It’s Time to Build

In many cases, I am not sure his solutions address the real problem.

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?

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

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

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

Because we have few of the industrial titans which are required to spearhead that and round up (or possess) the necessary capital. This sort of outcome does not magically self-assemble, it starts with one person that takes action. You actually need hyper competent, hard charging, ambitious, skilled people of all sorts to go after the extreme challenges represented by such a huge re-industrialization. These people and their talents no longer exist in such high numbers among the population as they did prior to the gutting of the US industrial age. They are now rare and the capital that desires to fund them is equally rare.

If you want to produce them, you need to completely alter the incentive structures we arrange our economy around.

We should have 0% corporate tax rates for all domestic manufacturing concerns, to get started. Tax individual income at a higher rate.

Implement a robust system of income tax credits and abandon the minimum wage as it exists today. This is not my idea of course, Warren Buffett is probably its loudest supporter and he is absolutely right. Set the income tax credit system such that it guarantees a higher minimum wage of at least $12. By removing the strict front-facing minimum wage we have today (which blocks labor from the market), all businesses would immediately aggressively seek to hire anyone and everyone they can get their hands on. The workers would be guaranteed a minimum wage by the redistribution income tax credit system and there would be no labor-value blocker (aka the minimum wage) keeping businesses from hiring people.

If a state has a $12 minimum wage, and your labor is only worth $9, you're screwed. This solves that.

It's about absorbing max lower skill labor (where the unemployment problems tend to be over time) into the workforce. You make labor artificially cheaper, while simultaneously paying that labor a fair wage: we subsidize the outcome we want. They produce, they earn a good wage, they build savings and can start to become asset owners. They also start learning new skills (and later might start production of their own based on the accumulating of experience at making goods; an important catalyst in re-industrialization). The combination would unleash epic common-goods manufacturing output the likes of which the US hasn't seen in half a century.

It would make it economical to manufacture low-margin, lower value goods in the US again. It becomes a de facto subsidization for employment and manufacturing.

This would instantly change the US economy for the better.

The testing availability and capacity there is also due to the many hospitals at the county level, each with their own medical testing lab.

The RKI (German CDC equivalent) developed and distributed a PCR test in mid January, so they were primed.

It is remarkable how uniformly lethargic the entire political spectrum of the West has been with respect to this crisis until it was too late, while we're seemingly also universally unwilling to build housing or infrastructure across the West, while many Asian countries seem to actually be doing a much better job of all of these things. Instead we sit around and bicker about everything and wait.