Another thing I thought was interesting was, when China was building hospitals in a few days, I figured that's something we just could never do. Well we ended up converting Javits into like the third largest hospital in the world in 48 hours. Turns out we really can build a hospital that quickly if we really want to. Maybe it is just a matter of attitude.
It’s Time to Build
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: It’s Time to Build
#582> New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Yeah, NY also put out a "desperate call" for "40000 ventilators" in spite of needing only 6000. So that's really not a good indicator of anything. Not to disagree with the core premise of the article, of course. We must be able to manufacture all critical equipment and supplies on US soil, with significant surge capacity. > In…
Small businesses were approved for $350B, most of which has not yet been disbursed, and only about 50% of the needed amount has been approved.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#583> Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build? Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution. Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?
Andreessen's point might not be that the government should force them to do anything necessarily, but that no one even expects them to do anything. They have 40 billion dollars in the bank. No one expects them to do anything with it. The government, donors, anyone in Harvard, the proverbial man on the street, none has an expectation that they should try to do anything greater than whatever they're doing now.
The "nobody expects anything from Harvard" statement might be a bit too strong. I've seen people say that Harvard has a responsibility to do more social good with it's massive endowment. Here's one example [1]:
> Endowments over $1 billion should be taxed if the university doesn’t grow freshman seats at 1.5x the rate of population growth. Harvard, MIT, and Yale have combined endowments (approximately $85 billion) greater than the GDP of many Latin American nations.
So maybe the issue isn't with expectations, but with incentives: to effect change in these old hierarchical systems, you need elitists to be anti-elitist; to make decisions against one's interests for the betterment of others.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#584A capitalist blames a lack of demand for the deep socioeconomic flaws that disasters like this shine an ugly light on. By his logic, if people wanted these things, capitalists would be able to make a ton of money off of them, and so it's everyone else's fault for not creating the demand.
And I don't know the original quote, but the idea that "capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know" is a hilarious feat of mental gymnastics to frame such a inherently self-centered economic system as some sort of inherent altruism.
He challenges the public sector to make better things than the private sector without even acknowledging the massive and growing asymmetry in the resources available in the private sector to accomplish these things.
And lastly he attempts deflect criticism like mine by writing off any counterpoint as "attacking" his ideas and instead asking we talk about what we would "build" and therefore take his deeply biased assumptions as axioms.
It's not the only factor, but to look at this problem without critically evaluating capitalism's role is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Now that we are in a point in time where the more wealth and power is being accumulated by an ever shrinking pool of people, capitalists like Andreessen have more power than ever to employ these kinds of changes. If the supposed demand is not there, then maybe take that one of many signs that capitalism is a dead end.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#585I hope a16z puts money where their mouth is. Investors can own and drive a lot of what "we" want.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#586Since you are reading why nations fail I would like to recommend a pairing. How democracies die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. The central thesis here is parties are the gatekeepers of democracies and when they put party before nation they erode the democracy that eventually fails. More often it’s a slow degrade than a sudden spectacular collapse. The erosion paves way for leaders that are more “spectacular”…
>GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers.
Trump won the primary because he took positions that closely follow the article being discussed here, anti-war, anti-outsourcing (additionally he took an anti-immigration position) while all of the other 18 GOP candidates had the same pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-immigration positions that the party gatekeepers (big donors) favor.
I think Ziblatt and Levitsky don't like that voters agree more with Marc Andreessen and what Trump said in the campaign.
EDIT: People didn't elect Trump because they trust the gatekeepers and were tricked by them. They elected him because he was the only candidate who promised to do what the people wanted who was able to _go around_ the gatekeepers by financing his own campaign. We wouldn't be on the road to neo-Hitler if the gatekeepers allowed sane people with popular opinions into the major parties, but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars, raising wages, lowering corporate profits, and ending the cheap labor glut in ways that will seriously dent the fortunes and power of the gatekeepers.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#587I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly. > Is the problem capitalism? I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, goo…
Put simply the reason why America doesn't have these things is because the money went elsewhere.
Why e.g. would you build a new skyscraper for people to live in, if you could instead just profit from the scarcity, spend no money and still get out much?
Those who are on top will spend a significant amount of resources to make sure they stay on top and that others don't take their place. Very much of what goes wrong these days is emergent behaviour of that.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#588Ok, assume I'm bought into this idea - where would I even begin? What are some companies working on these kind of fundamental building things problems? I know of the Boring Company, though haven't really heard anything from them since the flamethrowers a few years back. Sidewalk labs was doing some cool things in Toronto, but I think they've been running into big regulatory issues too and it one point it sounded like…
I think it starts with the financial system. The current system incentivizes bureaucracy, regulation and stagnation in part due to the cantillion effect but also indirectly because it destroys capital, increases debt and prevents a savings / capital asset accumulation desire in the populace. Say what you want about the gold standard but it did lead to the great industrial revolution in such a short period of time pro…
Another benefit of a hard-money system (bitcoin would be better than gold nowadays) is that governments can only wage war by spending hard money. And they can only get hard money by extracting it from citizens. It puts a very strong limitation on the government’s ability to wage war, when they need to convince us all to pay for it rather than printing money.
Another common trope is that deflation limits the economy. News flash - you can have a single dollar as long as it can be split to 10000 zeroes. We had a successful global economy for years before fiat took over.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain rather than simply state? Regulatory capture typically refers to regulations entrenching current players and increasing barriers to entry. By definition, less regulation, lowers barriers to entry of new participants. You surely cannot actually believe that no regulation increases barriers to entry of certain industries?
My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate. Most voters think that some level of regulation is beneficial and support it. Politicians who advocate for the complete removal of regulations don't usually do well in the polls, but this is a widely held belief in right-wing thought. The market will do all the regulatin…
Thank you for the decent explanation. You are certainly correct in your assesment. However, I was commenting on Andreesen's caricature of voters 'on the right'. While true that most voters support regulation, right-leaning voters are more likely not to support much at all, so they are entirely self consistent. When restricting yourself to only one 'side', then it's quite misleading to claim that right-leaning voters are siding with the kinds of people who enable regulatory capture.
Your explanation explains why regulatory capture may arise out of an interplay between right-leaning politicians and their constituents. Regulatory capture in your view arises when right-leaning politicians succumb to voters (not necessarily right-leaning ones) desire for regulation. However, this is an emergent phenomenon, not a tenet of right-leaning thought.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#590Just today I was on Twitter reading a thread where they were dismissing Chomsky as a “neoliberal shill”. Couldn’t imagine how. The things we need to build will probably require deep involvement of the government, or at least the exit of cronyism and political wave bending on the part of the government. And the vision of a 20, 50 and 100 year plan. Not sure I see that in our immediate future, here in the US.
Sounds great! But how do we separate cronyism and government? More government?
There seems to be a lot more cronyism in governments that don't do a lot of useful things. I'm sure there's favoritism in South Korea but at the same time their industrial policy is first rate.