It’s Time to Build

This is like saying we need to want to end poverty more than we want to prevent ending poverty. No one is for poverty, but very few people are against it enough to give up their money, power, or time. We need to want these things enough to make sacrifices

> We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare

Most of the problems he mentions stem from government. Our government is legacy software and the author is right that lodged deep within the spaghetti code are leeches who benefit from the current system and fight against change. But they aren't the biggest problem...

Billions of dollars are spent lobbying and the % of that money that is spent pushing for causes like better healthcare or education for everyone is infinitesimally small compared to what's spent lobbying for changes that'll benefit a few at the expense of the many. But this isn't the biggest problem either...

The problem is that the infrastructure that powers our democracy -- the stuff and rules that exist to enable the people to exercise their authority -- is eroding. I asked my grandparents if people always felt like their government was incompetent. To my surprise, they said that when they were young most Americans were proud of the government.

What's the solution? The idea of democracy isn't broken, but our current implementation is. We need an upgraded democracy the way Wikipedia upgraded our old encyclopedias or Amazon upgraded commerce. These aren't new ideas, they're simply new implementations using new tools. Technology is transforming everything around us but our government is stuck in 1776.

You know what the right and left have in common? We all know things could and should be better, but they aren't. Right now we're pointing fingers at the other side, but eventually we'll realize the machine is broken. When enough people feel this way, change will come, and it will come from the bottom up. But it's not as simple as just wanting change as Marc suggests...

First, people need to get angry enough to do something. In retrospect, change seems obvious, but looking forward it's risky. People have to lose a lot in order to put their time, money, and future on the line to fight for something that might not work, and this is hardest for the people who are the worst off in society and most need change to happen.

Second, people will vote for increasingly extreme candidates to try and change the system from within. This will result in incremental change, but it won't reform the system.

Third, a new system will emerge in parallel to our current government. If history is any predictor of the future, this is almost guaranteed to happen eventually. I have no idea what the new system will look like or when it'll emerge, but this is the type of thing we need to build. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone is building it already and we just haven't realized it yet.

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.