I find Ezra Klein's recent line here useful:
"[W]hatever the recommendations, the same thing is needed: A sustained and concerted movement that cares about institutional reform. But people get much more excited about building something, anything, than about reforming existing institutions. Meta-building isn’t a popular pastime, and the patient, focused work it requires is particularly frustrating, in my experience, to entrepreneurial personalities." [1]
I confess that I myself find it incredibly frustrating. See a government program that's incredibly difficult to deal with, friction-laden up and down, with reams of paperwork with legalese?
One can build a layer on top that eliminates most or all of the friction. But it will always be limited by the resource models that can sustain it. And many problems simply have no workable models other than state financing and operation (market failure, in other words).
Instead, doing the work to make that program much better institutionally involves long-term (frustrating) strategies like:
- Think tanks / white papers: influencing the epistemic landscape among policymakers
- Organizing: shifting the Overton Window to make the change you want to see broadly accepted
- Coalition-building: working with allies with overlapping agendas to get more muscle behind your own priorities
And even... waiting. You often have to wait — years! decades! — for a window to come where you can get a big thing done. People worked on big healthcare reform for 3 decades of effectively zero progress — and then in a year they passed Obamacare.
That work is long, hard, much more probabilistic than product work, and much less directly-controllable by a given person.
BUT there are playbooks to get it done. And I do wish technologists looked to those tools more to make the institutional changes we need to make it so the opportunities (individual and societal) of entrepreneurship were more widely accessible.
One concrete example: I've long thought that a basic source of friction in public services is because user experience isn't well-monitored, and therefore not well-considered in public policy decisions.
Technologists are great at measuring friction. It is a craft well-honed in an environment where conversion is a live-or-die metric. But translating that craft into institutional change requires something like a think tank, and/or an organized movement with an agenda.
I think we'll get there, but it will take some risk-takers who understand that long game and financial backers who aren't as well-versed in it, but who have the risk tolerance of SV and the savvy to see that playbook does work, and point it at a problem with significant leverage.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build...