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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#601

Post by supernova87a »

Well, the thing about building is that when a people achieve comfort and are well-fed and happy, there's very little incentive to build. Countries get old. They get middle-aged and a little tired or complacent.

It really does happen. The question is how you keep on renewing a country and a people when things are going "just fine".

There is really something to the idea that strife / disaster / starting with nothing causes you to yearn to be better and invest in things that you wouldn't do when you've already made it. You raise kids in wealth and they rarely have the same drive as their up-from-bootstraps parents. And maybe nature's checks-and-balances on this is that eventually those people who struggled through adversity and built things get comfortable. They stop wanting to invest, and instead want to extract. It gets hard to get people to be willing to sacrifice like they did when they were young.

The USA has already made it. In its own mind. So most people are not desperate to have high taxes, high effort, low potential of immediate reward -- the kind of thing that builds things that last beyond your children.

Now it's either 15% returns or it's not worth it. Or vote out anyone who proposes something that costs a lot. And only when we see other countries whose people had to struggle from nothing do we realize that standing still sometimes equals going backwards in the global race. It's how you end up landing at La Guardia, trying to take a subway, and wondering how your capital of prosperity could have gotten so bad without anyone noticing.

I don't know how exactly to incentivize a contented culture to be willing to sacrifice. I am sure, though, that social media and polarization and targeted outrage of special interests against any potential idea doesn't help. It's a real puzzle how we're going to get out of this funk and not be passed on the highway by lots of others.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#602

Post by camgunz »

Animats wrote: post #562
georgewsinger wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response is also printable/framable. > Where's the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort. Amen.

Not "where's the thorium reactors?" That probably won't work. But why don't we have rows of windmills from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border (the real US wind belt), and EHV DC lines west to California, east to Chicago, and south to Houston. That could power the US west of the Mississippi. Totally do-able. Proven technology. Profitable.

Because rich people have huge market stakes in the status quo. That's how you get billions in oil company subsidies and token garbage for wind, solar, battery research, etc. It is pure corruption.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#603

Post by Gfran »

tlb wrote: post #144
oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'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…

Getting an answer from a court (is X legal?) takes a long time: at least a few years and several hundred thousand dollars. Far too long to wait before building a business around X. Asking people to build the business first and then find out if it's legal isn't how a society of laws is supposed to work. Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.

IMO this is a classic case of loss aversion. Enforcers of law are put in a position to make subjective decisions that impact them personally. They don’t want to make a decision. They want someone else to make a decision. Decision stew until they can be disassociated with any person or group. This takes time. Usually the decision is tempered to absolve all parties and thus be convoluted and misinterpreted. Rinse and repeat.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#604

Post by nojvek »

Marc makes a lot of sense but his thoughts come out a bit too simplistic. Yes we deffo need to build (in a sustainable way). But what’s holding us back isn’t our technical capability. It’s the fact that we need creative destruction.

To build those fast trains, we may need to do it over people’s houses. To build safe nuclear plants, some may need to fail. Like SpaceX failures before they get it right.

We have a refactoring problem. To see the results, it could take decades. The demand is there but the power isn’t even in the hands of government. It’s by the people who own corporations and lobbyists, it’s by the private equity folks and the bankers who are over leveraged. They are very happy with current system of seeking rent from their monopolies.

Also we aren’t as organized. China can get shit done. I’m willing to make a bet that by 2030, China will have a higher GDP than US. China knows how to build.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#606

Post by muddi900 »

I doubt Andreesen wrote all this with straight face. This part is especially egregious:

>The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

No Mark the problem is that American labor is overvalued and the Government does not subsidize it like it does for Agriculture. Why, you ask? Because manufacturing does not get you swing states.

American Manufacturing can rise again if there are no expectations of profit. Which is only possible with Government money. Or if you are Elon Musk, and can convince private investors to lose money for no reason.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#607

Post by camgunz »

darawk wrote: post #568
wwweston wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, policy matters. It's important to have people in public leadership who understand it and can work on tuning it to avoid or eliminate unintended consequences. But complaining about either regulation or bureaucracy at a general level is the policy equivalent of approaching software by making general complaints about how terrible existing code is: sure, some of it is probably sub-optimal and should be rewritten, b…

> But complaining about either regulation or bureaucracy at a general level is the policy equivalent of approaching software by making general complaints about how terrible existing code is: sure, some of it is probably sub-optimal and should be rewritten, but anyone who's worked in the field for a while knows that the sweep-it-away/ground-up-rewrite impulse is more often wrong than applying Chesterton's fence (make…

Those kafkaesque bureaucracies come about when oligopolies ladder pull by writing their own regulating legislation. It's not bureaucratic overreach, it's corruption. Facebook recently tried the same thing.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#608

Post by refurb »

justicezyx wrote: post #262
betocmn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why Nation Fails" is a phenomenal book. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time to think of US institutions as reasonable examples of how the author portraits creative destruction and extractive institutions. I understand there might be some broken things in your nation's systems. Still, the fact you're able to discuss them here or work towards changing them through legal methods, shows the US is far off on the right trac…

Any recent example of a societal issue affecting American lives got fixed in American system?

Medicare Part D coverage of prescription drugs. Seniors now have subsidized coverage for not a lot of money and the program costs less than the forecast.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#609

Post by refurb »

camgunz wrote: post #599
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of 1 It used to be very expensive to travel between US cities because a govt agency (forget the name, maybe the board of air travel?) set the who what how could fly planes from a to b, and at what price. Think mad men times, panAm, etc. That agency was eliminated circa 1980 by some stroke of luck and perfect alingment of planets. Ticket prices plummeted and this opened flying to the poor. That was also th…

This wasn't because of regulatory overhead, it was because they had created regional monopolies for the airlines. It's exactly like insurance (or prescription drugs, if you're thinking internationally) is now, and that industry wages a life and death fight every time that"deregulation" comes up. It's corporate welfare created by federal corruption.

Right, the way the government regulated airlines is by creating monopolies.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#610

Post by jl2718 »

>> If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.

Most people do absolutely nothing useful, despite skill and desire, and they know it. We all know we’re much better at creating value on our own, but much worse at capturing that value. Something seems really unproductive about this system; must be a better way.

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