It’s Time to Build

What incentives do lawmakers have to make laws simpler?

Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I appreciate that the world has both extremes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because regulation in the US is rarely the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To quote from the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a presentatation given by the authors:

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

Main Concepts Inclusive and Extractive Institutions

Towards a Theory of Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Nations have and Do Fail

Because they have extractive political and economic institutions.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The virus is doing a pretty good work so far

... 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.

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

> 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.

Amen.

Then you also have the current bailouts of airlines, etc. So the incumbents in this case are too big to fail. You'll never get new entrants/innovators in these areas until those issues are solved.

  brain-computer interface

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.

That said, yeah, the elephant in the room is the massive concentration of wealth and regulatory capture. All the innovations I just mentioned are kinda happening in the back-rooms and on obscure boards like HN. Getting these things to markets and in the hands of professionals is really just terribly difficult. I get the FDA pushing back on things (and largely agree with it), but the big players just seem to push down really hard on innovators. I mean, look at the App-store, it's nutters. Paradoxically, more government intervention is needed, but against the big fish.

I fully agree that we have to build build build, to surpass technological level of Star Trek. And yes, I do want to live in science fiction.

"Early retirement" is the most retarded concept to me. Yes, I will retire when I will be a retard. Retired = retard.

People in the late 1800 actually hated the idea of retirement; corporations forced them to retire to give way to young people.

Out biggest problem compared to people of 1800 that we have a facebook (or twitter, or instagram). So instead of building, we outjealousing each other with beautiful vacation pics.

Apologies for the new HN account, lost my password for my main one somehow.

Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital.

Public institutions build and manage in response to electoral incentives.

If we're not prepared, it's because the incentives are wrong.

On the market front, once incentives and maybe even insights become opaque at the level of the abstraction of return on investment -- especially on a horizon within which a generation can live and die w/o experiencing a risk event like a pandemic -- then investors will be essentially blind to this.

On the public front, we have at least one political movement in the US that generally stands on the idea that government shouldn't do things like this for the common welfare. That movement is a minority, but knows how to use countermajoritarian features of the US political system to maintain control and is determined to do so (demonstrably well past limits of defensible public stewardship at this point).

That leaves philanthropy, which is helpful, but often scales poorly and is distributed first by proximity to various privileges on the social graph.

And maybe some degree of private capacity to re-think incentives and how long-term value could be structured into short-term incentives in private markets.

If anyone is in a position to do the last two, it's someone like Marc, so it's weird to read this as someone who's in a position nothing like his. Perhaps I'm not the audience. Perhaps others in his wealth class and investor circle are.

I don't know where you get this from but as far as VC goes a16z are especially willing to take long-term bets. Case in point, when we pitched them, we explicitly said it's going to take us a decade to achieve our goals and they were okay with that.

It's like it was written to be the perfect example of SV myopia for the rest of the world. Some examples:

>Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard?

Because the main purpose of Harvard and other elite schools like it is to pick out the best ~18 year olds and set them on the course to be leaders in business, government, law, and other areas. Harvard isn't Harvard because they're better at education. Harvard is Harvard because they get the pick of the litter. Extending their enrollment to a million doesn't mean we get a million more elites.

The funny thing is that we basically do have the education system he asks for in some places. For example, half of medical students attend lectures rarely or never instead opting for online resources. But they still plunk down 100k for those two years because the knowledge is worthless without the credential. (And years 1/2 are the gate way to the clinical education in years 3/4 that must happen in person).

Go look at the a16z team. How many of them don't have a Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/et al type pedigree? So to answer his own question, people like him are the reason why 1 million students a year can't attend those types of places. Otherwise, their graduates wouldn't be as attractive to people like him.

>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 there's no magic factory you can build to make every conceivable product cheaply. Obviously we don't do it because it's cheaper/more efficient to produce stuff in single purpose factories. Contrary to his argument, we wouldn't get richer by manufacturing more stuff. We'd get poorer.

>You see it in transportation. 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?

Because none of this stuff is economically or physically practical. He seems to want us to live in a science fiction fantasy world.

Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capitalists don't have a monopoly over the future (or current) direction of our society). Hell, they don't even have a plurality of control.

The things that Marc speaks of in this article that are fundamentally broken in the US are housing, education, and healthcare. I see new startups funded in the US every single week that attempt to solve these problems. In the end, though, they are bound by the regulatory constraints that American government imposes on them, and in these three areas, there is a patchwork of laws that is impossible to navigate if you wish to build anything meaningfully transformative. It is simply impossible for Marc Andreessen to deploy capital in a way that can accelerate the pace of housing development in San Francisco, or accelerate the pace of drug development in the US, or make public American high schools have a lower student-faculty ratio. The amount of regulatory capture in these long-running, slow-moving institutions is simply too high.

So while I agree with your sentiments overall, I wouldn’t say that Andreesen is especially reflective of the attitudes that you’re rightly calling out.

Disclaimer: my company received funding from a16z. It’s worth mentioning that, if anything, they have been part of a board encouraging our CEO/founder to think about producing more grand, long-term value, and our CEO already has a strong bias toward long-term thinking.

They are investors and money managers for LPs and not much different from the Wall St types.

So, we should not try to read too much into such blogs and articles.

Thanks, I was worried I would find HN readers to be largely in agreement with it and I'm glad I was wrong about that.

I also find that "we need to want these things" is the key problem with the article. I agree with your conclusions, but I think you've understated the case a bit.

I believe that all of this has happened the way it happened because we live in a society -- and a system -- that has been steadily lowering the value we place on human life.

When I moved to United States in 2013, what shocked me the most was the incredible number of homeless people in Seattle. This is an immensely wealthy, developed country, arguably the most powerful in "the first world". And yet, two of the "five most homeless cities in the world"[1] are in this country.

One of the big problems with the lockdown measures in several parts of the US was "what about homeless kids who depend on their schools". Do you people understand what that sounds like?

So yes, the problem is capitalism. No, not "crony capitalism" or any other variation of No True Scotsman defense of capitalism[2]. This is what you get when you build your whole system around the optimization of one variable -- profit -- and put essentially religious faith into the unproven idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market will make everything work.

Marc ends his essay by saying "instead of attacking my ideas, conceive your own". He's essentially asking people to express their disagreement in a way that validates his ideology. Sadly, the answer to his question about what we should build isn't anything he or the rest of the elites would like to hear.

What we need to build is awareness. What we need to build are societal "firewalls" against the ubiquitous propaganda[3] that inundates our society. What we need to build is a movement.

EDIT: Fixed some formatting problems that I didn't notice initially.

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[1]: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=e56c...

[2]: It's usually the same people who won't accept that "real socialism hasn't been implemented yet" as an answer that deflect critique of capitalism by saying "Oh, that is not capitalism, that's crony capitalism."

[3]: The US doesn't have state propaganda like North Korea or China, and that leads people to believe it's free of propaganda. It's not.

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.

I would very much like the author of the essay to read "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit":

>With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...

Can you talk about this a bit? 73 de W9NLS

edit: It's AREDN. Awesome!

Why e.g. would you build a new skyscraper for people to live in, if you could instead just profit from the scarcity, spend no money and still get out much?

Those who are on top will spend a significant amount of resources to make sure they stay on top and that others don't take their place. Very much of what goes wrong these days is emergent behaviour of that.

By writing this down, he's committing himself publicly to a path, there's no reason to think he's not aware of that.

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?

so it is. Democracy is not broken, but it really needs a modern remake. The problems we face today are more complex than ever, and we should be pushing out solutions based on the best crowd-sourced thinking, for the 99% of the people out there.

Also we need to start codifying the "meta" of government, the same way we have codified the "meta" of software development. Government and society at large should have regular mechanisms to counteract or at least slow the spread of red tape, legislative capture, and other systemic rots.

In particular there are issues that have little to do with government and more with the interaction between people and institutions. For example, it worries me to no end that in the middle of a pandemy the current news cycles centers on finger-pointing and gossip about Trump and the governors, while virology, epidemiology and the intricacies of vaccine development get very little coverage. When was the last time that you saw an explanatory diagram in a wide-circulation newspaper?

At an age where science and technology are more accessible than ever, our media divests attention and citizen time to gossip, instead of motivating people to learn and build more. Admitedly, provoking rage sells more than educating. But isn't social unity and development more important than the bottom line of media organizations? Maybe we should have mechanisms in place to subsidize social utility, and some taxes for toxic content, the same way we tax alcohol and tobacco.

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.

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://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

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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...

He says it right there in the blog post-- the problem is desire. For example, someone is reliably making tons of money in China stamping cities into the ground and building thousands of miles of high speed rail. Why can't we? Doing these things is hard in a sense that we seem unable to get collective wherewithal to do it. It's not hard in a sense that a cure for cancer is.

They can't invest in things nobody will let them build. Who in their right mind would invest in high speed rail from SF to LA knowing ex ante they'll deal with twenty years of regulatory quagmire for the project to eventually be killed by a thousand bureaucrats?

(And I think the bureaucrats are the symptom, not the cause. If we wanted things built the bureaucrats would be out on the street in three months. The cause is cultural decline.)

Did he really? That's so bad and tells a lot about that man.

If you haven't, read "Bad blood". Fantastic book and great story about real journalism work against many establishment figures.

Further, I would argue that even if he doesnt follow through on this, it is still a good and important essay in the context in a sense that there is every chance this can motivate others to take action. Given his reach and stature among the entrepreneurs, there is every chance it motivates you or me or someone else to take an action - the lack of which is quite apparent today. Call to actions work even when the people mobilizing others do not act on those. Of course, putting your money where your mouth is always a better scenario, but if that does not transpire here, this essay could still inspire others.

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

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

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

The government stockpiling and coordinating emergency measures is exactly what a government is for. The US maintains the largest military on the planet for exactly this stated purpose - just in case. Why is the idea of allocating capacity to preventing non-military disasters seem like such an impossibility?

300 million people is a lot of experts, studies, research and development and logistics, which can run simultaneously to plan for multiple disaster scenarios and review those plans continuously.

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.

I don't see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value.

Modern govt isn't failing from lack of funds, it's how those funds are spent that is the problem.

These are emergency preparedness problems so funding them means setting aside a pile of money and resources until the emergency actually happens. That pile of money makes an attractive target for capital, who can afford to fund campaigns to privatize those services and then get the emergency stockpile as a reward. That sort of maneuver has to go through a vote, but most voters get their understanding of the world through capital-owned media, so that's not much of an obstacle.

Edit: More and more, I think we need worker-owned news.

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.

A seminal article on the failure of the chaotic human coordination to-date is "Meditation on the Moloch". https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Here's a passage I liked:

> Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:

> It is glorious that we can create something like this.

> It is shameful that we did.

> Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?

Biggest problem I see is that we consistently elect people into political positions who are biased toward maintaining the status quo. The word “radical” is a dirty word to voters. We don’t like change. Until we change that mindset we won’t ever have people in government who could even begin to think about what building the future looks like.

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.

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.

Housing is rising in price as more people pile into fewer cities. There is no housing crisis in Spartanburg, Louisville, Lethbridge or even Houston. You can build all the homes you want, but unless they are in Manhattan or San Franciso, a billion new homes won't make the condos there cheaper.

You can also build all the colleges you want, but the returns on that are starting to narrow. Hundreds of thousands of grads end up unemployed or underemployed. We could make college free, but that wouldn't create more jobs that require such a degree. Are a million extra college grads at a mass-production school really going to change anything? Employers don't accept Coursera courses as a substitute for a degree and I suspect such a school would be viewed like Coursera. It doesn't help that in America and to a lesser extent Canada, people zoom in on the school ranking and reputation. A lot of the value of the university to an individual has nothing to do with what is taught in classes there, but how competitive it was to get into.

I had a conversation with a dean of a university about offering online courses and the reason they said they would never do it seriously is because that would greatly devalue that people admitted to that school were top tier and thus were top tier on the way out.

Is what makes Harvard special that it is doing something uniquely right or that it has the unique ability to draw the best?

One place where I'm finally starting to see this kind of desire to build making its way into the public sphere (and not just resonating in tech circles) is with all the growing energy around a Green New Deal (https://www.sunrisemovement.org/green-new-deal).

This is the first time in at least a decade that I can remember politicians talking with the same attitude Marc was. The climate crisis is an incredible opportunity to BUILD! And to build like we haven't built in generations!

I love your desire to find companies working in this space. I am interested to see what responses you get on that front. But I also think a serious way we can help is by shifting the public consciousness towards _belief in our ability to build_, by advocating for things like the GND. So this is how I'm spending my outside-work time right now: volunteering and organizing to spread the vision of a society that BUILDS, and fighting for political candidates that share that vision. :)

I've pivoted my career to working on the Julia programming language, because of its focus on science and engineering (_building things!_) rather than what I used to be doing in the software world (e.g. my past job at google), squeezing out more dollars from advertising. https://julialang.org/

This is advice I haven't followed myself, but might start following: talk with people who are working on building megastructures--not necessarily in your city--and ask how they got started. There aren't any online bootcamps for how to build a monorail, so "tribal knowledge" is probably the only way to go.

I'll let you know if this methodology works for me!

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.

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.

If you give up, you've already lost.

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

I would like my representatives to have a say in what is a reckless investors or not.

And I'm not really interested in schooling or health becoming more profitable as a vessel for investment in free market.

I would rather have decent, cheap public education for my kids and something else than whatever we're having for health. That the goal.

Unfortunalty, I don't think it's a great fit for a friction-less market. We're not selling financial instrument, we're trying to give young citizen everywhere a decent education, and have access to health.

They are also a "non-profit" and so don't pay property taxes even though they have a ludicrously-sized endowment fund which certainly accrues a lot of "profit".

The idea isn’t to make demands of how a private institution spends their money. The idea is to add conditions to government-sponsored loans such that they could only be used at institutions that meet specific criteria. If a university doesn’t meet the criteria, then we don’t give government-sponsored loans to attend that institution.

Harvard isn’t the best example of this idea, but consider how much better the student loan crisis could have been if we attached even minimal criteria that degrees must reasonably be associated with job placement and a minimum level of student earnings after graduation.

It’s not a great idea to let the government essentially funnel money into these institutions at large scale via student loans, then leave students entirely on the hook for consequences, without at least minimal expectations that the universities use this money wisely.

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.

Uptake is about 75% on the private side, 25% stick with the Govt model.

You could drag Obamacare there with the right political will but breaking Company based healthcare apart is a tough political cookie.

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.

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

Um no. The people in the 40s didn't have the choice to eat as much as we do today calorie wise. That is really all there is to eat. Food today is cheaper than ever. While that means fewer people go hungry, it means more people overeat. It has nothing to do with city design because cities that existed in the 40s largely in the same form still have greater rates of obesity.