA?

Caveats: there's nothing wrong with writing an American article about America.
And it's not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The 'smell'
occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the
Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That
such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon.

This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA
should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate
in all kinds of places - it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to
build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from
the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only
the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century
Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys.

How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and
Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway?
The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions
of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to
the author's ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it's
not a perfect correlation.

Building stuff is straightforward where there's not much stuff already -
because it's wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it's something new
like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there's hardly any government,
and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and
costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent
resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are
exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.

If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they
can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard
problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-
organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive
authority. But there's no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that
authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.

~~~
naravara
I think your point is correct in general, but I’d like to nitpick in a
specific part here:

> it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build,
> for Japan to build.

Just looking at the cost of rail infrastructure, it looks like the US has a
significantly harder time generating value for money with what we build.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-1-bil...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-1-billion-
doesn-t-buy-much-transit-infrastructure-anymore)

The cost difference per km of rail comparing Tokyo or Berlin to NYC is insane.
It’s literally an order of magnitude difference in some cases. And this issue
arises in many parts of our society. IT modernization projects in the federal
government cost boatloads of money, yet never seem to make any real headway.
Even in the private sector, real value adding things like transitioning to
electronic medical records never really took until insurance companies and the
government started forcing it. And once they did the focus on their design was
entirely around billing and coding and not really improving the physician’s
workflow or enhancing care.

So while the point may be true everywhere, I think there really is a baked in
tendency to veto and strike down proposals for change in the US that doesn’t
seem to get quite so rampant in other places.

~~~
netcan
I think you're both right.

To the meta-point made by the OP... We are now sitting on 200 years of social
"science" failure to gain an understanding of this stuff. Theories fall in and
out of favour, but they never seem to be affected by reality very much either
way.

I think science, as an approach, just isn't a useful way of getting an
understanding of why US rail construction costs are so outrageous. It isn't
that kind of question. Aspiring to an abstract philosophical or scientific
Theory of Government Procurement doesn't take you anywhere useful.

~~~
watwut
Was the "Theory of Government Procurement" ever been the goal of social
science?

~~~
netcan
The goalposts of social science always seems to be moved to where the ball
goes. But, I think if we're being honest, than yes.

Not the only goal obviously. But, there are countless economists & policy
researchers publishing on similar topics all the time.

~~~
watwut
To me, it seems that actual scientific articles that would fall into social
science umbrella have much smaller scope and goals.

~~~
netcan
I'm not sure what you mean by "actual scientific articles," but I mean stuff
that's generally published in economics, policy, psychology or other "social
science" related journals.

I'm not commenting on which is "scientific" in a Popperian sense. I'm not sure
any of these publications clear that bar.

Questions of scope and/or magnitude is one of the moving goalposts. Scope is
implied to be very broad in most contexts, limited in more critical contexts.
This theory only applies to preschools in this neighborhood.

The 2018 Nobel Laureate for Economics was about "Endogenous growth theory," a
theory of how human capital, innovation, and knowledge contribute to economic
growth. Is that a small scope?

The most influential social science book of the last few years was "Capital in
the 21st century" which is a theory of income and wealth gaps. Is that small
in scope?

Ultimately, a theory that can't be generalized iss not really a theory, in a
scientific sense. It's punditry.

------
carapace
You want people to build, give them money. Folks aren't living in tents
because it's fun.

"For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades"
[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-
us...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-
real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)

~~~
jseliger
"Living in tents" is more a problem with restrictive zoning laws; zoning needs
to be liberalized.
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/ne...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new-
hsieh-moretti-paper-land-use-restrictions-economic-growth.html)

~~~
aaomidi
So there isn't an issue with minimum wage stagnating compared to inflation?

~~~
scatters
Inflation is influenced by minimum wage. If wages rise but people are
competing for access to an artificially restricted housing market, all that
will happen is house price and rents go up to absorb the increase; the only
people better off will be landlords and homeowners with a larger house than
they need.

------
roenxi
There is a really good point in this article that is imperfectly articulated.
This "We do not have this impulse today." isn't being supported.

Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed
experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that
goes into similar ideas at a massive scale).

Picking on an industry, the supply of great home builders will be reduced if
there are not also many incompetent home builders. Incompetent home builders
are regulated out of existence because it isn't safe, so statistically a
couple of really great builders never learned their craft because they
couldn't muck around doing stupid stuff so they went to become shopkeepers
instead or something. Costs associated with homebuilding will also rise.

So it isn't that the impulse is lost, it is that when America was a great
builder the people had no choice but to accept a lot of shoddy work, and in
amongst all the dross a few of the experiments turned up aces. They wouldn't
accept that today (even though it is probably a really strong strategy)
because the median voter is risk averse to the point of hurting themselves.

~~~
mantap
In countries where house building is poorly regulated, you don't end up with
lots of aces, the opposite happens, the overall standards are reduced even at
the top end.

On the other hand, houses do tend to be safe _enough_ even without regulatory
oversight. I definitely think that the years that people in developed
countries spend working and saving in pursuit of an expensive house built to
code is not a good balance of life spent to life risk.

~~~
barrkel
Hmm, not so sure I'd trust "safe enough" in a flood plain, earthquake zone or
valleys around a volcano.

Some people won't be able to afford the difference, and every so often you'll
get a news story about 1,000-100,000 dying in a natural disaster.

------
groby_b
It fell apart when he made his management/free individual comparison, and then
went

> You see this in the difference quite clearly between Black Lives Matters on
> the one hand and the Civil Rights Movement on the other,

I'm flabbergasted. If there's one thing in recent times that is self-
organizing, it's BLM protests. And before that, OWS.

That prompted me to re-read, with an eye towards "is this claim substantiated"
any time he makes a claim, and no, most of the time, it isn't.

I'll pick another example: "Crises demanded organizing at the local level to
try and meet the problem head on. We do not have this impulse today."

Yes, yes we do. The amount of ad-hoc work done to distribute food, rustle up
PPE, deliver food to populations in need was truly amazing. On the larger
scale there was the (bipartisan) #stayhome effort. The clear leadership the
Seattle Flu Study took.

> in the America of the early 20th century, the default solution to any
> problem encountered was to assemble a coalition of Americans to defeat it.

[citation needed], counselor. The Great Depression didn't exactly have
"coalitions of Americans" \- it took the government to step in. (And needed it
to step in - it turns out scale matters). No civil organizations sprang up to
deal with the KKK in the '20s.

And so it continues. It's simply a "good old times" article, with little
connection to facts. (As those articles always are, because the good old times
weren't)

~~~
ashtonkem
I think what’s less relevant here is “builder” vs. “non-builder” but whether
or not governmental authority is properly hitched to the will of the citizens
on average.

The vast distributed efforts by citizens to produce PPE that the government
seemed incapable or unwilling to acquire seems to hint at some serious
dysfunction.

~~~
topkai22
I think that is part of the problem the author is getting it- the assumption
that the government, especially the federal government, is the sole
institution that can execute things. Historically, the argument goes, that
didn't used to be the case. People self organized, but they organized into
INSTITUTIONS, not just brief movements- the NAACP was formed in 1909.

I always think of my grandparents in these discussions. They had an enormously
active civic life their entire lives- quite literally, my grandfather passed
away at a church lecture. They helped build institutions like an anti-smoking
organization, their church, or the local arts organization- not necessarily as
leaders, but as the people who made things happen.

Boomers, Xers, and millenials... don't seem to do this. It's pretty well
documented (see Bowling Alone).

I'm with the author here- our the ability to organize has been greatly
diminished even as our ability to communicate has gone up. There are probably
many reasons why- entertainment is far more plentiful and an alternative to
civic engagement, maybe our existing institutions really are that good, the
trained responses the author discuss. Whatever it is, I think it is a shame-
participating in civic society is one the great joys in life, and I agree that
the lack of participation saps something of the United States culture and
success.

That being said, civic society doesn't operate in isolation. It tends to
interact with government extensively, but it can lend legitimacy and guidance
to government actions. You can see this at work with the government responses
to the BLM movement- one of the great civic society triumphs of recent times,
although a very different one then the author talks about.

~~~
curuinor
The Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese responses were undergirded by large functional
government bureaucracies, trust me. It wasn't town hall democracies and local
small-scale stuff like that, that arranged mass functional responses to the
crisis. Korea and Taiwan have civic society and the PRC really doesn't, the
thing that makes them different is government competence and government
operational capability.

Pandemic response is extremely within the wheelhouse of government.

------
discreteevent
I think that a lot of the problem of not building things comes from profits
being the only measure of what matters. The cultural imperative to get rich
above all else. Some western technology companies changed at some point where
a lot of them were driven by MBAs rather than engineers. They had no problem
outsourcing everything to China in order to increase profits.

Building things was "too costly". But the cost was only measured in profits
not in lost capability etc. The original founders of these companies built
things because they wanted to build them and profit was a means to sustaining
that. The Chinese are doing the same. The current culture in some western
companies is weak and unsustainable in the same way that just eating sugar is
weak and unsustainable.

~~~
abecedarius
But China's current dynamism kicked off when its government started to allow
people to work to get rich. It seems very odd to claim we have _more_ of that
motive, indeed so much more that it makes a huge difference. It must be about
the channels this motive has available to be directed into, I'd think. Does
the invisible hand push you more to rent-seek or to build?

~~~
webmaven
This may be overly obvious, but...

Just because some of a thing is judged to be good does not _necessarily_ imply
that more of it would be better.

~~~
discreteevent
Yes that's exactly the problem. Thinking that if something is good, more of it
has to be better. Its the same with regulation. Of course too much
registration is bad but this fundamentalist idea that good will just emerge
from pure free trade is nonsensical.

It's like seeing the benefits of event sourcing and then deciding that if we
use that everywhere a stable system will just emerge.

~~~
abecedarius
Above you blame America's not building on the "motive to get rich above all
else", contrasting China. I'm saying only that this seems a strange and
unsupported place to pin the blame, going by what actually changed in China
and in America. I didn't say that more greed causes more building; I'm saying
that more greed for profits, as a candidate cause for less building, is not a
relevant thing that has changed in the relevant way. It seems closer to the
opposite in what I know about China's history.

Are you saying you think China went from too-low profit motive to the
Goldilocks zone, while America went from Goldilocks to too high? Or is this
really about something other than profit motive?

------
swyx
> In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how
> do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?"
> This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not
> be a culture that "builds."

this is a very powerful statement. as someone who just did this this week I
feel very called out.

~~~
azhu
Thank you for sharing that. We need more humble folks willing to learn leading
by example.

------
fuball63
My favorite line was:

> I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a
> tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State
> Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create
> brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry.
> Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing
> and poem reading is the thing that people do.

I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article
goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its
the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up
approach and cultural shift to start moving again.

I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is
heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials
are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different
perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and
bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly
trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough
support from the bottom up.

~~~
azhu
Agreed. A possible "between the lines" reading of what the author is saying is
that good overall solutions are formed from the balance of many different
ones.

------
asdfman123
Random thoughts:

> One common mechanism was the establishment of an emergency committee—
> sometimes at the state level, other times at the level of the county or
> city— to deal with the overwhelming need for organization, communication,
> and cooperation among individuals, agencies, and organizations.

It's interesting they brought this up because the debate is often framed by
the right as the "zippy right wing free market capitalists" versus "the slow
and inefficient left." Yet from my perspective as a left-leaning individual,
Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until
it becomes unrecognizable -- i.e., Obamacare. Or they sabotage attempts to
deal with COVID-19 reasonably.

If I'm being fair, it seems like institutional rot goes much deeper than any
political ideology.

> It is striking to me how many of the old Silicon Valley builders—people of
> Andreeson's generation—were social outcasts in their youth. These people
> felt estranged from the established corsus honorum of American society.

Ironically, they were social outcasts because they spent the majority of their
time focusing on stuff that mainstream society didn't understand the value of
-- messing around with computers.

Now that internet-based businesses have become so profitable, upper middle
class kids with sufficient aptitude are generally encouraged to mess around
with computers. Someone tells their grandparents they want to be a software
developer, and they're proud of them (thinking of all the people who've gotten
rich off the internet), instead of saying "what the hell is that?"

~~~
noir_lord
> Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until
> it becomes unrecognizable

Republicans are conservatives which comes from

> averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.

They don't want to change the system because they _like_ the system (even if
objectively the system is bad for them and they've been told it isn't or that
Issue A is all that matters, ignore B through Z while we decimate you).

Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides
to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in
charge.

From an outsider perspective I frequently wonder why it's not more visible, I
certainly see it my countries national politics though not to the same extent.

And even when people do realise there is a problem they then hang around
waiting for the perfect single solution to fix it forever which is an ideal
opportunity for politicians who don't want the problem fixing.

If I'm been ultra cynical (and I try not to be) as an example, Roe V. Wade
been over-turned would be a disaster to the GOP, the promise to try to do so
is far more powerful at getting people out to vote than actually doing it -
which requires both doing it and then having to promise something else.

Divide and conquer all the way down.

~~~
asdfman123
> Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both
> sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the
> groups in charge.

Because the shared values are dressed up in completely different narratives. I
find talking to my conservative friend, he shares all of the concerns about
problems with the justice system and inequality, but when I roll it together
as "racism" he vehemently objects.

We're told the other side sees things dramatically differently, though. Or
that the want to kill babies.

~~~
DuskStar
> I find talking to my conservative friend, he shares all of the concerns
> about problems with the justice system and inequality, but when I roll it
> together as "racism" he vehemently objects.

If the issue is racism, that means that a fix for the justice system's
problems won't affect _him_. You're implicitly saying that any mistreatment
he's experienced at the hands of the police is the way things should be, and
that it shouldn't be fixed.

Saying the problem is racism is saying that only a fraction of the US deserves
a solution, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people will find that
disagreeable.

~~~
watwut
That sounds like quite strongly motivated reasoning. Basically, I can not
accept that other people have specific big problem, because then resources
would go toward problem I don't have.

Therefore if there is both problem with racism and other one, racism can't
exist untill all problems touching me are solved first.

I mean, I can see how people who have the other problem would find him
obstacle to solution to their problems.

~~~
DuskStar
And "this must have been caused by racism" sounds like motivated reasoning to
me!

If, instead, police 1. treat people equally when encountered 2. encounter
demographics in proportion to the crimes committed by that demographic and 3.
african americans commit a significantly higher number of crimes per capita...
There wouldn't be a way to make the police less racist - since they already
treat people equally - but police reform could be effective at reducing the
brutality encountered by _everyone_. Making things a _police_ racism problem
(african americans might commit more crimes due to racism from groups other
than the police) then just makes it so that no progress can be made on the
"police beating people up and killing them" problem, because the police aren't
racist.

The above might not be true! But it's believed by a _lot_ of people, and has a
fair bit of academic support. (for instance, there are studies showing that
police officers were faster to shoot a white man than an african american man
when they were taking the same actions - the opposite of what I'd expect if
police treatment differences were driven by racism)

~~~
watwut
I was quite convinced by studies I have seen, mostly those collected by Radley
Balko that this your first paragraph is not the case.

But here, we are arguing about opinions on what is going on and not by "you
should understand this person can not accept racism as explanation because he
would not be benefiting from it".

There, I was asked to understand that reasoning on itself, if it is not
benefiting me it can not be true, which is completely different then this.

~~~
DuskStar
I'm saying that there's a lot of reasons that someone might respond badly to
being told that the problem is racism. One is that the problem _genuinely
might not be racism_ , as I've tried to say earlier in this thread. Another is
that systemic racism is a society-wide thing, and so by blaming a problem on
it you indirectly blame the person you're talking to. (or at least they
perceive it as such, even though systemic racism is supposed to be the idea
that the system can be racist despite the individuals not being racist) A
third is pattern-matching past instances of people saying "the problem is
racism" to unpleasant/ineffective outcomes for them - for instance, implicit
bias training (which while IIRC there is evidence in favor of implicit bias
being a _thing_ , training actually working to reduce it is on _far_ shakier
foundations). I'm sure there are more, and not all of them are "racist
conservative refuses to accept racism is the problem because they don't
benefit from solving racism".

On the other hand, "the problem is racism" is very morally easy/acceptable in
leftish circles, and saying the problem is _anything else_ often gets a
negative response (this thread existing might be counted as evidence here) -
providing motivation to call things racism regardless of the truth of the
matter... (This is not necessarily the case, of course - just trying to show
that motivated reasoning goes both ways)

~~~
watwut
But the guy in original story I responded to had one specific concrete reason
- if it is racism then solution does not help me. And I was supposed to find
that understandable.

I was respousing to that particular logic of that particular guy who was much
less reasonable then he believed himself. I was not responding to all the
possible reasons of all the people in the world.

------
tommilukkarinen
I was reading the original article and thinking tomyself ’am I feeling this’.
Apple and Google came to my mind, they are the governments in digital business
whose regulations and tantrums I have to abide by. Past are the times this
kind of business could have thrived without restrictions. Maybe we should
_build_ a reasonable choise to them?

~~~
dannyw
These companies compete with each other, but they work together to implicitly
suppress anyone who may join the league and compete with them.

The 30% platform tax is a fantastic example. A giant will always win, or be
able to stall a fast-growing company, if they can tax 30% of the revenue and
build a competitor without this headwind. Even allowing apps that require
people to sign up outside the app, that is a significant growth and conversion
hurdle.

Advertising-based apps are untaxed and hence incentivised. However, Google and
Facebook have acquired and monopolised the market so that you really can't
make good money unless you go through them -- and they get to take a 40% clip.
Thus, FAAMG will always grow faster than you because collectively enforce a
tax on anyone who might be able to challenge them.

FAAMG is the modern day OPEC, just relying on subtly and game theory instead
of outright cartel meetings.

~~~
hiptobecubic
Except that these cloud providers are trying to undercut each other as much as
possible all the time, and you really honestly don't have to use them to build
your service if you don't want to.

If you want a bunch of super convenient features like elastic compute, you
will, but they didn't have those features when they built their flagship
products.

~~~
pphysch
Public cloud providers are very much in the customer acquisition phase. There
are still a lot of on-prem datacenters out here that they are trying to
compete over for business.

Once the entire customer base is locked in more or less, the cartel effect
will kick in.

------
chiefalchemist
The pivotal moment in USA's history was WW II. The USA was the only major
country _not_ ravaged by the war. Once the war was over, the other countries
had to focus on recovery and rebuilding. The USA supplied the materials and
goods for those needs. It was a great time to be the USA.

But now that the playing field remains level and that historic outlier long
gone, the USA's self-proclaimed tag line (i.e., "greatest country in the
history of the world") is more myth than it is reality. The sociopolitical
fallout from perpetuating the myth,and not keeping pace with reality, isn't
over yet.

------
NalNezumi
From the original article of the article: >You see it in housing and the
physical footprint of our cities.

Isn't the problem with housing not "willingness to build" but actually heavy
regulations that penalize builders to favor the "already-have" people? It
seems to me like a shallow argument to point it toward "willingness". Seems
more like bad incentive systems.

The overall message I agree with; we should build more. But the root cause of
it, my take, is not "willingness" but in expectation and reaction to failure.

Most of these regulation was put in place with well intention. Some
landlord/teacher/constructor made a shoddy work (mistake or with malicious
intent), people make demands "to be better" after media outcry, policy maker
put regulation in place. Unintended consequences is that
landlords/teachers/constructors that was doing nothing wrong (and people that
cause honest mistakes) also get penalized.

Same attitude can be seen outside regulators and policy makers; On the
internet: the entire "cancel culture" or social media witch hunt is all about
finding a mistake someone did, ascribe intention to it and shame them to
inaction. In hiring, new grads are expected to have a work-experience
equivalent skill-set already gained in university. (Effectively penalizing
allowance of mistake by hiring someone that have to learn at work.)

Our "willingness" seems to be the same but "expectation" seems to have been
blown out of proportion, and the fallout of failure to meet this expectation
is constantly growing, so less and less people would even like to try.

------
Sniffnoy
Non-mobile link: [https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-
that...](https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-
build.html)

------
netcan
As a european, I don't understand why the european response is seen as
significantly better on this front than the US', especially in the context of
Andreeson's criticism.

I mean, Europe has had some of the worst outbreaks, mortality rates, failures
of the hospital system, elderly care... The horror of peak covid in northern
Italy was, largely, a preventable failure.

We also see a similar helplessness when it came to actions that required
"building." Ability or inability to do "lockdown" well varied, but that's not
building.

The one obvious thing that did need "build" was testing, contact tracing and
such. Very few countries managed to scale up testing fast, even by now.

------
rossdavidh
I found the Andreesen article interesting in the first few paragraphs, where
he says, essentially, that you need to look beyond your own city, state, or
national government, since all of Western society was caught unprepared for
this. Then he spends almost the entire rest of the essay talking about aspects
of America specifically, as if they were an explanation for the problem. It's
like he didn't read the start of his own essay. Whatever the source of the
problem, it cannot be something uniquely American, as France, the U.K., Italy,
Spain, Belgium, etc. all had the same (or greater) state of unpreparedness, as
measured by per capita mortality.

But, if you look at countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
etc. that had far lower per capita mortality, it's not clear what they have in
common. I think it is more important for us to be asking "why were those
countries better off, what do they have in common?" than to be trying to
answer what we should be doing different. You can't find the right answer
until you've asked the right question.

Most of the things that Andreesen says we should be building (like many more
nuclear reactors, or mile-higher skyscrapers to increase population density)
are, to say the least, not something for which there is a consensus. I
wouldn't want to see most of what he lists. Including, by the way, flying
cars, which would make our current fatality rate from transportation even
higher.

~~~
SomeoneFromCA
They simple locked themselves down very early.

~~~
rossdavidh
In Japan's case, definitely not true.

------
mempko
If you want people to build, do what the Chinese do (who learned it from the
Japanese). Give smart people lots of money and get out of the way. China told
it's thousands of regional banks to lend towards productive purposes. This was
called "Window Guidance".

The best thing you can do is give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck
out of the way. There are three ways to do this; Bank lending, government
spending, and private equity.

The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset
purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. One reason is
that very few large banks make most of the loans. Government spending on high
technology and research has also been declining over 30 years.

The reason people build today in Silicon Valley is private equity is funding
projects (giving smart people money and getting out of the way). The problem
with Silicon Valley is that private equity is a drop in the bucket compared to
the capacity of bank lending or even government spending. In fact most of the
tech, including the fact that Silicon Valley exists in the first place, was
because of federal government spending. (fyi Google started as a government
grant, google maps, waymo)

Lets look at the USA. There are 15k Banks in the US but the majority of
lending happens in the top 3. The US can just instruct it's thousands of local
banks to lend for projects instead of real-estate/asset purchases and suddenly
you will have a lot of people with money to build things.

Alan Kay who was at Xerox Parc, which is estimated to have produced trillions
in wealth cost only 100 million dollars, says that Parc worked because smart
people were given money and management stayed out of the way. That they
invested in people.

In fact, the vast majority of high technology was funded this way. Government
gave labs lots of money and they created computers, the internet, rockets,
GPS, AI, etc etc etc.

So a combination of government spending + bank lending can kickstart building.

Lots of smart people out there can't build because of the lack of funds. Give
these people money! Let them build! Don't make them do a dog and pony show in
front of VCs about WHAT they are going to build. Just invest in people and
stay out of the way.

~~~
pdonis
_> The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset
purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production._

I'm not sure I agree with this. A lot of lending is for mortgages, and a lot
of those go into new construction, not purchases of existing buildings. In my
area, there is a ton of vacant office space that has been built over the past
decade or so because of the availability of cheap loans for new construction.
The problem is that it was new construction that was not needed--hence the
buildings are still sitting vacant years after completion.

In other words, I think the problem is not that lending is being done for
asset purchases instead of new production, but that lending is being done for
the _wrong_ new production--producing things that nobody wants instead of
things people do want. That misallocates resources and creates shortages of
things that are actually wanted. Imagine if all the resources that went into
building those vacant office buildings had gone into making PPE for disease
protection instead.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
+1 for the _Dave Barry Does Japan_ reference.

Watching the Japanese build stuff is amazing.

I would visit once or twice a year.

First visit, looking out my hotel window: big ol’ hole in the ground.

Next year: Thirty-story skyscraper, fully occupied.

~~~
m4rtink
And in summer 2019 when we were there a lot was being built, repaired and
improved all over the place infrastructure wise, most likely expectimg the now
canceled 2020 Olympics.

------
barry-cotter
> First, the TLDR version: In the 21st century, the main question in American
> social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get
> management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture
> which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds."

> The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture.
> I believe it is possible; Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-
> cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this
> is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of
> the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon
> Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This
> may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political
> infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the
> patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New
> York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking
> seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments
> in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and
> cities in the state, perhaps California itself.

~~~
rubidium
Hilarious that the capital of ad-tech and useless app proliferation is
considered “Building things”.

You want builders, go blue collar. Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers.
They know how to get * done. Not Stanford CS grads ensconced in their golden
FAANG coffins.

~~~
tlb
What are the most impressive or valuable things they are building recently?

~~~
watwut
If you demand the things to be impressive in order to count, you can not build
culture of building. You will build culture of impressing. And impressing in
most cases requires a lot of money thrown on pr.

~~~
Kye
This is so true. I'm more impressed by the focused and successful long-term
(~20 year) plan of revitalization of the local downtown than I am by most
things out of Silicon Valley. It started with a cheesy video [1] and now you
can go find small businesses [2][3][4] operating in what used to be the
hollowed out husks of a past era.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4)

[2] [http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/](http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA)
/
[https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/](https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/)

[4] [http://hometownrhythms.com/](http://hometownrhythms.com/)

This is in a place where every building used to look like this:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,2...](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,296.98h,94.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbRddvf2sgXLrxR6dlxRq_g!2e0!7i3328!8i1664)

It started from a dying post-WW2 textile town and now it's showing up in
movies and TV shows as an idyllic small town. It's not even _that_ kind of
idyllic small town. The local paper's editor wrote articles in favor of
marriage equality, trans rights, and racial equality and still hasn't been run
out of town.

------
spyckie2
I think the title and vocabulary used should be centered more on resource
utilization rather than the build metaphor.

This is because we have a lot of capability (which is stated multiple times by
many authors). We just have a poor system to funnel those capabilities to the
right places.

This conversation reminds me of startup growing pains when there is
dysfunctional org structure and communication lines. I'll reference some
reading material for those who are seriously interested in learning more:

[https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy](https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-
praise-of-hierarchy) [https://www.thee-online.com/Documents/SMC-
HiQ.pdf](https://www.thee-online.com/Documents/SMC-HiQ.pdf)

The basic idea is that hierarchy/structure is needed to allocate resources in
a more complex way. BUT American values has traditionally gone away from an
explicit hierarchical structure and instead tends towards a flat org
structure. The issues described all sound like issues that come from a poorly
run flat organization, or an organization at a pragmatist stage (if using the
vocabulary in the 2nd link) - mainly that hierarchy is implicit and there is
still people at the top, its just hidden and undocumented how to get there or
how changes happens.

To me, it makes sense to look into organization theory literature as a
direction for potential solutions and try to fit them into our societal
context.

===

Another way to describe the article's point is the fact that we were once the
employees of America, but have now become the shareholders. The wild west era
is characterized by the people not being separate from the livelihood of their
community. The town is a self contained unit where everyone in the town is
helping to keep the town running, and every townsman has a role to play in
order to keep the town lively.

Nowadays however, it seems that there is a distinct line between the people
running the town and the rest of the town. The actors are not the townsfolk;
they are the bureaucrats, the designated representatives, the people put in
charge. The rest of us are spectators, benefactors, shareholders benefitting
from their work but effectively cut off from participating in it. They are the
clergy and we are the laity.

This is either built into the culture over a long period of time, or there's
some pernicious systematic law that pushes mature ecosystems into a clergy-
laity state. Either way, both explanations need an active structural solution
to combat it.

------
leetsquad
I believe it might just be that we are used to safe incremental building now.

For example, building a feature on top of a successful product will get 5%
gain with 80% certainty.

Building something completely new will give 10x gain with 2% certainty.

Management is more likely to favor the 5% gain because it gives safe returns
and they can explain it well to whoever they are reporting to.

Also, I believe the same applies to startups. A founder has to explain crazy
bets to investors, employees and everyone in the company. That's notnas easy
as it sounds.

------
snikeris
If we want more builders, we should work on the disincentives that builders
face.

The original American builders weren't saddled by a progressive tax system
where they were penalized according to their degree of success.

Perhaps we're witnessing Rand's strike of the mind in slow motion. The
headwinds to building in public are so strong that the builders have retreated
to build things in private, no longer sharing their gifts with the world.

------
pragmatic
But we do build things. Those things are software. Software has sucked Ali The
air out of the room. Our top talent is sprinting away their life building
adtech and SaaS, not buildings and spaceships.

Hard to believe Andreessen can't see this as he's part of the "problem" I'd
you think it's a problem.

Software has eaten the world, meatspace is in second place now.

------
bsder
Perhaps if we _taxed_ like 1955 we might _build_ like 1955, eh?

~~~
dilap
I don't think that's the issue. SF has tons of tax revenue, but it can barely
build anything, and it can't keep the streets clean or safe.

~~~
topkai22
Total (federal) receipts are also relatively unchanged as a percentage of GDP
since 1955. On top of that there is A LOT more GDP to go around. The real
differences are source of revenue (Payroll taxes massively up, corporate
income tax down) and the spending of the income (basically, anything that
isn't Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid).

We could potentially spend like the 1950s, but it'll be a tough sell to cut
Social Security and Medicare in half or more. You might get some right wingers
behind doubling the military budget though.

~~~
dilap
The amazing thing about all that $ for medical care is we're barely any better
off than people in the victorian era:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/)

And actually, if weight by quality of years lived, almost certainly worse off.

(That's a British paper, but let's say US and UK are roughly equal.)

This is, I think, because we're basically poisoning ourselves w/ poor diet,
then trying to mitigate w/ medical care.

Probably most people would more or less agree with the above statement, but
then you'd find very little agreement about _what exactly_ about our diet
makes it so unhealthy. (I think the #1 culprit is excessive linoleic acid.)

~~~
antepodius
Well, also because of the societal trap of health insurance. If you have
health insurance, you're (hopefully) not paying for your medical costs. So the
medical costs get jacked up- after all, you, the buyer, don't front the bill.

If nobody had health insurance, medicine would be cheaper. Of course, for
every individual who can afford it, health insurance is a good choice
(individually).

~~~
dilap
No doubt the efficiency of the care that is being provided could be
dramatically improved, but that's not the root problem, IMO.

~~~
antepodius
I basically agree with you.

------
N1H1L
I was visiting one of the dams at TVA yesterday. It was a beautiful day for
running on the river trails, and because this is 2020 and I am addicted to my
cellphone - I was looking up on the Wikipedia article on TVA. TVA is a huge,
massive behemoth - but this lines from the Wikipedia page caught my attention:

>> Opponents, such as Dean Russell in The TVA Idea, in addition to condemning
the project as being socialistic, argued that TVA created a "hidden loss" by
preventing the creation of "factories and jobs that would have come into
existence if the government had allowed the taxpayers to spend their money as
they wished."

Now Dean Russell is an Austrian school economist, and his assertion here has
no factual backing here. No evidence is ever given. And I was wondering, how
much building has been also been stalled today by the fetishization of free-
market economics?

------
aylmao
IMO this sentence resonates:

> He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or
> thought of possible improvement.

I read this sentence and I think it carries a lot of truth. I think it's not
hard to believe that people today just don't "own" the USA like they did
before. Literally, home ownership has been in decline for generations [1].
Millennials are in debt [2], and younger generations go longer without even
having a family to root them in [2].

Back in my home country you stay in your city— in the USA everyone seems to be
moving about all the time; first for school, then for the job. Morale wise,
patriotism has been stained by rampant nationalism, so who wants to own that
title? What's the "American" identity, when everyone clings to their
differences? I've met people born and raised in the USA who introduce
themselves as Salvadorian, Venezuelan, Japanese before saying they are
American, because in the USA that's what they are— something else first, then
American.

Moreover, it's easy to be disappointed with Americanism. Generational memory
exists. People built last century expecting a better future this century, but
capitalism and irresponsibility failed to make it happen. This country built
roads and bridges it cannot afford to maintain [3], a health care system that
bankrupts people and sells them addictions, an economy that disproportionately
favors the rich, and a government that has spurred some dystopian agencies
[5], destabilized many other governments [6] and is constantly at war [7]
while failing to address the needs of its population.

If you don't own your house or your whole paycheck, if you don't own your
culture or what your country stands for, if you don't feel connected to your
neighbor or feel like you could even connect with them, or if you're not proud
of where you are, then yeah, you're a tenant. And tenants don't build.

[1]: [https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-
gene...](https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-generation)
[2]: [https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-
yo...](https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-young-
adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations/) [3]:
[https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-
scheme](https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme) [4]:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-
ar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-are-saying-
about-how-to-improve-american-education.html) [5]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra)
[6]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States)
[7]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-
century_wars)

~~~
Melting_Harps
On your first issue about lack of cohesion and Identity, I think that is by
default; first, its a nascent nation comprised of immigrants. It would make
sense to describe themselves by their ethnicity, than it would be to a generic
'American' moniker that doesn't really pinpoint what it is they're ascribing
to themselves. Furthermore, you have multi-generational citizens like myself
who will identify more with our unique culture, than to the US as a whole. My
entire time in Europe I regarded myself as Californian, and not American; I'd
correct people who tried to foist that term onto me as it didn't reflect my
value system.

If they really wanted a History lesson on the matter I'd tell them California
existed before the US did and how much Law and culture differs between CA and
the rest of the US. There is a reason its many laws are aggregated as 49,
pertaining to the rest, and not California. That has many caveats and
drawbacks, but it exists and its worth noting.

> Moreover, it's easy to be disappointed with Americanism. Generational memory
> exists. People built last century expecting a better future this century,
> but capitalism and irresponsibility failed to make it happen. This country
> built roads and bridges it cannot afford to maintain [3], a health care
> system that bankrupts people and sells them addictions, an economy that
> disproportionately favors the rich, and a government that has spurred some
> dystopian agencies [5], destabilized many other governments [6] and is
> constantly at war [7] while failing to address the needs of its population.

For once I'd really like someone define what Capitalism has to do with the
cronyism we've seen in the US since the gilded era. Capitalism as the mode of
functional means of production has been lost since then, in its place you have
robber-barons who monopolize a sector/Industry through the use of lobbyist and
donations to politicians campaigns that keeps them in office way longer then
was intended (Pelosi) and then offer them cushy jobs as consultants,
effectively undoing the critical aspect of Capitalism: Competition.

At no point or time can I look at Jeff Bezos or Amazon and say that's
Capitalism's success story, instead what you have is State sanctioned
protectionism that skewed the playing field for an Amazon to take over and
benefit from the model that is often berated. Labor laws seem to be entirely
negligible to an entity that knows it can have a system bend to its will. The
same applies to banks who not only create continual booms-busts cycles to
consolidate their power, and wealth over a system but they enter into a realm
in which we HAVE to believe they are 'too big to fail.' And suffer the
consequences as nepotism and plutocrats emerge as the real rulers of Society.

That is exactly the antithesis of Capitalism.

Just for claity's sake: as an Anarcho-Capitalist I think Capitalism is
inherently flawed at its core, as it relies on perpetual growth that can only
be maintained for periods of a time, and often at great consequence to the
Environment when and entity like the State exists and is the supposed
vanguard. As its entirely susceptible to corruption, but its the best we have
to ensure commerce continues as the viable default rather than warfare to
procure goods and services.

But it's still often erroneously portrayed in a light that negates that much
of the progress that got us to have critical things to modern Life and longer,
healthier life expectancy are somehow the mistakes of Capitalism and not the
desired outcome. And that some how we should entrust this responsibility to
the very entity responsible for the corruption of a system (Governments) to
benefit its own largess.

Just look at all the insider trading done by politicians on both sides as
COVID was starting to shutdown the economy. That's what a political class
does, it insulates itself from crimes that others would have to pay with jail
or their very Life. Look at SLS with ULA, look at the entire banking sector
post 2008... I can go on.

But I'd really like to see a response to this question: Define Capitalism, and
how IT has led to the captured Markets and Industries you see, and are
responsible for the entrenched wealth and inequality you describe.

~~~
pdonis
_> I'd really like someone define what Capitalism has to do with the cronyism
we've seen in the US since the gilded era._

And _during_ the gilded era. The big-time capitalists of that period were
_not_ people who made money in free market competition. They were people with
inherited wealth who got beaten in free market competition by others with less
inherited wealth but better entrepreneurial skills--and so they went to the
government and got their competition outlawed, for example by getting monopoly
rights to transcontinental railroad routes.

In other words, "capitalism" and "free market" are not synonyms, though
capitalists love it when everybody else thinks they are.

~~~
Melting_Harps
> And during the gilded era. The big-time capitalists of that period were not
> people who made money in free market competition. They were people with
> inherited wealth who got beaten in free market competition by others with
> less inherited wealth...

Agreed, and that is in my opinion when entrenched Wealth was established to
oppose the very notion of the US narrative about free enterprise. I think free
commerce was possible when the US was a frontier, and even that has caveats,
because Abraham Lincoln's relative was able to hi-jack California into the
Union after the Bear Flag Revolution in Sonoma [1], won without any bloodshed
by 30 something Frontiersmen after they removed a Mexican Governor and later
made Pio Pico a politician in the New Republic to surrender without violence.

And I think it was also found in the Gold Rush thereafter. This was critical
for the emerging Economy in CA that would eventually make it the 8th Largest
Economy in the World.

> In other words, "capitalism" and "free market" are not synonyms, though
> capitalists love it when everybody else thinks they are.

I'm open to this idea, but how can you achieve this without mal-investment,
and destruction of resources found in all other antithetical forms of Economic
systems: I've lived and worked with Anarcho-Communists/Marxists/Socialists and
I (Anarcho-Capitalist) was always the defining variable in our collective
projects succeeding because they often reverted to endeavors that lost our
operating Capital.

I'd get us to a certain benchmark and then we'd be able to procure services
and goods to get us to the next phase only to run out of money half way
because they felt it best to spend on 'feel good' gestures to appease their
concerns rather than have a merit-based system where compensation came from
ROI on labour and judged on an empirical individual basis.

I took pay hits, as in not paid at all and had to pay my own way for most of
the entire time and I worked for free because I was so driven to make it
happen, because they felt the need to take the money (they erroneously felt
entitled to as funds ere held in common ownership) that I often earned on
risky business ventures to offset the expenses/losses we incurred from things
like printing useless propaganda and paying people for 'raising awareness' in
the most useless demos imaginable.

My real mistake was to be so stubborn to my openness to collaborations with
anyone who wanted achieve the same goal(s), regardless of ideology; in
retrospect I'm glad I did these projects but I'm sure I had shortened my
Lifespan having done these things on several occasions.

I can go on, but you get my point.

But my question remains: outside of the Capitalism, as in non State-Sanctioned
Central Bank based cronyism, how do you achieve this?

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

------
Layvier
I think it's also related to how capitalism derives towards ultra
specialisation of individuals. We help solving a very specific (often very
indirect as well) need of society, extremely efficiently, and expect all our
needs to be fulfilled in return. Or at least that's what we assume the system
should do. But the system is never well adjusted, we just inherit it from
another time. And no one makes the effort to try to improve it. We think
voting is the only job we have to do in that regard, when in practice we
simply contribute to perpetuating an inefficient "management", that
accumulated a lot misaligned incentives over time...

------
pphysch
The US elite have been waging total war on (domestic) collectivism for the
past half century. An atomized populace buys more products and services than
one that shares and cooperates freely. This is good for business but
disastrous for society, as we are seeing in the 21st century.

Capitalists want the worker ants without the ant colony.

~~~
tathougies
This is ridiculous, because what the author describes here is not
'collectivism' in the sense that free marketers are against. Nowhere in the
post is there anything about needing to get rid of private property or even to
socialize ownership of goods. What is discussed is individuals collectively
taking responsibility for their own lives and those of their neighbors -- as
demonstrated in the highway and obstacle example. That is not an instance of
'big government collectivism'. Quite the opposite, and one not only compatible
with, but encouraged by the libertarian free market capitalists you decry.

In reference to the highly authoritarian European regimes, Toqueville states
that Americans are different:

> This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety
> or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the
> danger he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his
> rescue.

This sounds like something a 'far-right', liberty obsessed gun afficionado may
say as he points out the importance of the second amendment and self-defence
and the importance of a small government

~~~
pphysch
So we're not allowed to discuss the elephant in the room i.e. the tremendous
faults of unbridled late-stage capitalism and the extreme individualism it
requires? I'm not sure what your point is here.

I mean it makes sense given the demo here on HN, but come on.

~~~
antepodius
It's not individualism, it's infantilism. Everyone's waiting for daddy
government/daddy employer to save them.

~~~
pphysch
Individualism and infantilism are not mutually exclusive

------
wayoutthere
So is it just me or is this guy basically advocating for anarcho-communism?
Like I don't disagree that's probably the direction we need to head towards,
but I never thought I'd see ancoms on HN.

~~~
rm445
It's the paradox of the firm. Centralised authority seems to be effective for
small and local efforts, while not being how you'd want the whole society to
be run.

------
tathougies
> This begins to become apparent when school starts and children, even in
> their games, submit to the rules they have established and punish offenses
> following their own definitions

This is really the issue right here. Our schools neither allow children to
play freely to make up their own rules. And certainly if any children decided
to dole out their own punishments, that would be met with immediate hostility.

~~~
watwut
Yeah, school nowdays tolerate bullying much less.

~~~
MattGaiser
Yes, but their approach to it is essentially relative lockdown of the
students. Obviously that has benefits, but there are also costs.

~~~
antepodius
Now everyone gets a boot on their head!

