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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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Exactly, him & his firm have been leading the bandwagon on crypto investments, social/mobile, ads, "scooters", and all the other sectors which are all hype & no build.

> 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.

There are a lot of things to criticize about Elon Musk, but he does understand this much.

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

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

> I doubt Marc has anywhere near enough capital to get these things done (by himself).

He probably has enough to make a good start on one of them.

> maybe this post is a call for help and the billionaires will unite?

If enough people in his position each pick a problem and start on it, that in itself would be a big help.

If he did what he is proposing, he would be out of business quickly with no investor money to mess around. This entire post reads like a script for Gavin Belson to me.

> If he did what he is proposing, he would be out of business quickly with no investor money to mess around. This entire post reads like a script for Gavin Belson to me.

But this is sort of the central complaint, no? "These people have to want it" is a good rallying cry, but it should apply to Marc and his peers and funders. They have enormously more influence on the direction of industry and infrastructure in our countries than I do, and it'd take a revolution to change that dynamic.

Exactly, so to summarize: he doesn't want to put his money where his mouth is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I doubt that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140525060607/http://www.cepr.n...

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

Apart from their Law School, Harvard is not an incredible school. Good, yes, but not stellar.

The product Harvard offers is being able to rub noses with rich and influencial people and their kids. Access is no small thing.

*elbows

Though I don't doubt the possibility that nose-rubbing is a time-honored tradition of at least one final club. We'll never know.

If you ever watch the movie on the basis of sex. I feel is a clear example of why people want to go to harvard. Its a feeder to positions of power.

+1 isn't Harvard more about the name and the people you associate with than the education itself?

Harvard seems to have troubling relationships with both China and Saudi Arabia. We need to start treating such relationships as treasonous/harmful to the United States and our future:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/13/harvard-yale...

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