Why wouldn&#x27;t we build the more efficient one in terms of resources?

They already have lots of passively safe designs, but I don&#x27;t need to tell you the difference between a real reactor and a designed reactor. With the economics of the power industry I doubt a lot of work will go into IFR commercialization.

What do you mean by severity being 10&#x2F;10? The issues we had in recent times were fairly mild. As long as they&#x27;re not hidden and acted on quickly, we seem to cope well. Sure, people die, but it seems like severity 10 only because it all happens in one go. Take the deaths from air pollution, resources transport, mining, production, etc. involved in coal&#x2F;gas&#x2F;solar&#x2F;wind, and put them in one day at the same rate as we had reactor failures - that would seem even more &quot;not feasible&quot;.

More people have died from mining accidents than nuclear accidents.

I love nuclear power, I used to be a &#x27;nuke&#x27; in the Navy, but it&#x27;s not feasible at today&#x27;s tech level. There&#x27;s too great a risk of nuclear accident right now, even if it&#x27;s very uncommon (risk = severity x probability, if severity is 10&#x2F;10 then any probability is too high, IMO). Someday, if the financials are right (if profit margins are good enough), or if we need it more than ever (if profit margins don&#x27;t matter), someone will come up with a guaranteed safe and reliable reactor design, much like Google invented a much better search algorithm or Uber came up with a way to overcome the taxi coalition (I don&#x27;t support Uber or Google today, but their ideas were revolutionary). Once that &#x27;revolutionary&#x27; new nuclear tech comes, if it does, then I&#x27;ll back it. Today&#x27;s reactor designs aren&#x27;t proven, not tested, and cost too much, so for now I will support renewable energy, like geothermal, solar, wind, etc, combined with storage like batteries, dams, gravity potential energy solutions, etc.

This is correct. If we were to invest in a moonshot project for the future, my choice would be nuclear fusion.

I want nuclear power because I want humanity to be a space-faring civilization, and we can&#x27;t do that with just solar panels and wind farms.Why maintain the status quo with solar and wind when we can go far beyond it with nuclear?

When there is a cheaper and cleaner alternative to base load power generation

Big construction corporations and bought-and-paid-for politicians will continue to love nuclear.

While I&#x27;m pro nuclear power, at what point do we say that nuclear isn&#x27;t the way to go? The cost of solar panels and batteries are declining every year, and you don&#x27;t have to deal with the terrible stigma that nuclear power has. Sure, new reactors are &quot;zero emission&quot;, but will people actually want them to be built?

Ultra fast and reliable 3D printing for engineers - submit a file at praxismfg.com and we courier deliver a plastic copy in 0-2 days at a price you&#x27;ll love.We run on proprietary printers built in house with advanced features like support-less 5-axis FDM, multi-material&#x2F;multi-resolution printing, and integrated QC.The real goal is to combine manufacturing services with a machine tool OEM like Kern Microtechnik has done in precision milling. Combining those two businesses strongly differentiates your service, freeing you from the race-to-no-margins that&#x27;s wrecking every other 3D printing hub right now, and subsidizes 100-1000x more in-house hardware &quot;testing&quot; than any regular OEM can afford to do, which lets you build great new machine tools at lightning speed.

&quot;Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?&quot;So, what are you building?

Gandhi&#x27;s “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” while a little more abstract is essentially the same thing.

It is interesting to see Marc Andreessen in 2020 to quote Mencius Moldbug from 2013 almost word to word.To quote Mencius directly -- &quot; One pathology of our age is a childlike credulity in the magical efficacy of complaint. Don’t complain, build. We have done well at complaining; so what? What have we built?&quot;, which is basically tl;dr of Marc&#x27;s article.

How about a crisis only approval. During which time you don’t give it to babies, pregnant women, etc.It would still be enormously valuable for first responders and elderly. You make sure they have all the information about the unknown risks and let them be consenting adults.A terrible idea for normal times but maybe ok weighed against the cost of doing nothing in a crisis.

If we have a rapid, flexible platform and a great enough need, those 3 months could be enough. But the solution isn&#x27;t just with the vaccine platform. If, in 10 years,  we get lab on a chip working and replace mice with chip based experiments that better reflect human physiology, and&#x2F;or see a moores law type spike in quantum computation, and&#x2F;or see breakthroughs in ai, and&#x2F;or some other set of breakthroughs I cant even imagine right now, we can make the current model obsolete. So it&#x27;s not just about the vaccine and the drug, but also the ecosystem to test and evaluate them, that needs technological breakthroughs to fuel it.

&gt; Let’s spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine in three months.The big problem is that we have to test it long term on a bunch of live human beings to make sure it doesn&#x27;t deform babies or something. That is the major delay.Build whatever system you want, but a perfect vaccine ready today would still be well over 3 months from deployment due to the need for safety checks.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;apr&#x2F;15&#x2F;coronavirus-vaccine-when-will-we-have-one-covid-19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;apr&#x2F;15&#x2F;coronavirus-va...</a>

This is very much how the world was built.How many people do you think questioned the Queen of Spain&#x27;s logic in paying for Columbus to go yatching?
But it lead to the &quot;discovery&quot; of America and massive amounts of European expansion. Ok, debatable benefit...How many people questioned the validity of the space race? Which the entire world now benefits from the knowledge and technology created during that time.To pmarca&#x27;s own history, how many people questioned the resources put into developing the internet, or why the University of Illinois was wasting their time with students building a &quot;web browser&quot;?Private Public partnerships for the most part, seem to be the only things that can really drive these huge changes. The only counter-example I can think of (and I&#x27;m probably wrong) is the computer revolution, which was a grass-roots development.

This is great. We are really playing the victim with this virus. I think we should be attacking it on all fronts.Let’s spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine in three months. Maybe have a national reserve of people standing by to participate in vaccine trials during a crisis.Don’t have some of the technology? Invent it! Rules don’t allow it? Change the rules!

I know who he is and that he can build. I just find it interesting how he stepped back from building and now does boards and venture capital. Those can still contribute to building, but it is hardly the same thing as leading the effort.I checked the portfolio. I don&#x27;t see many that address the big challenges he talks about.

Of those companies which one make the physical things that he demands?

If you made this response in a web browser, he helped build that.See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a16z.com&#x2F;portfolio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a16z.com&#x2F;portfolio&#x2F;</a>

The entire laundry list can&#x27;t be accomplished by one person. Can many of those things be done on a smaller level by a billionaire with his connections and skills? Absolutely.Could he build just one state of the art dreadnaught factory to supply X for California? Yes.Could he give a university a team of top-notch developers to create an on-demand bachelor&#x27;s curriculum that could accommodate a million learners simultaneously? Yep. He could even go to Harvard and do that! They would take his call a heck of a lot faster than they would take mine.I am not demanding that he do everything. Just that he start to lead the way.

Billionaires can literally direct huge amounts of capital top down. They can’t do everything but they can raise the money to do almost everything.

The entire article is about top down resource allocation to build society. That can&#x27;t be accomplished by any single person, organization or state.Yours is a hopelessly cynical response that I hope you will reflect a little deeper on.

You think people don&#x27;t ordinarily need PPE or ventilators? Or any other thing that we used to make?

PPE and ventilators are already supplied by private companies.

Governments need to lead on this. I am not sure how corporations can do this without just donating their infrastructure or profits (which would be a great thing to do!). But even then their profits pale in comparison with the money the governments have at hand to spend on these things.An investor can only invest in building things for which there are demand, and for things that benefit society at large that demand usually comes from the government. Sometimes from philanthropists - but they are piss poor compared to the resources of an entity that can demand tax from every citizen.

&quot;Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?&quot;I am doing what he asked at the bottom of the essay. :)On a more serious note, I don&#x27;t disagree with the essay. I don&#x27;t view his point as wrong. It just applies a lot more relevantly to him than most other people who might read it.

This is what I will call the redirection or hypocrisy fallacy.Regardless if you think that Marc is fulfilling the values that he claims to support, point this out does nothing to dismiss the actual point that he made.So his point is still valid. And misdirecting the conversation to being about Marc, is not a valid way of disagreeing with the point being made.

And it goes well beyond Marc.The list of socially valuable things VCs are responsible for helping to build in the past 10+ years is pretty darn small. Considering their outsized influence and wealth, if they want to know why the future isn&#x27;t what it should be, they can start by looking in the mirror.

You are a billionare Marc. You are probably one of the top 1000 people with the capacity to build in North America.So, how many of the things you list are you building?

There seems to be a lot more cronyism in governments that don&#x27;t do a lot of useful things.  I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s favoritism in South Korea but at the same time their industrial policy is first rate.

Sounds great! But how do we separate cronyism and government? More government?

Just 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.

You can always find a crazy example of something or other and choose to blow it out of proportion, while ignoring positive developments on the ground. Blood and gore sell newspaper subscriptions. In the meanwhile I&#x27;m glad Trump ignored the political damage Cuomo was inflicting, and did not send the entire stock of vents to NY. Doing so would be utterly disastrous to other hotspots.

You might be right, but your tone is quite unpleasant and I think you give people an easy out to ignore you.&gt; not a good indicator of anythingOne was a projection of eventual scarcity (vents), the other is a response to current scarcity (ponchos).If you believe that we should ignore this on &quot;boy who cried wolf&quot; grounds, we can go ahead and dismiss the rest of your comment, since you also got something badly wrong and are therefore &quot;not a good indicator&quot;. (But of course you and we and the world don&#x27;t REALLY dismiss people in the way you&#x27;re suggesting!)Cuomo, like all the folks in leadership roles at the moment, is looking at data and analyses from a variety of sources. The specific claim he made was that the apex could require 30,000-40,000 vents. It seems likely that some version of the bullwhip effect is in play here, but either way given that the US national stockpile is reportedly c.8000 ventilators, any reports which peg the need at 4x the maximum national availability ought to be treated with seriousness. Suspect you would do the same!&gt; False. Our family...You are drawing a generalisation from one datapoint. CNET and others are reporting that cheques are weeks away from going out, and that direct deposits have started happening. The original post is sweeping, but I don&#x27;t think many would disagree that to be 3 weeks into a lockdown before stimulus arrives is slow. It might be fast compared to the normal speed of government, but it&#x27;s slow to those in need.Folks like you have some really great insights both into the optics and realities of government, but like Trump, they are often ignored and maligned because of aggressive rhetoric.

False. It&#x27;s all gone by now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;federal-governments-350b-small-business-relief-fund-runs-money-less-2-weeks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;federal-governments-350b-small...</a>I do agree it&#x27;s not enough though. Take it up with your representative.

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.

&gt; New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns.Yeah, NY also put out a &quot;desperate call&quot; for &quot;40000 ventilators&quot; in spite of needing only 6000. So that&#x27;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.&gt; In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it.False. Our family of 3 received $2900 because my wife and I took 2018 off so to the IRS it looks as though we need help. From which I conclude that everyone who made below cutoff threshold (which is unusually high for this) got money directly into their checking account, even though most people haven&#x27;t been laid off yet.And small businesses so far got $350B, with more blocked by austere scholars of pork in Congress.&gt; We should have gleaming skyscrapersThe utter devastation high density living is causing in NY would suggest otherwise. We need to spread the fuck out.

As I&#x27;ve gotten older I&#x27;ve realised that sometimes us trying to &quot;build our way out of things&quot; is often just &quot;digging the hole deeper&quot;. Technology doesn&#x27;t have all the answers unfortunately; I used to think so but as I&#x27;ve seen more I realise I was wrong. Someone&#x27;s progress is someone else&#x27;s nightmare quite often; especially in a system where capital (and therefore technological control) is concentrated in the hands of the few rich.Anything you built has inputs, outputs and waste (this is the bad stuff that makes our lives worse and is subject to the problem of the commons) - it isn&#x27;t an efficient process. Often benefit accrues to the person with money, and the waste goes to everyone else. Sure there are some nice solutions out there but on the whole we probably need less building than done today; and what we do build being much more targeted to society&#x27;s benefit.As an example I look at China and think - they build a lot of stuff but I wouldn&#x27;t want to live there personally with the smog, pollution, bad environment, etc. I live in a nice part of the world but can see &quot;progress&quot; coming close to my door. Maybe I&#x27;m just getting cynical.

He&#x27;s saying build solutions, not just stuff, is he? So, you could build an environmentally sound solution to replace a polluting incumbent.

Right, this is why I&#x27;m bullish on additive manufacturing (or 3d printing). It&#x27;s incredibly flexible and you can retool your manufacturing to produce masks or whatever you need in record time. This technology is maturing rapidly and it&#x27;s something I feel will thrive in the coming decades as on-shoring becomes more common.

You can’t just solve everything by “building”.Build too much, and you end up with depleted resources, non-environmental solutions, and outdated artefacts.Recycling is surely an option, but it should be the fallback, not the default.While the current crisis could’ve been handled better, it is not at all badly handled. Nature is much stronger than us, and the fact that we are not totally screwed after over four months since the outbreak is impressive.Over building hospitals for the next pandemic sounds inefficient to me.

Certainly not all of them, but the German healthcare system has dealt extremely well. There is plenty of testing capacity, and plenty of ICU beds. Thanks to century old unified health insurance laws.Edit: Otto von Bismarck actually instituted the health insurance system of Germany, certainly not a socialist!

All of them started late but Germany seems to be on top of the situation. Singapore and Taiwan are much closer to them then the US.

Well, if you know that the US represents half the spending on healthcare in the world (!) and that its GDP per capita is 20-60% higher than even the one of Western European countries plus the fact that its total GDP is higher than the EU one... You might be excused for expecting a better result in the US.

I don’t think there is evidence of European governments being any more competent during this pandemic.

It&#x27;s 80 - 90% govt. And 10 - 20 % private

Yep, Germany&#x27;s Healthcare system is a good model - Mandated Govt insurance with optional Private Insurance.Uptake is about 75% on the private side, 25% stick with the Govt model.You could drag Obamacare there with the right political will but breaking Company based healthcare apart is a tough political cookie.

It’s great to see this passion and sentiment. I wholeheartedly agree.In my opinion, the deficiencies that the pandemic is unmasking in the american system need a political solution and change.Looking for heroic activism isn’t going to fix the systemic issues.The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model!Look to the European democracies. They have a lot of what is missing here. They are more socially oriented, the state taking care of it’s citizens.Look to Germany’s healthcare system. It’s regulated, but works well for everyone.

It&#x27;s partly because this is fantasy land stuff, it&#x27;s provacative in that it spends the first paragraph wiping away any connection to reality, unwinds a lot of hope, then puts you in a position to be put down for being negative.It&#x27;s sort of a Jonathan Swift-style critique of American plutocracy in the early millennium. Very clever!

Him funding many effective people working on big ideas at once is probably more effective than him doing one idea himself.

You realize he’s one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet as we see it today right?Then you somehow proceed to say “well why is Michael Jordan talking about how X player isn’t performing!? He should be out there playing right now”... uh what?So a player moves to becoming a coach or some support character after decades in the game and that’s your great comment?

I don&#x27;t have an issue with the ideas. I agree with many of them.I just find it a bit absurd that one of the top 1000 people capable of putting them into action is telling other people to go do it while he spends his time investing in them.Capital is obviously helpful and crucial for building companies, but he is obviously satisfied waiting for solutions to walk in the door rather than chasing them himself.

I don&#x27;t think he&#x27;d waste his reputation in that way intentionally, especially when pretty much every word he utters gets to the top of the charts on this site and goes semi-viral elsewhere.

&gt; Is there a word for this phenomenon?Taunting?If you stand in a room full of people and say &quot;the sky is blue&quot;, you&#x27;ll get a weird look at most.If you say instead &quot;Most of you will think it&#x27;s controversial and criticise me, but I think the sky is blue - you&#x27;re free to voice your opinion though&quot;, you&#x27;ll get lots of people commenting (as you did) that this is not controversial and the sky is indeed blue. You can get people to spread and talk about your idea this way.

I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.It&#x27;s interesting that he manages to say completely uncontroversial things, yet do so in such a way that even he finds them controversial. Is there a word for this phenomenon?Reworded in a way that doesn&#x27;t generalize quite so intensely and that doesn&#x27;t use such an ineffective tone, this &#x27;essay&#x27; (I don&#x27;t really think it counts as one; it&#x27;s more what you&#x27;d expect to hear in a speech) might have actually had legs.

A man&#x27;s reach should exceed his grasp or what&#x27;s a heaven for?

Let&#x27;s not build the Alien Dreadnought, though - we wasted two assembly lines chasing that dream and ended up having to put up a tent in a parking lot to meet 80% of production goals 3 years later, and we ended up _behind_ our peers in automation.Measure twice, cut once, respect our forebears.

Books accompanying Marc’s essay - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pmarca&#x2F;status&#x2F;1251648508655923200?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pmarca&#x2F;status&#x2F;1251648508655923200?s=21</a>

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?

&gt; Regulatory capture is something the right is adamantly against usually. I mean, most right-leaning politicians in America are into reducing regulation.Getting rid of regulation is the ultimate regulatory capture.

I broadly agree with him, but I do think his opinions on the &#x27;right&#x27; are more due to media portrayals of right wingers rather than the actual opinions of those &#x27;on the right&#x27;. He says.&gt; The right must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly buybacks in lieu of customer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, even more investor-friendly) innovation.
&gt; 
&gt; It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.Regulatory capture is something the right is adamantly against usually. I mean, most right-leaning politicians in America are into reducing regulation.Offshoring is also something that hasn&#x27;t been on the right for almost a decade.Finally, the right typically often has absolute political support for aggressive VC investment. Our current right-leaning president has supported a ludicrously low interest rate to encourage private investment in technology as well as set up economic opportunity zones to encourage investment in underserved communities.

true for most every college (private and public)

And perhaps more importantly, government grants for research.

Harvard is a private institution that is widely funded by government-backed loans.They are also a &quot;non-profit&quot; and so don&#x27;t pay property taxes even though they have a ludicrously-sized endowment fund which certainly accrues a lot of &quot;profit&quot;.

For better or worse, the United States government is deeply entangled with the financing of college educations. Much of the money flowing in to Harvard via tuitions is involved in government-related loans in one way or another.The idea isn’t to make demands of how a private institution spends their money. The idea is to add conditions to government-sponsored loans such that they could only be used at institutions that meet specific criteria. If a university doesn’t meet the criteria, then we don’t give government-sponsored loans to attend that institution.Harvard isn’t the best example of this idea, but consider how much better the student loan crisis could have been if we attached even minimal criteria that degrees must reasonably be associated with job placement and a minimum level of student earnings after graduation.It’s not a great idea to let the government essentially funnel money into these institutions at large scale via student loans, then leave students entirely on the hook for consequences, without at least minimal expectations that the universities use this money wisely.

The &quot;nobody expects anything from Harvard&quot; statement might be a bit too strong. I&#x27;ve seen people say that Harvard has a responsibility to do more social good with it&#x27;s massive endowment. Here&#x27;s one example [1]:&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s interests for the betterment of others.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.profgalloway.com&#x2F;how-i-got-here" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.profgalloway.com&#x2F;how-i-got-here</a>

Andreessen&#x27;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&#x27;re doing now.

&gt; Normal private institutions in America have none of those.This is not true. Any non-profit classified corporation would be tax-exempt. This is not particularly difficult to set up. All you need to do is file with the IRS and not have shareholders.

&gt; It benefits from federal student loan programs.If by &quot;normal private institutions&quot; you mean companies, sure, that&#x27;s true. But normal private educational institutions absolutely benefit from this and other similar programs. The University of Phoenix, for instance, heavily recruits GI Bill-eligible students, and their right to do so was defended by Republican US senators.&gt; It receives federal research grants.You can do this as a private company just fine. SBIR is a great example. I worked at a startup that got federal research grants less than a year after being formed.&gt; It is allowed to be a tax-exempt institution. And it is allowed to own a tax-exempt endowment.These are common for normal non-profit institutions in America and are in no way specific to Harvard.

Harvard is subsidized by the federal government and the American taxpayer several ways. It benefits from federal student loan programs. It receives federal research grants. It is allowed to be a tax-exempt institution. And it is allowed to own a tax-exempt endowment. Normal private institutions in America have none of those.

&gt; 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 &quot;Harvard education&quot; to someone who didn&#x27;t qualify to make it in today?

Not a subscriber to this view, but the concept is that we take care for our family and friends for free, and charity is driven by showing us real people rather than cold facts. For the rest of the &quot;people we don&#x27;t know&quot;, investment and payments are capitalism&#x27;s way of helping them out.In this context, it sounds like he&#x27;s surprised that investors are waiting for government to bail out any normally-profitable airlines, rather than making an investment or buying in while keeping them afloat. This seems simplistic to me; the cost of maintaining an airline or hotel for the upcoming no-revenue months is so high that your investment would be lost.

Nicholas is a British economist:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nicholas_Stern,_Baron_Stern_of_Brentford" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nicholas_Stern,_Baron_Stern_of...</a>A somewhat stronger formulation of the same idea is from David Friedman: &quot;People do things for other people for three reasons: love, money, or force.&quot;

Indeed. Communist societies build less, and somehow also pollute more.

I don&#x27;t disagree with his statement, but I disagree with his expectations. These systems are NOT ripe for capitalism. Capitalism is built to fulfill demand. There was never demand from the government for it to distribute cash, therefore they never built a system for it. There was never a real demand for a vaccine, so we never developed it.Capitalism is why we&#x27;re in this mess - we&#x27;re valuing short-term gains over long-term&#x2F;far-fetched&#x2F;society-changing results - and a16z is part of that system. Sure, he&#x27;s at the edge of that system, but I guarantee you he would not have invested in a coronavirus vaccine in mid-2019 when there was no market for one.I would not say it&#x27;s time to build. I would say it&#x27;s time to change our system of motivation. Money does not, and will not ever, solve these problems BEFORE they become problems.

At this point in the essay, Andreessen is wondering aloud why more building hasn&#x27;t happened in the United States to solve problems in fields like education, manufacturing, and transportation.He asks what the reasons could be, and lists several rejecting each of them. One reason that he rejects for why more building hasn&#x27;t happened is capitalism.Andreessen thinks capitalism can&#x27;t be the reason for us not building because the fields he mentions are places where it&#x27;s profitable (&quot;highly lucrative&quot;) for businesses to operate. Replacing capitalism with another system (say communism) wouldn&#x27;t solve our inability to build, in Andreessen&#x27;s view.

&gt; 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, good both for the investor and the customers who are served.I&#x27;m not familiar with Nicholas Stern, and will look him up, but does anyone here want to elaborate as if you were talking to a five-year-old?

From my original post:Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets

The people should have a share of the proceeds if their tax dollars funded the work.I don&#x27;t think printing money is the answer, if I&#x27;m understanding you correctly.

That’s not an idea for building, that’s just an idea for the government getting more money. The government clearly doesn’t actually need the money when it cares to do something (based on the stimulus bill and the last decades of deficits).

Federal and state governments are different.

The federal government continued to spend trillions of dollars a year during this period of austerity you&#x27;re referring to. Any liquidation of emergency stocks was not motivated by financial need.

A global capital levy is Piketty&#x27;s central proposal in _Capital in the 21st Century_.

Aren&#x27;t the last 30 years sort of the problem though? How about we check the 30 years before that: medicare, social security, the tail end of the new deal, the rapid cleanup of acid emissions which were wrecking forests all up and down the east coast... Seems like, starting in the 80&#x27;s, you would have looked at this and said hey, this government knows what it&#x27;s doing, we should let it do more stuff.Instead we basically did the opposite, starving federal programs everywhere possible (virtually every entitlement or program that existed in the 80&#x27;s is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we&#x27;re seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response.So I&#x27;d sort of flip this around: what was it we did in the last 30 years that destroyed our confidence in our own government? Because it used to work.

Here&#x27;s one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the past 100 years.That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.

Food stamps, medicare, TANF, and welfare improve the daily lives of millions. And this money is accountable to the person who spent it, to the person who voted to spend it, to who raised it.

It could give that money back to people and let them spend and invest it? More people free to quit working for someone else and to instead work on &#x27;building&#x27; sounds like exactly what Marc is advocating. We have our smartest maths graduates trying to make automated trading algorithms skim an extra .0000001% off a trade, which you could argue is not helping humanity progress.  Maybe with UBI they will quit that and work on something more long-term? For Marc&#x27;s dream to come true it seems like reducing the concentration of wealth and power is the first step.

The US funds billions in research, this one time it even resulted in the internet.  Probably a good idea to keep doing that.

Well, there were those research efforts that came close to a SARS vaccine until their funding got cut: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;health&#x2F;health-care&#x2F;scientists-were-close-coronavirus-vaccine-years-ago-then-money-dried-n1150091" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;health&#x2F;health-care&#x2F;scientists-were-c...</a>By the way, the formal name for COVID-19&#x27;s virus is SARS-COV-2.

Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?

How many large companies have come from federal grants? How much would that tax actually generate? If the govt can print money in emergencies as needed, what would the taxes have done?I don&#x27;t see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value.Modern govt isn&#x27;t failing from lack of funds, it&#x27;s how those funds are spent that is the problem.

Net neutrality was killed without this policy and with no government stake in the tech industry.  I don&#x27;t follow.

It also potentially means the state partly owns the free speech platforms, which may have some risks.

Sure, govts. should tax the FAANGs of the world more, but having a &quot;stake&quot; in them means govt. interests suddenly align with corporate interests, meaning regulation for the public good gets sidelined. Net neutrality anyone?

Many Asian countries have recent experience with SARS, which led them to get their pandemic game together in advance of this one.

It is remarkable how uniformly lethargic the entire political spectrum of the West has been with respect to this crisis until it was too late, while we&#x27;re seemingly also universally unwilling to build housing or infrastructure across the West, while many Asian countries seem to actually be doing a much better job of all of these things. Instead we sit around and bicker about everything and wait.

Taxing the hell out of capital is a good idea, but our current political reality makes it hard to maintain any public service that&#x27;s not extremely visible.These are emergency preparedness problems so funding them means setting aside a pile of money and resources until the emergency actually happens. That pile of money makes an attractive target for capital, who can afford to fund campaigns to privatize those services and then get the emergency stockpile as a reward. That sort of maneuver has to go through a vote, but most voters get their understanding of the world through capital-owned media, so that&#x27;s not much of an obstacle.Edit: More and more, I think we need worker-owned news.

&gt; I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.For almost all of those risks, the problem isn&#x27;t &quot;what to build&quot;, it&#x27;s that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.Here&#x27;s my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov&#x27;t investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.One possible implementation: gov&#x27;t gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are &quot;tiny&quot; compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K&#x2F;year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov&#x27;t gets 0%.Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.

I share some of the sentiment, but only demand and necessity will drive “building”. An energized or optimistic citizenry surely helps, but to kick innovation into high gear we need a Cold War or something. A crisis where we can go outside at least - this virus really has deflated some of the American spirit it feels like. Sort of stuck in this limbo where everyone wants to rally and help but the touted best way to help is to stay inside. A lot of pent up energy in me at least; perhaps Marc is channeling a bit of his own.

The US didn&#x27;t actually deindustrialize. US manufacturing by value added is larger than Germany and Japan put together. What we did do is get rid of a bunch of low value manufacturing. We&#x27;re finding out the hard way that some of that low value manufacturing is actually useful though when you need a hundred million facemasks or ten million test swabs or whatever.

Germany also faced the China shock and Japan. They didn&#x27;t deindustrialize. Policy choices matter. Leadership matters. And the social factors that lead to devaluing competence and doing things matter.

I don&#x27;t think &quot;ambition&quot; is the correct root cause for &quot;not enough surgical masks&quot;, either.Look at someone like Bill Gates. He had the knowledge of how dangerous a pandemic could be, the financial resources to manufacture or stockpile the basic medical items which would be needed, and as much ambition as anyone on this planet.I hate to single out anyone in particular, as this is certainly not his fault. I don&#x27;t mean to pick on him. It&#x27;s just an example of how even cranking AMBition up to 20 wouldn&#x27;t have prevented our current predicament.

Perhaps desire is the wrong word to use.  I don&#x27;t think he means desire in terms of willpower or motivation, but in terms of ambition.  I do think the world has lost some of of its ambition over the last 50 years.

My point is that arguing that &quot;try harder&quot; is a solution to the American obesity problem is provably ridiculous, because we&#x27;ve been saying that for decades and it obviously hasn&#x27;t worked.

A single outcome in over a single point in time, you mean. It doesn’t address the structural issues, such as cost and availability of healthy foods, that contribute to the need to lose weight in the first place.

Would you say the same when talking about drug addiction, rather than just weight gain? Would it matter to drug addiction rates, if there were cheap Fast Drug stores all across the country, akin to fast food stores?I think it&#x27;s quite clear that here it makes zero sense to just say &#x27;try to resist taking these ubiquitous drugs which give short-term satisfaction&#x27; as a policy measure. You&#x27;d need to treat it as a public health issue in which human beings not rational robots, but instead pleasure-seekers who would be helped by e.g. a sugar tax, policies that restricted the number of fast food stores to a minimum concentration level, healthy-food subsidies, public health and information campaigns, public cycling infrastructure, rules to enable workers to engage in sports at their workplace blablabla.Apparently willpower is not enough and there are lots of policy instruments we could employ.

Using an example where an outcome (weight gain) is completely driven by an individual’s (in)action (consuming more energy than expending) is probably not the best argument for opposing a “try harder” approach to living.Yes it’s never been easier to eat like shit and have hobbies that require no movement, but the opposite is also true.

&gt; Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years?Um no. The people in the 40s didn&#x27;t have the choice to eat as much as we do today calorie wise. That is really all there is to eat. Food today is cheaper than ever. While that means fewer people go hungry, it means more people overeat. It has nothing to do with city design because cities that existed in the 40s largely in the same form still have greater rates of obesity.

&gt;Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas today you basically the vast majority of a similar population is overweight-to-obese.Weren&#x27;t they rationing foodstuffs?

&gt; The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia.I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest.It&#x27;s akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas today you basically the vast majority of a similar population is overweight-to-obese.Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years? Of course not, there were huge structural changes over that time in lots of areas (design of our cities, rise of the automobile, industrialized food and agriculture, etc.) that caused the person with &quot;average&quot; willpower to become obese.Similarly, it&#x27;s not as though people have less &quot;desire&quot; than before. There are large structural changes, many of which Andreesen doesn&#x27;t address at all, such as the forces that have led to so much inequality and a hollowing out of the US manufacturing capacity.I don&#x27;t fundamentally disagree with Andreesen&#x27;s goals, but &quot;try harder&quot; is the sort of platitude that rarely brings about real societal change.

In the article, Marc doesn&#x27;t mention software. Maybe software could eat the world faster too(probably will, since many companies starting communicate over the internet). But there is still a huge gap between developers and consumers. I&#x27;m wondering what he thinks about that? Also, I&#x27;m glad He mention Westworld, great show.

This is why judges cannot be the highest power - the people still need to be able to hold them accountable to ensure that the legal institutions don&#x27;t become inaccessible to the common man.(Not that they are accessible now... but it could be worse.)

How can we change incentives for lawmakers?

I thought the &quot;remove two regulations to add one regulation&quot; was an interesting hack.Don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s political rhetoric or even viable.

&gt; why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courtsWhat incentives do lawmakers have to make laws simpler?

I also don&#x27;t think you can just ask a court to answer a hypothetical in a binding way. You basically need to get into the legal problem first.

This is exactly how two of the biggest startups of the past 15 years - Airbnb and Uber - were built.Airbnb and Uber built products that were in a legal gray area. Lawmakers are still catching up to them.

This is also a failure to build. We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner and the legal profession too often gets fat fees for slow-walking legal proceedings when technology exists to make expeditious dispute resolution much faster. For example, I can think of no reason why we can&#x27;t mandate that discovery must use electronic format unless the information was never before recorded in an online electronic system. Given that I have never seen a functioning typewriter in a corporate office, I imagine that would smooth things a bit.Also, just as a matter of how the US legal system works, the presumption is that someone is innocent until challenged, whether by the state or by a private party. A prospective business could not file a petition with a court asking if their conduct was legal or not, since it&#x27;s not really a controversy. But businesses will always do loads of due diligence with lawyers beforehand, who should help identify areas of legal risk.

Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donotpay.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donotpay.com&#x2F;</a>

Problem is, the faster courts are, the more likely people are to actually wait for them, which ends up a net slowdown. Really the only path to success is, take a risk to try to beat the competition and hope the courts side with you in the end. And if you&#x27;re successful, they probably will.

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.

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&#x27;s legal isn&#x27;t how a society of laws is supposed to work.Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.

We’re not necessarily talking about litigation here. Like another commenter pointed out, other legal system allows you to ask the courts for decisions without an opposing party.

We&#x27;re actually not running out of ventilators anywhere. Existing installed base is sufficient and moreover, it turned out the federal government had a large stockpile anyway, which rather invalidates the central thesis of the article re: lack of preparedness.The claim about ventilators was one of the first dodgy claims I noticed but really the entire first part of the article is a pack of lies. Andreessen says:&quot;We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents&quot;This isn&#x27;t amazing. The amount of testing being performed has scaled exponentially over the space of just a few months, from a standing start. In fact there&#x27;s a lot of evidence that the supposedly exponential growth of the virus was really due to an exponential growth in testing, when positives are viewed as a proportion of overall tests done. It&#x27;s not an indictment of &quot;the West&quot; that materials run out after such a vast acceleration - if anything I&#x27;m amazed it didn&#x27;t happen earlier!&quot;We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds&quot;All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.I&#x27;ve been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don&#x27;t understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn&#x27;t aware of this.&quot;We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses&quot;Vaccines can&#x27;t be created for a virus that doesn&#x27;t exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn&#x27;t remarkable: it&#x27;s inevitable. As for therapies, that&#x27;s what ventilators and CPAP are.&quot;then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production&quot;Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.&quot;it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives&quot;I&#x27;m actually on Marc&#x27;s side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill. But this claim is also nonsense. FDA allows fast-track approval bypass for cases where someone is going to die without treatment anyway, and Ebola disappeared after 2014 - according to CDC the next time it was spotted was Zaire in 2018 with a grand total of 8 cases. That&#x27;s not even close to &quot;many lives&quot;.&quot;A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.&quot;Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.&quot;At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard&quot;In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can&#x27;t be rapidly scaled up.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;why-factories-cant-keep-up-demand-for-face-masks-coronavirus-2020-4?r=US&amp;IR=T" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;why-factories-cant-keep-up-d...</a>Headline is literally &quot;Factories are scrambling to make 20 times more face masks a day to keep up with demand amid coronavirus outbreak, but the masks are surprisingly difficult and expensive to make&quot;As for money, transferring money is easy. Figuring out the right amounts and the right people to send it to, without creating an explosion of fraud and waste - that&#x27;s not so easy.

&gt; The moneyed classes of America don&#x27;t like redundancy and they don&#x27;t like long term investments.This class denigrating language does nothing to elevate the discussion and it is absolutely false (in the sense that it is only a &quot;truth&quot; within your worldview and the worldview of others who share it), and it is false in the sense that it doesn&#x27;t accurately describe the behaviors of individuals in the &quot;moneyed class&quot;.The &quot;moneyed classes&quot; as you call it if anything have more redundancy and longer term investments that most other classes. It is incredibly rare for anyone in the &quot;moneyed classes&quot; to not have a balanced portfolio of investments that add in fiscal redundancy in case one investment goes bad. The portfolios are also balanced insofar as balancing short term and long term growth depending on their investment horizon.The problems you&#x27;ve identified have far more to do with a coordination problem than the vices of individuals.The &quot;moneyed class&quot; is not one coordinated hive mind mass that all conspire with one another to avoid redundancy and eschew long term investments.The &quot;moneyed class&quot; like the &quot;unmoneyed class&quot; are all individual actors each acting in their own self interest and trying to figure out an optimal solution given limited imperfect information and handicapped by many cognitive biases.Any system that is going to solve the issue of redundancy and long term investments needs to acknowledge the reality of limited imperfective information and cognitive biases and the impact these have on human reasoning and the subsequent actions of individuals.

&gt; It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn&#x27;t been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.Sure, but is this actually a high order blocker? I&#x27;d argue that it&#x27;s not even a first order effect. The problem here is not that we don&#x27;t have enough insurance capacity; the problem is that we don&#x27;t have enough ventilators. And it turns out, actually building those things to spec is hard. Intellectual property and regulatory capture are bad things to be reduced, IMO, but they&#x27;re only part of our current equation.The moneyed classes of America don&#x27;t like redundancy and they don&#x27;t like long term investments. Since they hold such a huge chunk of wealth compared to the rest of America, their preferences (which I might note, Marc represents professionally) make these decisions long before patent troll lawsuits or building inspectors can rain on any parade.&gt; Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we&#x27;d see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.Litigation is the most costly way to settle these things. Your idea would require even more startup capital per small business to overcome the legal obstacles you seemed eager to abolish.

All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia.I really wouldnt give much praise to the great governing elite that failed to prevent this in the first place, despite scientists telling them about it a long time ago.

&gt; What they all have in common is that decisions are made by leadership which can act with the necessary degree of autonomy.No, what they have in common is that they&#x27;ve been through this experience before with SARS, learned from it and setup procedures so they could act faster next time.

The inclusive vs extractive institutions mentality makes sense but I think in the exact reverse way then you suggest.It&#x27;s precisely because of the Wests (and like Marc says it really is the West) failure to respond to this crisis. It&#x27;s the excess of inclusivity that leads to short term, ballot box decision making in response to crises, and it is the short term, market logic that leads to loss of autonomy and neglect of long term goals that Marc talks about in the piece.It&#x27;s the politication of a healhcare &#x2F; virological crisis that renders responses ineffective. When the American president gins up armed protesters during a pandemic that is the direct result of the inclusivity praised in the book. It&#x27;s crisis response turned into a media spectacle and an election campaign.Efffective resopnse to the crisis was visible in East Asian countries in which &#x27;elites&#x27; can govern without constant interference, and that&#x27;s not a glorification of China, but also of democratic countries like Taiwan, or so-so democratic countries like Singapore. What they all have in common is that decisions are made by leadership which can act with the necessary degree of autonomy.

Yeah, I generally agree. The book does highlight how much of it is hinged on contingency, though. The US has strong institutions, but the dynamic of having elites opposing change is still present, obviously. High barriers of entry is a prime example of how it can be done when other options are unavailable.

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

&quot;Why Nation Fails&quot; is a phenomenal book. I&#x27;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&#x27;s systems. Still, the fact you&#x27;re able to discuss them here or work towards changing them through legal methods, shows the US is far off on the right track of constitutional rule and pluralism.

That reason being capturing the market by means of regulation.

The system is working great except there isn&#x27;t enough censorship?

Answer is pretty easy. People are assholes.Those rules and regulatory frameworks exist for a reason, and with something like health insurance you don’t see better outcomes in states with lower regulatory burden.Same with the financial burdens that companies cry about. Enron, GlobalCrossing, etc all demonstrated that corporate governance required the federal stick to behave.Anderseen’s article is pretty lame with respect to why we can’t do things. We can and we have. The difference is now that you have executive leadership that is batshit crazy people have taken over the government. That happened because of the absence of regulation that gives extremists like Alex Jones, who were relegated to public access cable and weird newsletters in the 1980s access to the public at large.Taking off what rails remain isn’t a strategy for success.

I may not have expressed that point very well, but it seems like the common law system would encourage less explicit regulation rather than more, so that seems like a bit of a contradiction. Does the need for more litigation drive a desire to be more explicit in how statues are written?

Yeah, but when the practice of this is different with it often being up to regulators what actually is allowed and what isn&#x27;t. The obvious recent example is that GDPR enforcement is (often intentionally) not strictly following the letter of the law.

Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we&#x27;d see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.I agree with your overall point, but you have the regulatory differences between the US and Europe exactly backwards. Europe (excluding England somewhat) has a statutory legal system. Things are either legal or illegal according to laws that have largely been written down ahead of time that anyone can go read and figure out.In the US we have a common law system where much of our law is written by the courts in response to specific cases where judges interpret the general principles described in the &quot;simpler laws&quot; you speak of.In practice this means that, under many circumstances, things move a lot slower in the US because of the time and expense of litigation (and even the threat of litigation). This is one of the reasons that it&#x27;s harder to build things in the US. Our public transportation systems (trains, subways, etc) cost on the order of 5-10x more than similar ones in Europe. Our different legal systems is one of the big reasons why.

100% it’s politics, it’s self-interest. The reason why we don’t have Musk’s Alien Dreadnought factories throughout the US is related to the reason Elizabeth I rejected weaving machines; the people who have power will not gain enough from it and may even lose. Elizabeth I feared the consequences of creative disruption on her constituents, and the knock on effect that might have had to her tenuous grip on power. Today in the US we see silly policies that are pushed to make a few people rich at the expense of society as a whole. The more we are able to dismantle monopolies, and weaken the capability of incumbent industries to skew legislation in their own favor, the more society will move forward.

Simple - politics is about control. Laws are a form of politics.Why would anyone give up control once they had acquired it?

I think trying to put all of Europe into one EU in your argument is already where it breaks down.Europeans don&#x27;t live in a cohesive society. Italians, Germans, Swedes live in a cohesive society in their small california-sized countries.

I feel like all the replies comparing legal system differences between the US and the EU miss a crucial element - the difference in the characters of the people participating in each society.I&#x27;m now going to make a couple of broad generalizations. Note, that I&#x27;m aware they do not apply to every person, or even state in the US, or member nation of the EU.However having lived in both for a number of years, I do have some personal insight.Europe and Europeans are a cohesive society where the ideal is a flat society without too many outliers. Standing out from the field is not promoted. And career aspirations are about attaining a work life balance and produce meaningful work. The overall societal system works, offers many opportunities for education and entrepreneurship, but within a well lit path. Europe is a fast moving train.As a result, people look for ways to succeed within the system.The US is a &quot;land of opportunity&quot; in all the best, and all the insidious ways that this implies. People are looking to separate themselves from the pack, to be &quot;insanely great&quot; in some way or another, and see society and laws as just impediments to that goal. The US is a rocket powered supercar.As a result, people look for ways to succeed in spite of the system.This is why both the US needs a common law system (because the population would never tolerate a restrictive &quot;write everything down&quot; statutory system because would consider it overly restrictive to their liberty), and also why it fails. Because people and corporations abuse the common law system to violate the spirit of the law as much as possible to succeed and thrive in the short term. So half the country is constantly tries to create more regulations and the other half is trying to tear down existing ones.This is why in the US the most innovative companies and people can succeed on a 5-10 year timeline, and so the biggest public companies in the world are there, but why Europe is much better at building 20-50 year projects and so have better infrastructure. (I&#x27;m ignoring China completely here because China is better than both at everything now, but is also an authoritarian dictatorship, so it&#x27;s even harder to compare that apple to the other oranges).Ultimately my point is that the EU raises a certain type of person and attracts a certain type of immigrant, and the US another.I&#x27;m Canadian, so I frankly think both extremes are distasteful. I find the US a post-apocalyptic every-man-for-himself dystopia. And I find the EU a restrictive stifling nanny-state. Canada is just right for me.But I appreciate that the world has both extremes.

I wonder what you think about the necessity of the health insurance industry? Seeing as how apparently it began as a sort of subscription service to keep hospitals afloat when beds were empty... It is a lot to wrap my mind around, but I have the general feeling that insurance drives the prices of health care way up and we would be better if we could all pay out of pocket for most things, but be covered by a true &#x27;risk mitigation&#x27; insurance solution that would kick in when indeed we got cancer, or got in a car accident or the like.

I respectfully disagree about what it takes to be approved as a health insurance COMPANY (as opposed to a broker). In fact I am quite happy that regulators require you to show that 1) you know what you are doing 2) you have a massive balance sheet to protect your customers if they need it. The point 2 is super important in the context of VC-backed companies. There is simply no way to build a massive insurance company that way, the return on equity is too low. Unlike airbnb you just don’t go out and raised $2B in debt because you are running out of money and you can’t pay claims. Regulators would step in way before, and they have done that multiple times.Witness what is happening today: I have not heard from any health insurance company requesting a bailout (unlike most companies). State regulators are a pain in the neck, are conservative but - in your interest - they control how the insurance company uses their capital (you grow too fast = you must add more equity, a bit like working capital), and how you invest your money (they restrict the amount of equity you invest in). All in the interest of the consumers.Think for a second: if the balance sheet of your health insurance company looked like the balance sheet of Softbank’s vision fund? Would you like to hear “we are sorry, we’ll have to stop your cancer treatment, we are out of money”.Health insurance companies are regulated at both the State and Federal level. The goal is to make sure that they are fair and will pay the claims when you need that down the road. Like everything in financial services (your savings, your retirement fund, your health for you and your family) this is not the place for fly by night startups. While it is visually appealing to see a better UI, you hear startups &quot;disrupting this dinosaur industry&quot; but very few of them succeeded. And maybe it would be nice, but smart investors (after say series B or C) realize that the returns are not that great and the company requires a massive amount of equity, in fact locked in low risk investments&#x2F;stable bonds.Sure, you can target a very young workforce and ignore the sick, the old, the crippled, those overweight or whatever else there is. And you can make money within the startup ecosystem, when everybody works out, eats well, and is super healthy.But it is simply illegal and my advice for you is to buy insurance from an old, stodgy company. Maybe a mutual company? I don&#x27;t care if wework is out of money, I can always find space somewhere else. When you have cancer, or when you child is disabled, you don’t want to deal with insurance regulators who have seized the assets of your shiny new health insurance company startup.There is no room for mistakes when it comes to your health and your savings.Disclaimer: I have Kaiser, I never use them, but I am sure they will be there when needed.

Thanks, agree, great book. I think of it as &quot;Why Nations Succeed&quot; instead. Inclusive institutions = economic generativity = non-zero sum. A more philosophical version is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B004W3FM4A&#x2F;ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1587262791&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse-ebo...</a>

Because a law is a machine to compact thousands of hours of ethical thought into an actionable doctrine. It&#x27;s designed specifically to take the subjectivity and bias out of executing policy, which is introduced by a single (or small group of) human brain(s) working on a problem for a few weeks, at most. Courts are a last-ditch effort to jury-rig a conclusive plan of action to rectify whatever dilemma come before them; as with similar tasks, they&#x27;re more expensive and time-consuming at-scale than just planning correctly at the outset.

Totally, spot on.  I think a great next step would be democratize the system that performs those tests and works with the regulatory institutions so new pharma companies can focus on innovation.  A reasonable analog are the fintech startups that provide APIs and say essentially &quot;were regulated so you don&#x27;t have to be&quot;.  That stuff is important and we should DRY it up so we don&#x27;t have to copy&#x2F;paste it every time we start a company.

I have no doubt that money drives burdensome regulations, but most regulations are put into place because someone screwed up and hurt people.Yeah, there are a ton of regulations If you want to bring a new drug to market. That makes it super expensive to do.But in exchange we get pharmaceuticals that work, are reasonable safe, and are based solid data.

Funny enough, adding such role&#x2F;institution adds complexity in itself

And what would it solve? If you can enter the market but later on you are judged in the court for doing something wrong - you are better to be forced to think about it before you even start it.The problem here is growing complexity, which governments doesn&#x27;t recognize as a problem for some reason. There should be some institution in the government body, which primary goal would be to reduce complexity of governance.

thank you, _Why Nations Fail_ is partisan hackery.

I don&#x27;t get why everybody is raving about &quot;Why Nations Fail&quot;. Their definitions of inclusive&#x2F;extractive institutions seem hopelessly muddled. It is almost as if they&#x27;ve collected all the stuff they liked in prosperous countries and called it &quot;inclusive&quot; and then did the same with all the stuff they disliked in impoverished dictatorships and called it &quot;extractive&quot;. If you try to distill a succinct definition of these concepts and then apply it, you run into contradictions such as (borrowing an example from Fukuyama): &quot;The Indian political system is so inclusive that it can’t begin major infrastructure projects because of all the lawsuits and democratic protest, especially when compared to the extractive Chinese one.&quot;If the thesis is &quot;institutions are important for prosperity&quot;, it is kind of obvious. But the book does little to explain exactly what kind of institutions.

I think the single biggest roadblock to building new things is regulation. How do we eliminate most regulations, and simplify the rest to fight off regulatory capture?What if we had a github for laws and required that anybody who worked on a law use their real name and if they were paid by a company they had to list how much?

Insurance is not meant to cover routine purchases, it&#x27;s meant to cover purchases that are unexpected and too large to cover.We have a publicly paid health system in Norway, but we still have:
 * Copays until you reach €200
 * No dental coverage for routine operations (only major surgeries)
 * No eyewear coverage (I assume if you have some eye illness requiring surgery or similar it will be covered)Seems to work fine, and that France should change what insurance does cover

so when (extra) cost goes to zero, the demand goes to infinity?

&gt; I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn&#x27;t been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.Very often regulation starts lean, then inevitably some assholes take advantage of it to their profit, so the regulation becomes more and more specific and complex. Rinse and repeat.It starts at individual level. In France, health insurance providers started reimbursing eyewear, with a rule &quot;one pair of glasses each 2 years&quot;. Now everyone buys new glasses every 2 years, sharp, because &quot;I&#x27;m paying for it&quot;, even if they don&#x27;t really need new glasses. Stuff like this make insurance price go up for everyone as a result, which incentivizes you even more to be an abuser. The rules are now more strict about the how much is reimbursed, because people obviously go for most expensive Gucci frames allowed.

&gt; I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn&#x27;t been another provider for twenty years or so.I think the difficulty involved in spinning up an insurance company probably has literally nothing to do with those 6000 pages of documentation, but if I suspected otherwise, it would seem like what is actually on those pages is a lot more relevant than how many of them there are.

&gt;Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it?This will _never_ happen. The vast majority of people are too intellectually challenged to see the benefit of simplicity. The earlier someone understand this fundamental fact about the vast majority of people, the earlier they can probably channelize efforts in the right direction ( what ever that might be), rather than hopelessly toil to make laws simpler. Democracy=tyranny of the masses.

If it was just health insurance and similarly &quot;risky&quot; industries that required the 6000 pages, it wouldn&#x27;t be so bad.Earlier this year Lambda School (an online school where you watch videos and learn things) got fined $75k by a California regulator for the crime of teaching without a license. One single state license application required &quot;2177 pages and weighed 25 pounds,&quot; and they&#x27;re having to do this for many states.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20555351" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20555351</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Austen&#x2F;status&#x2F;1153450365712388096" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Austen&#x2F;status&#x2F;1153450365712388096</a>

&gt; Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we&#x27;d see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.Because regulation in the US is rarely the problem.We have a US mask manufacturer sitting outside Dallas who never went 24&#x2F;7 in production because NOBODY WOULD PAY HIM.Billionaires shouting &quot;Hey, we&#x27;ll pay for preproduction on vaccines&quot; because they know they won&#x27;t have to deliver isn&#x27;t helpful.Handing a small business $10 million so he can go full tilt would be helpful. But then these billionaires would have to cough up actual CASH.

You are confusing regulation that protects the oligarchy, throwing spanners in the wheels of potential independent competitors, with regulation that effectively protects the health and safety of the people.The US might have the former, but when Europeans refer to a lack of regulation in the US they mean the latter.

&quot;I&#x27;m in the process of reading the book _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions.It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture.&quot;However if we actually look at the pages of that book from 2012, the authors never use the US, or any present day &quot;Western&quot; country, as an example of one that had or has extractive instutitions. Instead they cite examples such as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, Liberia, Egypt, North Korea, Nepal, or Haiti.According to the authors, the US currently has inclusive institutions and uses the example of the software industry as a success story to support this argument. This industry is in fact the blog post author&#x27;s area of focus as a former programmer turned venture capitalist.To quote from the book:(Note the bit about fraud. The US had serious problems with fraud 100 years ago, and still does. Consider that is why the SEC exists. Many would argue it has very limited powers of enforcement to deal with modern-day fraud.)&quot;Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But he ultimately responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers. Those institutions also made the financing of their projects feasible. The U.S. labor markets enabled them to hire qualified personnel, and the relatively competitive market environment enabled them to expand their companies and market their products. These entrepreneurs were confident from the beginning that their dream projects could be implemented: they trusted the institutions and the rule of law that these generated and they did not worry about the security of their property rights. Finally, the political institutions ensured stability and continuity. For one thing, they made sure that there was no risk of a dictator taking power and changing the rules of the game, expropriating their wealth, imprisoning them, or threatening their lives and livelihoods. They also made sure that no particular interest in society could warp the government in an economically disastrous direction, because political power was both limited and distributed sufficiently broadly that a set of economic institutions that created the incentives for prosperity could emerge. Secure property rights, the law, public services, and the freedom to contract and exchange all rely on the state, the institution with the coercive capacity to impose order, prevent theft and fraud, and enforce contracts between private parties. To function well, society also needs other public services: roads and a transport network so that goods can be transported; a public infrastructure so that economic activity can flourish; and some type of basic regulation to prevent fraud and malfeasance.Though many of these public services can be provided by markets and private citizens, the degree of coordination necessary to do so on a large scale often eludes all but a central authority. The state is thus inexorably intertwined with economic institutions, as the enforcer of law and order, private property, and contracts, and often as a key provider of public services. Inclusive economic institutions need and use the state.&quot;The US approach to business does have its flaws. However the book &quot;Why Nations Fail&quot; does not address them. To the authors, the US is a nation that &quot;succeeded&quot;, and continues to succeed, by having inclusive institutions, not one that &quot;failed&quot; or is failing today.A book like &quot;Why Nations Fail&quot;, and there are many others like it, arguably encourages readers to view the US, irrespective of its flaws, as the shining example of what a country could&#x2F;should aspire to become. There are no present-day comparisons of the US with Western Europe in books of this type. Such books are arguably part of the reason for certain institutional problems that will forever remain unfixed in the US, e.g. regulatory capture and complexity, because books like these have themes that support the idea that America&#x27;s &quot;solutions&quot; are not just different but better than all the others.This book really has no relation to any criticism of US institutions. If anything, it supports the idea that the US has the best formula for creating a rich country, i.e., a country where &quot;anyone can be rich&quot;. They compare how Bill Gates became wealthy versus how Carlos Slim became wealthy.From a presentatation given by the authors:Acemoglu Robinson (Harvard) Why Nations Fail June 6, 2011 8 &#x2F; 36Main Concepts Inclusive and Extractive InstitutionsTowards a Theory of InstitutionsExtractive economic institutions: Lack of law and order. Insecure property rights; entry barriers and regulations preventing functioning of markets and creating a nonlevel playing field.Extractive political institutions -- in the limit of absolutism: Political institutions concentrating power in the hands of a few, without constraints, checks and balances or rule of law.Inclusive economic institutions: Secure property rights, law and order, markets and state support (public services and regulation) for markets; open to relatively free entry of new businesses; uphold contracts; access to education and opportunity for the great majority of citizens.Inclusive political institutions: Political institutions allowing broad participation pluralism and placing constraints and checks on politicians; rule of law (closely related to pluralism).But also some degree of political centralization for the states to be able to selectively enforce law and order.Acemoglu Robinson (Harvard) Why Nations Fail June 6, 2011 36 &#x2F; 36Why Nations have and Do FailBecause they have extractive political and economic institutions.These are difficult to change though they can be successfully challenged and altered during critical junctures.The roots of modern world inequality lie in the emergence of inclusive institutions in Britain and the fruits of this - the industrial revolution - spread to those parts of the world that had similar institutions (settler colonies) or quickly developed them (Western Europe).Other parts of the world languished with extractive institutions which have persisted over time and thus remain poor today.

I&#x27;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 of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn&#x27;t been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.I can&#x27;t help but think that there&#x27;s a fundamental flaw in the American regulatory approach. From the European perspective, the US is sometimes viewed as some time of free market haven, but in practice it often turns out that the regulatory burden is much higher. The framework imposed on financial markets by the SEC and related authorities is on a whole different level in the US, and with higher complexity you a also get a larger surface area for special interests to make their mark.Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we&#x27;d see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.

I don&#x27;t see your point re: housing. The current situation is where the equilibrium has naturally ended up. SF is much more expensive than small cities, but people still get enough value from it (or think that they do) to pay the higher cost and live there. If some of the people on the margin moved to a cheaper second-choice place, they&#x27;d be slightly worse off, otherwise they would have already done that. So telling them to move to Louisville doesn&#x27;t make them any better off.However, if more innovative ways of building (and getting approval to do it) could make housing twice as plentiful and half the price, that would make them much better off.Land is expensive in SF, and it is hard to get approval to build new housing. But it&#x27;s not the only problem. Just building can be insanely expensive, like this project where it&#x27;s going to cost almost $900k per unit to build affordable housing [1]. It&#x27;s not clear if some of that is land cost, but it seems to imply that is not the case because it sounds like this is land that is already owned and dedicated to affordable housing.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfexaminer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;supes-question-890k-per-unit-cost-for-sunnydale-hope-sf-rebuild&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfexaminer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;supes-question-890k-per-unit...</a>

&gt; I had a conversation with a dean of a university about offering online courses and the reason they said they would never do it seriously is because that would greatly devalue that people admitted to that school were top tier and thus were top tier on the way out.IMO that&#x27;s pretty short-sighted. This line of reasoning is that the degree is valuable _because_ its exclusive, not because the degree is evidence of particular skills gained.If you simply took the exact same course structure and grading from a Harvard degree and put it online for thousands, the skills gained would be identical.Obviously being admitted to Harvard signals things besides skill. Wealth and connections, for example, though I would argue maintaining those value signals is harmful to society. It&#x27;s unfortunate that this dean values those things over increased access to education.&gt; Is what makes Harvard special that it is doing something uniquely right or that it has the unique ability to draw the best?&#x27;Excellence&#x27; in institutions is self-fulfilling. Harvard is seen as being the best, and therefore students choose to go there because they believe it&#x27;s the best. Since the best students go there, Harvard is indeed the best. At the end of the day it&#x27;s just perception that drives the cycle. Oh also being ludicrously wealthy.

In many cases, I am not sure his solutions address the real problem.Housing is rising in price as more people pile into fewer cities. There is no housing crisis in Spartanburg, Louisville, Lethbridge or even Houston. You can build all the homes you want, but unless they are in Manhattan or San Franciso, a billion new homes won&#x27;t make the condos there cheaper.You can also build all the colleges you want, but the returns on that are starting to narrow. Hundreds of thousands of grads end up unemployed or underemployed. We could make college free, but that wouldn&#x27;t create more jobs that require such a degree. Are a million extra college grads at a mass-production school really going to change anything? Employers don&#x27;t accept Coursera courses as a substitute for a degree and I suspect such a school would be viewed like Coursera. It doesn&#x27;t help that in America and to a lesser extent Canada, people zoom in on the school ranking and reputation. A lot of the value of the university to an individual has nothing to do with what is taught in classes there, but how competitive it was to get into.I had a conversation with a dean of a university about offering online courses and the reason they said they would never do it seriously is because that would greatly devalue that people admitted to that school were top tier and thus were top tier on the way out.Is what makes Harvard special that it is doing something uniquely right or that it has the unique ability to draw the best?

(Here&#x27;s an analysis of the Green New Deal published in Energy Research &amp; Social Science):
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S2214629620301067" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S221462962...</a>

From my perspective a lot of the problem is indeed about _motivation_ and _imagination_, like Marc says.One place where I&#x27;m finally starting to see this kind of desire to build making its way into the public sphere (and not just resonating in tech circles) is with all the growing energy around a Green New Deal (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sunrisemovement.org&#x2F;green-new-deal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sunrisemovement.org&#x2F;green-new-deal</a>).This is the first time in at least a decade that I can remember politicians talking with the same attitude Marc was. The climate crisis is an incredible opportunity to BUILD! And to build like we haven&#x27;t built in generations!I love your desire to find companies working in this space. I am interested to see what responses you get on that front. But I also think a serious way we can help is by shifting the public consciousness towards _belief in our ability to build_, by advocating for things like the GND. So this is how I&#x27;m spending my outside-work time right now: volunteering and organizing to spread the vision of a society that BUILDS, and fighting for political candidates that share that vision. :)

This answer is a shame though. It would be more efficient for a lot of passionate people to join companies with an existing head start instead of starting a bunch of small efforts. More wood behind fewer arrows. A big part of this problem is that our society glorifies entrepreneurship more so than coming together in large cohesive groups to collectively do something big. For example, much of what this article discusses are political problems. Those problems need large political movements and institutions, not startups.

Put more simply:
Quit your job, learn to be an expert in a new field, raise capital, start a company, change the world. Simple.

The parent comment is asking for tractable ways for a person to help improve things. Starting a company is not tractable for almost anyone. If you have kids, are poor, etc, you need some form of income. If you don&#x27;t fit the right mold, you&#x27;re unlikely to get VCs to invest in you.Starting a company is not a feasible option for most people, and the average company fails and ends up causing nothing but harm for all involved (in the form of lost years of their life they could be doing something that didn&#x27;t fail so).Your answer amounts to &quot;you can&#x27;t do anything. It&#x27;s impossible unless you&#x27;re so privileged or already independently wealthy that you can start a company&quot;.Your answer sounds like &quot;Well, Bill Gates made the Bill Gates foundation, just make your own research institution&quot;.

If you&#x27;re actually set on the ideas laid out there, don&#x27;t join a pre-existing company. Find a domain you&#x27;re passionate about advancing, learn what you need to validate your hypothesis on improvement, then do what you need to do to advance it. If you don&#x27;t have any passion about whatever you&#x27;d be doing, there&#x27;s not really any point; the world doesn&#x27;t advance because of people who don&#x27;t care about what they&#x27;re doing. Those people make a whole bunch of money, though.

Also, here&#x27;s an essay I really like written more from a tech&#x2F;software engineer perspective about how to align your career towards building (with an emphasis on building our way out of the climate crisis):
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;ClimateChange" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;ClimateChange</a>I&#x27;ve pivoted my career to working on the Julia programming language, because of its focus on science and engineering (_building things!_) rather than what I used to be doing in the software world (e.g. my past job at google), squeezing out more dollars from advertising.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;julialang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;julialang.org&#x2F;</a>

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.

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 &#x2F; 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 providing a -somewhat- playing level field for inventors and technologists to push forward while Kings and courtier, Parlamentarians and Senators had a very difficult time ‘controlling the markets’. I see the return to a non inflationary reserve currency as the first order problem to be solved.

I&#x27;m in exactly the same boat as you. I want to help build the city of the future, but as a data scientist, I have no idea where to start.This is advice I haven&#x27;t followed myself, but might start following: talk with people who are working on building megastructures--not necessarily in your city--and ask how they got started. There aren&#x27;t any online bootcamps for how to build a monorail, so &quot;tribal knowledge&quot; is probably the only way to go.I&#x27;ll let you know if this methodology works for me!

Ok, assume I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve been running into big regulatory issues too and it one point it sounded like their plans were completely on hold. The YC New Cities idea sounded intriguing, but as far as I know they never talked about a single thing to come out of that program and it&#x27;s now been shut down.I really haven&#x27;t heard of very many companies at all doing these kinds of things (which is Marc&#x27;s whole point), and the ones that I have been casually following, I check back 5 years later and they don&#x27;t seem to have made any tangible progress. Is there just no way to iterate quickly at all in the physical world?Then of course there would be the challenge of trying to actually get a job at one of these places, I&#x27;m not sure what experience would even be required for this kind of work. Maybe a Civil or Mechanical Engineering degree? As a software developer I&#x27;m not sure how I&#x27;d even get my foot in the door.I guess that would leave trying to start something myself, but there too I really have no clue where to even begin. It doesn&#x27;t seem like you can just start tinkering on construction innovations with minimal upfront investment on your nights and weekends like you can with building an app. On this front someone like Marc Andreesen could offer a ton of advice, I&#x27;d love to see him follow up on this post with more thoughts about this. Or even announce a program to fund new companies focused on this type of fundamental building.Anyway, I&#x27;d be really curious to hear if anyone knows of either 1. more examples of companies working these spaces to look into or 2. resources to even just learn more about the problem space and which areas might be ripe for innovation.

Let&#x27;s build what we need to make remote work fully practical and available to many more people!

Great idea. Decentralizing would be a very effective way to combat disease like this. It would also make society more resilient to other kinds of disasters.

I don&#x27;t know why soaring skyscrapers should be viewed as some sort of penultimate view for the future. With remote work tech, we can rid ourselves of the need for dense urban cores, and we can decentralize our population centers more appropriately.

The solution to that is simple: raise property taxes to the point where underutilized land is no longer a suitable vehicle for wealth preservation.

Re: HousingHousing is about the least desirable form of real-estate development for land owners. That&#x27;s why low cost market housing is built in former cow pastures outside of town and in town market rate housing development tends to be built for upper income and luxury buyers. That&#x27;s why affordable housing has been done with public subsidy. First as public housing. Then as tax credit financing and housing vouchers. Recently as a condition of building market rate housing.Real-estate is where wealth is parked with long time horizons. Pension funds and life insurance reserves and intergenerational personal wealth preservation. When wealth preservation is the goal or the investment horizon is thirty years or more, sitting on under-utilized land waiting for a commercial use on a triple net lease provides higher returns than selling houses. Even better if the land is producing rent off the sunk cost...and there&#x27;s always a market for used car lots. Housing competes with every other use and most uses are much more profitable and stable.Even leaving land vacant is better than converting to housing when the goal is wealth preservation. In wealth preservation, if you sell, you have to find someplace else to put the money. When real-estate is the wealth preservation vehicle, that means finding another parcel of greater value for equal cost. E.g. a more valuable parcel than the valuable one already in hand.

If Aaron Paul&#x27;s character is in the scene, the setting is in Los Angeles.

Nuking Paris and moving the action to Singapore was one of the most blatant &quot;hey asian markets, western culture was yesterday, we want to say hi on behalf of our TV shows&quot; I&#x27;ve seen. HBO has done a bunch of those kinda scenes, Netflix is doing some as well.&gt; When the producers of HBO’s “Westworld” wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn’t film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?I&#x27;ve definitely noticed more and more of this in other shows. It&#x27;s not at all a bad thing, just the opposite: it shows there&#x27;s big money to be made over there.

&quot;When we were trying to think about what the future could look like, we scouted and examined a bunch of areas, and that&#x27;s how we came to Singapore. There&#x27;s nowhere that looks like Singapore; it&#x27;s absolutely beautiful on a purely aesthetic level. And it&#x27;s incredibly different from modernism in other cities, even the lines of it; when you look out of the window (of The Esplanade Theatre), you have these, linear lines, but it&#x27;s cross cut by these curving rows, which on film always looks so beautiful. There&#x27;s a different texture to everything and the bounce from the water off of the glass there. The other thing that’s really interesting is the incorporation of nature.Singapore has done this incredible job of integrating nature into the city. We&#x27;re staying in the Parkroyal on Pickering and there&#x27;s greenery everywhere, just crawling up there. There’s a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.style.yahoo.com&#x2F;interview-westworld-creator-lisa-joy-jonathan-nolan-singapore-filming-location-160114813.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.style.yahoo.com&#x2F;interview-westworld-creator-lisa-...</a>

Westworld spoilerI’d have to watch again to be sure, but I think the scene in Westworld in Singapore is actually in Singapore because Paris was destroyed. There are scenes in futuristic sf also that show Fremont street among others.

Are you claiming that most of the cost in building housing is in labour costs?At least in places with housing shortages, like the Bay Area and NYC, it seems to me that the high costs comes from the government slowing down (or refusing to allow) new housing construction.I think a similar problem is evident in healthcare, with certificate of need laws and AMA&#x27;s restrictions on number of doctors.

&gt; Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factoriesYes, and most of these were also built by slaves or people in slave-like conditions. It&#x27;s incredibly easy to build things when you have nearly free labor.

We don&#x27;t build TV&#x27;s and computers. Other countries do.We do build hospitals&#x2F;housing&#x2F;schools. Maybe if we imported slave labor like say, Dubai, it&#x27;d be cheaper to build things.

&gt;What if the key to making necessities like housing and education more affordable was to get the federal government out of the business of guaranteeing loans and backstopping reckless investors?I would like my representatives to have a say in what is a reckless investors or not.And I&#x27;m not really interested in schooling or health becoming more profitable as a vessel for investment in free market.I would rather have decent, cheap public education for my kids and something else than whatever we&#x27;re having for health. That the goal.Unfortunalty, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a great fit for a friction-less market. We&#x27;re not selling financial instrument, we&#x27;re trying to give young citizen everywhere a decent education, and have access to health.

Housing, schools, and hospitals also have ongoing costs and costs which don&#x27;t have meaningful economies of scale. A nurse can only watch so many patients. A teacher can only tend to so many kids.

Compare, as another example, the price curve for LASIK laser eye surgery which is purchased out of pocket, to the price curve for every surgical procedure reimbursed by insurance.

Schools and hospitals also suffer from Baumol&#x27;s cost disease.  As the production of computers, TVs, food, clothing, and other items gets more efficient, the relative cost of industries with low productivity growth skyrockets.  Also including symphonies, theater companies, etc., and this leads to them becoming unaffordable in the presence of substitute goods, like movie tickets and recorded music.

&gt; ... The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.What if building in itself isn&#x27;t the answer to increasing affordability and ensuring supply of things that matter? What if incentives are the key?Things the author says drop rapidly in price:- computers- TVsThings the author says skyrocket in price:- housing- schools- hospitalsThe former group includes small-ticket items that are often bought with &quot;cash.&quot; These are also items with an inherently low regulatory burden.The latter group includes big-ticket items bought on credit, or paid for by someone else (health insurer). Often, there&#x27;s a government backstop involved. And these industries have a very heavy regulatory burden.What if the key to making necessities like housing and education more affordable was to get the federal government out of the business of guaranteeing loans and backstopping reckless investors?

&gt; The problem is desire. We need to want these things.... and you can&#x27;t really force that. americans seem unmotivated to want the same things. cynicism drives people to politicization and polarization of everything, including chemical compounds. On the one side, half the people believe that through politics they can force the other half to do their work for them. The other side realizes that and becomes increasingly cynical, hiding their money away from them. there is no sense of common purpose despite the proclamations. maybe the issue is trustthis essay is nice and arousing and all, and hard to disagree with it, but somehow i think people will forget about it

Holding land isn&#x27;t unproductive. Existing is a pre-requisite to working for an income. Having shelter is a pre-requisite to existing. Shelter is extremely productive in fact and is necessary. That&#x27;s like pretending that the factory roof isn&#x27;t productive because all it does is provide shelter from the elements, so it&#x27;s unnecessary. It can make a lot of sense to be a land owner, which is why people seek it out so strongly. Being able to say: this is mine, this is not yours, this is not the tribe&#x27;s land, this is where I shall raise my family for the next 20 years, this is my private space to do as I please; that&#x27;s extremely enticing (for most non-robots).Eating food at home is productive. Raising children under a safe roof is productive. Learning in the comfort of your home is productive. Resting is productive. A good night&#x27;s sleep is productive. And so on.Further, factories exist on directly productive land. It often makes sense to own that land for all sorts of good reasons.There&#x27;s a fair argument for land tax adjustments, however it should go with increased income taxes on the top 1&#x2F;3 regardless. Although it has to be very technical. Taxing people that own $10m houses in SF at the same elevated rate as a homeowner in a poor rural region would be economic assassination.Of course this all needs to go hand-in-hand with demolishing our healthcare system and remaking it into a system with per capita costs 50% lower than they are today (which gets us close to the rest of the developed world). Doing that is how we finally get universal coverage, until then all properly universal systems will remain blindingly expensive. The economic benefit to the new system having a lower cost, universal healthcare system would be very far reaching.

Minor nit:&gt; Tax individual income at a higher rate.We should instead move the tax burden to land, since holding land is completely unproductive, and as opposed to working for an income, which is productive.

That would be true for the absolute lowest value labor. Only about 1% of the labor force earned the minimum wage in 2019. Maybe that would increase to 3-5% under this scenario, with higher real wage compensation covering more people.The competition for labor - which exists at all times in some form - will continue to force businesses beyond the floor of the income tax credit line for the extreme majority of labor. A person that now earns the minimum $12&#x2F;hr via the tax credit system, a business can offer them $12 + their own $3 cost ($15&#x2F;hr total to the employee), and steal them away for relatively inexpensively versus the old minimum wage costs. The business might have been paying a $10&#x2F;hr min wage in their state previously, for example; so paying $3&#x2F;hr for that labor is still a net savings. You could gradually eliminate the tax credit as you step up the income scale (maybe every combined dollar above $12&#x2F;hr the person earns, one dollar in the credit vanishes; so someone earning $20&#x2F;hr total, that employee loses $8&#x2F;hr of the credit, so $16&#x2F;hr of that has to come from the business; or half that rate of vanishing; you get the general idea). It&#x27;s entirely plausibly this would massively boost income levels for the bottom half of workers, as businesses would offer over the $12&#x2F;hr line to lure the best lower skill workers (it would still be net cheaper to the business than the old system, which is why they&#x27;d do it). It would also make a lot of small businesses solidly profitable and encourage higher rates of business formation again (most mom &amp; pop businesses operate at very thin margins; would have to implement some new fraud checking and minimum revenue requirements perhaps; have to avoid various fraudulent employment schemes). Also, the credit should apply to lower income waiters also, they can keep tips on top of that (if they yield enough combined income, it would be taxed; a person earning the minimum $12&#x2F;hr pays zero income taxes, over that we&#x27;d have to decide where income taxes begin and how they climb).We would continue to tax normal corporate income outside of manufacturing (and we could begin by just experimenting by dropping manufacturing taxation to half the normal rate, test the outcomes it generates). The increased personal income taxation pays for the new redistribution model. We would want to reform our personal income tax system further to optimize, maximize it (including treating all income equally for tax purposes).We could entirely exclude high wage employees from the income tax credit system, so those employees are not subsidized in this (if your engineers are making $125,000 they don&#x27;t need the $12&#x2F;hr income tax credit underneath them).We simultaneously could alter some welfare benefit programs that are no longer as necessary as a larger share of the population is working and earning higher wages (you rebalance the system in other words).

How would that minimum wage replacement work?  Wouldn&#x27;t every minimum wage employer just switch to paying $1&#x2F;hr or whatever, and let this system pay the rest?  That would mean such companies couldn&#x27;t give their worst a $1&#x2F;hr raise without paying $12&#x2F;hr more.   I seem to be missing something.

&gt; Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country?Because we have few of the industrial titans which are required to spearhead that and round up (or possess) the necessary capital. This sort of outcome does not magically self-assemble, it starts with one person that takes action. You actually need hyper competent, hard charging, ambitious, skilled people of all sorts to go after the extreme challenges represented by such a huge re-industrialization. These people and their talents no longer exist in such high numbers among the population as they did prior to the gutting of the US industrial age. They are now rare and the capital that desires to fund them is equally rare.If you want to produce them, you need to completely alter the incentive structures we arrange our economy around.We should have 0% corporate tax rates for all domestic manufacturing concerns, to get started. Tax individual income at a higher rate.Implement a robust system of income tax credits and abandon the minimum wage as it exists today. This is not my idea of course, Warren Buffett is probably its loudest supporter and he is absolutely right. Set the income tax credit system such that it guarantees a higher minimum wage of at least $12. By removing the strict front-facing minimum wage we have today (which blocks labor from the market), all businesses would immediately aggressively seek to hire anyone and everyone they can get their hands on. The workers would be guaranteed a minimum wage by the redistribution income tax credit system and there would be no labor-value blocker (aka the minimum wage) keeping businesses from hiring people.If a state has a $12 minimum wage, and your labor is only worth $9, you&#x27;re screwed. This solves that.It&#x27;s about absorbing max lower skill labor (where the unemployment problems tend to be over time) into the workforce. You make labor artificially cheaper, while simultaneously paying that labor a fair wage: we subsidize the outcome we want. They produce, they earn a good wage, they build savings and can start to become asset owners. They also start learning new skills (and later might start production of their own based on the accumulating of experience at making goods; an important catalyst in re-industrialization). The combination would unleash epic common-goods manufacturing output the likes of which the US hasn&#x27;t seen in half a century.It would make it economical to manufacture low-margin, lower value goods in the US again. It becomes a de facto subsidization for employment and manufacturing.This would instantly change the US economy for the better.

It’s Time to Build