This is a monumental piece. I loved it.
It’s Time to Build
171–180 of 1001 posts
Re: It’s Time to Build
#172> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest. It's akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas tod…
Perhaps desire is the wrong word to use. I don't think he means desire in terms of willpower or motivation, but in terms of ambition. I do think the world has lost some of of its ambition over the last 50 years.
China begs to differ.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My point is that arguing that "try harder" is a solution to the American obesity problem is provably ridiculous, because we've been saying that for decades and it obviously hasn't worked.
Have we though? Fat Activism didn’t exist in the 1950s.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#174The start of the article is simply wrong. It was forseen, and some governments have handled it well. Just because the US is a shitshow, no need to tarnish the rest of the world with the same brush. Elsewhere there is competence and people actually wanting to do the right thing.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#175Sure, everyone cut your lifestyle in half and let's re-build this great nation, save the planet, the whales, penguins and colonize Mars by tightening our belts for the next 100 years.
Sounds good? No? Alright then. Good talk.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#176The start of the article is simply wrong. It was forseen, and some governments have handled it well. Just because the US is a shitshow, no need to tarnish the rest of the world with the same brush. Elsewhere there is competence and people actually wanting to do the right thing.
It's fine to make a substantive objection, such as by pointing out which governments handled it well. But please don't toss nationalistic flamebait into HN threads. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, and those are nasty, boring, and dumb.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#177> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks. For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't…
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.
Many Asian countries have recent experience with SARS, which led them to get their pandemic game together in advance of this one.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#178I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…
In your expert opinion on US health insurance, what number of pages would represent due diligence for federal and state review?
Re: It’s Time to Build
#179I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…
> It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.
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.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#180> 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…
Minor nit:
> Tax individual income at a higher rate.
We should instead move the tax burden to land, since holding land is completely unproductive, and as opposed to working for an income, which is productive.