The most sorely lacking in self-awareness aspect of his post is that a16z is a
primary driver of a flavour economic (and social) neoliberalism that is a 'root cause' of almost everything he lamented.
1) If non-college educated kids had a legit path into the market (like they do in Germany) then surpluses would be more evenly distributed and housing wouldn't be such a problem.
But they don't have path because a) industry won't train and b) the US is an economically liberal place - there is no communitarian impetus (like Japan/Germany) to structure. The US doesn't really care that much about citizen v. non-citizen - the economic benefit in the short term is outsource/insource - there is no consideration for the population.
US Citizens are an externality to the business world.
2) On the college side, the US has already financialized the college race, arguably to a nearly corrupt degree. There are tons of kids going to Uni in the US, many of them ill-prepared, and then will be over-indebted.
3) Silicon Valley VC does not want longer-term risky bets, they want to make short term bits with big near term payouts, with long term outcomes again, irrelevant.
It makes much more sense to invest in something like Twitter/TikTok/SnapChat than most other things in this context.
4) And who exactly built those supersonic planes? Was it VC's? No! It was generally the government, with the impetus of war, specifically WW2 and the Cold War! Literally ARPANET.
5) 'Building here' would entail a coordinated national strategy that is anemic to free-market types they usually can't even contemplate it. It would take something like an economy-destroying epidemic (!) to realize the consequences of their lack of strategic investment at very least in things like specific manufacturing (medical, medicinal) and food production. All of a sudden those farming subsidies start to look a little different!
6) So what issue ties all of Marc's seemingly disparate points together? Why didn't he look deeper at Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore as examples? What's actually going on there at a more fundamental level that's different from the USA?
I'm not necessarily advocating for some big 'state-managed' anything or huge governmental intervention. But I am certainly advocating for rational and specific nationalist intervention, with a communitarian attitude - or at very least the contemplation of it.
The fact someone so enormously intelligent and influential 'didn't even go there' I feel is because the language is literally lost in North America. They have no idea what it even means. Much like entrepreneurialism, especially 'creative destruction' is a really hard concept for many business circles in Europe to get. It's like a foreign language.