While I'm pro nuclear power, at what point do we say that nuclear isn't the way to go? The cost of solar panels and batteries are declining every year, and you don't have to deal with the terrible stigma that nuclear power has. Sure, new reactors are "zero emission", but will people actually want them to be built?
Nuclear provides guaranteed minimum power production, which is what you actually want. You also want a more diversified system than just eg solar and wind.
It's not acceptable to depend on renewables like solar and wind to try to fill that minimum guaranteed role. They are low on the guaranteed scale, whereas nuclear is high on the guaranteed scale. Grid scale batteries do not fill that role either, not under any scenario short of magic batteries that self-fill perpetually.
Paying the added cost for nuclear at 20-30% of total national energy production, is a reasonable price to pay for higher diversification and higher guaranteed minimum energy production.
We should also boost the grid and build nuclear in low-risk weather locations and distribute from there to everywhere else. Climate change is going to hammer the coasts, right? Perhaps a super hurricane knocks out solar and wind across multiple states around Florida. We bring the lines back up and immediately have nuclear power flowing in from weather-safe foreign states to re-start everything with (those out of state nuclear plants are already handling 20-30% of Florida's power in this concept; if rebalanced properly, they could handle 50-60%+ of all the now-lower power demands in the early re-start phase after such an emergency).
You can get high-concentration of power output capability in a weather-safe area with nuclear, in this model, which solar and wind can't even remotely come close to competing with.
The Sun is always shining somewhere on Earth. We have the luxury of a nuclear furnace about ~92 million miles away and not going anywhere. Build a Ultra-High-Voltage World Electric Grid as Bucky Fuller described 40+ years ago and we'll make better use of it as a continuous power source.
Another person who dismisses or is unaware of the existence of grid scale batteries.
Nuclear could help but it is so centralized it really puts all control in the hands of big corporate and government types, with cost overruns and bankruptcies funded by ratepayers and taxpayers. “Too cheap to meter” was a lie yet the same lie continues to be recycled when talking about the next promised generation. No thank you. I’ll take local control, local and individual ownership, and individual freedom and self determination thank you very much.
I love nuclear power, I used to be a 'nuke' in the Navy, but it's not feasible at today's tech level. There's too great a risk of nuclear accident right now, even if it's very uncommon (risk = severity x probability, if severity is 10/10 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'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't support Uber or Google today, but their ideas were revolutionary). Once that 'revolutionary' new nuclear tech comes, if it does, then I'll back it. Today's reactor designs aren'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.
They already have lots of passively safe designs, but I don'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.
Yea, that's what I'm saying, there's no financially viable solutions, and someday if we can make one, or if we stop caring about the cost for some reason, then it'll happen. Right now, the problem is that the "safe" designs aren't tested well and they're generally not commercially viable due to cost.
It's great to have you around. I worked for CIA Blackwater etc in the old days, non nuclear though, but, I accept your fucking shit man. I know how this shit goes. Para etc yeah I'm legit dude. Fuck nuclear man. Especially now. Surf safely man. Watch out for the fucking napalm.
What do you mean by severity being 10/10? The issues we had in recent times were fairly mild. As long as they'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/gas/solar/wind, and put them in one day at the same rate as we had reactor failures - that would seem even more "not feasible".
You still don't understand that it's not financially feasible, for many reasons. I love nuclear, I fucking operated nuclear plants, but until we have passively safe designs that are tested and proven, it's not an option. You're totally correct on the facts, but no one is willing to fund it, that's the fact that killed nuclear.
The problem is that there's tons of deaths from accidents that we can't quantify due to cancer or the like. If we expanded nuclear, who's to say the deaths from mining nuclear materials, cancer, etc wouldn't outstrip those of wind, solar, etc.? Severity and probability are hard to quantify, and with the financial argument, I'm kinda saying that it doesn't matter anyways because no one will fund one of the most expensive forms of energy that has high enough risk profiles that you cannot even insure it in many places.
"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?"
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'll love.
We run on proprietary printers built in house with advanced features like support-less 5-axis FDM, multi-material/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's wrecking every other 3D printing hub right now, and subsidizes 100-1000x more in-house hardware "testing" than any regular OEM can afford to do, which lets you build great new machine tools at lightning speed.
It is interesting to see Marc Andreessen in 2020 to quote Mencius Moldbug from 2013 almost word to word.
To quote Mencius directly -- " 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?", which is basically tl;dr of Marc's article.
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!
> 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'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.
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.
One problem with this idea is that the coronavirus just isn't that severe. If the mystery treatment has a 5% rate of severe complications, then the cure would be worse than the disease. Even 1% might be too much: consider that not everybody will contract the coronavirus, and the people most at risk from it (elderly or with comorbidities) are also likely to be at the highest risk of complications from some novel drug. A 5% risk of serious complications isn't unusually high: thalidomide was around 50% for pregnant women.
If the coronavirus death rate was comparable with the Spanish flu - around 10% instead of 1%, and severe in young healthy people - we'd be a lot more justified in rushing through untested treatments.
If we have a rapid, flexible platform and a great enough need, those 3 months could be enough. But the solution isn'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/or see a moores law type spike in quantum computation, and/or see breakthroughs in ai, and/or some other set of breakthroughs I cant even imagine right now, we can make the current model obsolete. So it'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.
Who skipped animal studies? J&Js vaccine, one of the most promising ones, went through preclinical trials before human trials started[0]. So did novovax[1]. Even moderna, who was particularly light on animal testing, worked with the naiad to run a trial in lab mice[2]. The industry has been working on covid vaccines since january[0], there has been less time than usual, sure, but nothing to the best of my knowledge has gone into humans without preclinical work.
How many people do you think questioned the Queen of Spain's logic in paying for Columbus to go yatching?
But it lead to the "discovery" 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'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 "web browser"?
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'm probably wrong) is the computer revolution, which was a grass-roots development.
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't see many that address the big challenges he talks about.
The entire laundry list can'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'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.
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.
I’m talking in context of preparedness for a pandemic, rather than healthcare BAU.
This is the mood of the article which begins:
> Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
If you want to be prepared for a pandemic you need stuff built with orders from the government.
Of course startups can help with innovation and may create things that make it easier to be prepared such as a low cost ventilator, but government needs to take care of preparing whatever the tech happens to be.
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.
"Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?"
I am doing what he asked at the bottom of the essay. :)
On a more serious note, I don't disagree with the essay. I don't view his point as wrong. It just applies a lot more relevantly to him than most other people who might read it.
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't what it should be, they can start by looking in the mirror.
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.
There seems to be a lot more cronyism in governments that don't do a lot of useful things. I'm sure there's favoritism in South Korea but at the same time their industrial policy is first rate.
> New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns.
Yeah, NY also put out a "desperate call" for "40000 ventilators" in spite of needing only 6000. So that's really not a good indicator of anything.
Not to disagree with the core premise of the article, of course. We must be able to manufacture all critical equipment and supplies on US soil, with significant surge capacity.
> In 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't been laid off yet.
And small businesses so far got $350B, with more blocked by austere scholars of pork in Congress.
> We should have gleaming skyscrapers
The utter devastation high density living is causing in NY would suggest otherwise. We need to spread the fuck out.
You might be right, but your tone is quite unpleasant and I think you give people an easy out to ignore you.
> not a good indicator of anything
One 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 "boy who cried wolf" grounds, we can go ahead and dismiss the rest of your comment, since you also got something badly wrong and are therefore "not a good indicator". (But of course you and we and the world don't REALLY dismiss people in the way you'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!
> 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'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'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.
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'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 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.
So to be clear, you believe: Cuomo deliberately ignored credible data from his people suggesting that the state would not need 30,000 - 40,000 ventilators in order to attempt to do political damage to Trump?
> In the meanwhile I'm glad Trump ignored the political damage Cuomo was inflicting
A notable feature of Trump's response to the crisis has been his inability to ignore criticism from others. One could argue that the silly video he aired last week was a byproduct of his total inability to ignore political damage from folks like Cuomo!
> Doing so would be utterly disastrous to other hotspots
I agree, in hindsight. But it would also have been far fewer than New York said it needed. Cuomo believed he needed 30,000. The national stockpile is around 9,000.
From The Guardian on 2nd April: "[New York state] has 2,200 [ventilators] in its stockpile and Cuomo said 350 people severely afflicted by the virus are coming into hospitals every night needing such breathing assistance."
Ummm. Yeah? Politics is certainly not be the main reason why he did it, but are you going to argue that it did not factor into Cuomo's initial, confrontational tone? He (and Newsom) seems to be pretty pleased with the federal government now. Trump aired a clip of Cuomo today during his presser which you will never in a million years see on CNN. You should watch it. They at first botched it in the live stream, but then played it again a little later. Had I not told you about it, you wouldn't even know it exists. Think about that for a second before you read further.
> One could argue that the silly video he aired last week
You people still don't see that he does this on purpose. He's not speaking to you, anything-but-Trump voter. He speaks to his base, and swing voters, and he successfully penetrates the confinement the mainstream press tries (unsuccessfully) to put him into. He really has no other choice.
Look, I'm not a fan of his public speaking skills, and I wish he tweeted less, but I can see that it works 100% of the time. Whether you like it or not, this is why he won, and this is why he's going to win again. You can't deny that whatever it is he's doing is effective, even if you don't understand it.
Shit, the dude maneuvered the DNC into nominating a gaffe-master with dementia and a closet full of extremely damaging skeletons before the real race even starts, while dealing with impeachment (successfully) and then with a country-wide disaster (also, so far, successfully - see the projected vs actual casualty counts).
I agree with WSJ, Trump is rewriting the book on responding to country-wide disasters. This is the biggest disaster the country has ever faced, by any reasonable measure. Instead of responding with centralization and authoritarianism (like pretty much all previous presidents), Trump responds with decentralization and constitutionalism. Even DPA is not used willy-nilly. This is what an experienced manager does: he delegates. It wouldn't even occur to a lawyer to do this. We'd get Stalin-style "prodrazvyorstka" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka) bullshit with that. It'd all be on manual control, and fucked up beyond any recognition because manual control does not work at this scale.
> inability to ignore political damage from folks like Cuomo
There's punching back (which Trump will do 100% of the time) and being guided by political pressure. Those things are different. Watch what he does, not what he says.
I'm sorry to see you're being downvoted. I think (hope!) it's an unhappy byproduct of your tone not your opinion.
> Yeah? Politics is certainly not be the main reason why he did it, but are you going to argue that it did not factor into Cuomo's initial, confrontational tone?
Cuomo's original criticism of the government came on March 8th, when he said "they've been slow and they continue to be slow". After this, on March 16th, Trump singled him out as a governor who "needs to do more". On March 25th, Trump said Cuomo was "happy with the job we're doing", which prompted Cuomo to reply that he was not happy.
> Trump aired a clip of Cuomo today during his presser which you will never in a million years see on CNN. You should watch it. They at first botched it in the live stream, but then played it again a little later. Had I not told you about it, you wouldn't even know it exists. Think about that for a second before you read further.
I watch his entire press conference every day, and you're right that they did include a clip of Cuomo saying that he was happy with how the response had gone. If I recall (apols if wrong - a lot of these clips are blurring into one!) the same clip outlined the basis for his requesting 30,000 vents. Something he has done elsewhere, too: ""I hope the President's right. I'll go better than what the President said -- I hope I don't need any ventilators. But I can't govern that way -- I govern on the data and on the numbers and on the science," he said, adding that if "you count the numbers and the trajectory, we're looking at 40,000 possible ventilators, 140,000 possible hospital beds -- those are the numbers."
And it doesn't really have anything to do with whether Cuomo was right to go public with the ventilator need.
> You people still don't see that he does this on purpose. He's not speaking to you, anything-but-Trump voter.
I see what he's doing. Every time Trump appears like a moron to me I know that he's engendering support and approval from his constituents. I call that video silly because it was an extremely clear manipulation of events. You might argue (and you might be right) that his misrepresentation of his actions as being perfect is a necessary correction to the media's presentation of his every action as moronic. But you cannot escape that the President was for several weeks comparing COVID-19 to the flu (he's now done a 180 on this) and pushing a dangerous drug cocktail ("What have you got to lose?") which resulted in at least one person dying.
The damage to his credibility is done by his attempt to whitewash his response. The man clearly isn't prone to intense self-reflection, but he has missed a spectacular opportunity to win over moderates by saying, "You know what? I got these things totally wrong." Nobody expects him to be perfect, and doing so would show everyone a contemplative side of himself. (By most accounts he has the capacity to change his mind when wrong privately, and he listens to expert advice.)
> He speaks to his base, and swing voters, and he successfully penetrates the confinement the mainstream press tries (unsuccessfully) to put him into. He really has no other choice.
The way I see this, and I might have bias here, is that his language is so vague and imprecise that he leaves himself room for misinterpretation at every step. The counterpoints he has presented -- what I think you're referring to as the confinements the MSM puts on him -- are not "you said X, but the truth was Y" disproof by counterexample. They are "you guys are nasty and I'm doing a very good job and here are videos of people saying I am doing a good job".
If he was an employee of yours or mine, you'd say that there is an optics issue. He is, in his opinion, maligned and misunderstood and misperceived so frequently that it becomes inc...
The reason why it’s like this so so that people like Mr Andreesen can make more money. If he and his fellow billionaires would like to do something about that and change how our country works, great.
But let’s not do the “both sides”, “it needs to come from everywhere” stuff. Look at a chart of who’s been making off with all the money for the last, let’s say, decade. Let it come from there.
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.
As I've gotten older I've realised that sometimes us trying to "build our way out of things" is often just "digging the hole deeper". Technology doesn't have all the answers unfortunately; I used to think so but as I've seen more I realise I was wrong. Someone's progress is someone else'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'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's benefit.
As an example I look at China and think - they build a lot of stuff but I wouldn'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 "progress" coming close to my door. Maybe I'm just getting cynical.
Right, this is why I'm bullish on additive manufacturing (or 3d printing). It'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's something I feel will thrive in the coming decades as on-shoring becomes more common.
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!
I don’t mean to critize american healthcare, it’s one of the best in the world. Unfortunately not accessible for the part of society that is uninsured and undocumented.
Marc and his family have donated so much for emergency medicine, the last resort for the uninsured, which is awesome.
What makes me sad is to see how people can end up in an existential crisis, both for their health and financially, because the system is failing them.
American healthcare should absolutely be criticized, I just meant that it’s too early to say, as Joe Biden did two months ago, that a socialized healthcare wouldn’t have helped COVID because Italy has socialized healthcare. We haven’t seen the full destruction of COVID to make an valid comparison.
But it’s just a case of how bad: really bad, or really really bad. When a basketball team can get tests, but ordinary citizens can’t, that is not a healthcare system, it’s a wealthcare system.
The republican stronghold of Texas has one of the lowest covid deaths per capita in the United States, better than even California (which is doing relatively well). Deaths per capita at 16/million is lower than almost anywhere in Western Europe.
It's not obvious to me at all you can make a political judgement from covid19.
California was hit early but acted very quickly and effectively. They're also pretty wealthy so they could get equipment and supplies before there was really a rush.
Texas and Virginia had the benefit of getting hit when most people were taking this seriously (i.e. they didn't want to become NYC). You also have to consider public transportation use which is way higher in places like Seattle and Chicago than it is in Dallas, Houston, etc.
So again it's mostly about exposure: density, travelers, being in contact with travelers, being in contact with people who've been in contact with travelers, etc. How quickly shelter in place was ordered (getting a testing system set up would also have worked but you have to act even faster and spend upfront money, which of course we were never going to do) has a direct effect in exposure. And then it's all about how well you get supplies to treat the infected.
So, if we were to to scale Texas' to Germany's "3x population", Germany could still handle that in a week. The implication stands.
> 2. Maybe they haven't broken 200k tests because there isn't an obvious population to test when you've had an order of magnitude fewer covid deaths?
No, it's that they're willing to die for Whataburger. There's nothing else that would tangibly explain a complete refusal by the 9th largest economy in the world to attempt to protect itself.
I don't know, it looks like Singapore has missed a step somewhere. Adjusted for population and looking at the curves logarithmically, they're not doing so well.
The majority of the new cases in Singapore are in foreign labourer dormitories, so maybe the missed step was not putting enough effort into improving conditions in those dormitories? They put a lot of effort into contact tracing and the like, but that doesn't help much when you have a bunch of people who live together in (presumably) crowded quarters, who are unable to isolate themselves.
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 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'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't generalize quite so intensely and that doesn't use such an ineffective tone, this 'essay' (I don't really think it counts as one; it's more what you'd expect to hear in a speech) might have actually had legs.
It's partly because this is fantasy land stuff, it'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's sort of a Jonathan Swift-style critique of American plutocracy in the early millennium. Very clever!
I don'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.
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?
You realize he’s one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet as we see it today right?
This is a drastic over-generalization, and a very controversial one at that. He played a big role in popularizing the Web, which many people believe to be the worst of available options at the time of creation. He also arguably started the trend of "Make the WWW browser do as much as possible."
I personally don't share most of these views, but let's not go overboard here.
> You realize he’s one of the main players in your enjoyment of the internet as we see it today right?
I know who he is.
> 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?
If he is on the bench and is talking about how performance is desperately needed, yes. Michael Jordan is old. He can't play as well anymore. Marc Andreessen is in the best position to be a builder in his life.
> So a player moves to becoming a coach or some support character after decades in the game and that’s your great comment?
Players generally stop playing once they for some reason can't (injury, age, etc) or begin to have other priorities and don't view the effort of playing as worth it.
I don't see a reason that he can't, so this is of lesser significance to him than the essay alone would indicate.
If you stand in a room full of people and say "the sky is blue", you'll get a weird look at most.
If you say instead "Most of you will think it's controversial and criticise me, but I think the sky is blue - you're free to voice your opinion though", you'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 don't think he'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.
Yet, this is the first one which crossed 300 votes, as far as I can tell (only checked 8 pages back or so) and is currently the highest scoring one. It may be that it's the most interesting one too. But adding popularity didn't hurt.
Let'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.
Communism is stateless and therefore was never applied. Capitalism isn't working, we just have convinced ourselves that the suffering of millions under this system is not a sign that it's not working.
I broadly agree with him, but I do think his opinions on the 'right' are more due to media portrayals of right wingers rather than the actual opinions of those 'on the right'. He says.
> 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.
>
> 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'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.
> 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.
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?
So you want more regulation made in an attempt to prevent regulatory loopholes from enabling private players to protect their market position using government regulation? Without any explanation, this position seems absolutely incoherent.
Umm, no? I want there to be regulation in place to prevent monopolistic / anti-trust behavior.
Many "right-wingers" I have talked to want to dismantle many of the regulations that have been put in place for expressly that purpose and actually do pretty well in that regard.
I don't generally want "more regulation". I want the right regulation.
My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate.
Most voters think that some level of regulation is beneficial and support it. Politicians who advocate for the complete removal of regulations don't usually do well in the polls, but this is a widely held belief in right-wing thought. The market will do all the regulating necessary. This has quite obviously been proven incorrect over the years. Nevertheless, the idea persists.
The next most effective way to have no regulations is to keep the appearance of regulations and have the enforcers be completely ineffectual, thus regulatory capture.
So, you end up with the externally perverse-looking, but internally consistent situation where the right will support regulators' existence and even promote their people into those institutions.
Thank you for the decent explanation. You are certainly correct in your assesment. However, I was commenting on Andreesen's caricature of voters 'on the right'. While true that most voters support regulation, right-leaning voters are more likely not to support much at all, so they are entirely self consistent. When restricting yourself to only one 'side', then it's quite misleading to claim that right-leaning voters are siding with the kinds of people who enable regulatory capture.
Your explanation explains why regulatory capture may arise out of an interplay between right-leaning politicians and their constituents. Regulatory capture in your view arises when right-leaning politicians succumb to voters (not necessarily right-leaning ones) desire for regulation. However, this is an emergent phenomenon, not a tenet of right-leaning thought.
This essay smacks of living in a right-wing, top 1%, American bubble. I know the writer is in America, but the claim is that this is a "western" issue.
No, it isn't.
> You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities.
Not in many cities in Europe. Take look at their urban development and housing policies.
> You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year
Again, Europe. Not rocket science here guys.
> You see it in transportation.
Again, Europe, but also Japan. This isn't hard.
> Show that new models of public sector healthcare can be inexpensive and effective
Look at every other industrialized nation.
America seems to have a not-invented-here syndrome. There's a fundamental inability to look elsewhere and adopt foreign ideas with some humility.
And that syndrome is MUCH stronger on the right than the left side of the political spectrum.
> Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?
Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution.
Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?
Harvard is a private institution that is widely funded by government-backed loans.
They are also a "non-profit" and so don't pay property taxes even though they have a ludicrously-sized endowment fund which certainly accrues a lot of "profit".
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.
Andreessen's point might not be that the government should force them to do anything necessarily, but that no one even expects them to do anything. They have 40 billion dollars in the bank. No one expects them to do anything with it. The government, donors, anyone in Harvard, the proverbial man on the street, none has an expectation that they should try to do anything greater than whatever they're doing now.
The "nobody expects anything from Harvard" statement might be a bit too strong. I've seen people say that Harvard has a responsibility to do more social good with it's massive endowment. Here's one example [1]:
> Endowments over $1 billion should be taxed if the university doesn’t grow freshman seats at 1.5x the rate of population growth. Harvard, MIT, and Yale have combined endowments (approximately $85 billion) greater than the GDP of many Latin American nations.
So maybe the issue isn't with expectations, but with incentives: to effect change in these old hierarchical systems, you need elitists to be anti-elitist; to make decisions against one's interests for the betterment of others.
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.
> 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.
If by "normal private institutions" you mean companies, sure, that'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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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'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?
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 "people we don't know", investment and payments are capitalism's way of helping them out.
In this context, it sounds like he'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.
At this point in the essay, Andreessen is wondering aloud why more building hasn'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't happened is capitalism.
Andreessen thinks capitalism can't be the reason for us not building because the fields he mentions are places where it's profitable ("highly lucrative") for businesses to operate. Replacing capitalism with another system (say communism) wouldn't solve our inability to build, in Andreessen's view.
You'd need to argue that they did it faster because of communism. In fact, China starting growing when opening up to markets. Oh and tens millions dead each. And the pollution & resource use is worse too. See https://www.amazon.com/More-Less-Surprising-Learned-Resource...
No, that would be moving the goalposts. The GP post claimed that communist societies "produced less" (I made no claim about "polluted more," which the GP post also stated). I gave 2 examples showing very large countries that went from zero to world industrial power in 50 years. China is very near the top in world GDP right now. The USSR put both the first human and the first artificial satellite into space in that timeframe. Show me a capitalist country that's accomplished so much so fast.
The reason you are talking about growth over a 50 year span is because your basic capitalistic countries like the USA didn't get to play catch-up, because they were always riding the front edge of technological advancement.
Since the PRC's timespan was post-WWII, it's fair to compare them to the Asian tigers and Japan. It's easy to see which did better. Edit: Same goes if we're talking about "building more" rather than doing better.
I don'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're in this mess - we're valuing short-term gains over long-term/far-fetched/society-changing results - and a16z is part of that system. Sure, he'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's time to build. I would say it's time to change our system of motivation. Money does not, and will not ever, solve these problems BEFORE they become problems.
> 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't "what to build", it'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's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.
One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/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'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.
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).
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
I don't know about California but the same kinda shit happened in France.
In 2007 our health minister had a bad time because she orderer massive amount of tests, masks, and hydro-alcoolic solutions. It was during SRAS, and at the time for 'nothing'.
All those item were needed 3 weeks ago, but the stock were never fully replenish since. Most of those things are perishable.
FWIW CA's tax system is pro-cyclical, because they do tax the richest 1%'s more, but the result is that 1%'s don't make any capital gains in recession years so state tax revenues get obliterated during recessions.
What people? The government (of the people by the people for the people) already receives all of the tax revenue from successful companies. I don’t see a reason to double dip here.
The federal government continued to spend trillions of dollars a year during this period of austerity you're referring to. Any liquidation of emergency stocks was not motivated by financial need.
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?
Aren'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's, you would have looked at this and said hey, this government knows what it'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's is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we're seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response.
So I'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.
You might be right, I honestly don't know. But if this is the case, maybe first you need to reform the government (in what exact way? and how the reform should be done, politically?) and after first task is accomplished you can feed it with some trillions of dollars?
Otherwise, "tax the living hell out of capital" will just cause some more big BOOM sounds somewhere in middle east, and deplete private capital from making more investments at the same time.
How about "tax the living hell out of capital" on a spending-neutral basis? Pay off the debt. Stimulate local economies. Increase the EITC ceiling. Hell, write a simple UBI statute.
There are lots of easy (and easily verifiable) ways to spend government money on things people value. That you think there aren't is sort of the triumph of modern conservatism in a nutshell.
Here'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.
I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight.
1. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving.
2. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure out in 2020, are the pieces of cloth on my face help to fight the virus or not? Seems it's still up for discussion.
3. Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff.
So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"? I still not getting it.
Science is incremental, often is done with out clear end products, and value can only really be measured much later typically in terms of wide spread effect. Like the internet existed decades before everyone used the internet. And only because tax dollars supported it.
Thus if you want more output, they only true solution is to fund much more science than is funded today.
If some machine takes your money and produces 98% war and 2% science, maybe - just maybe - the only true solution to fund more science is not to put more money into said machine, but change configuration first.
> Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff
That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.
Where did the foundational ingredients for each of those things come from? Computers, networks, video compression, touchscreens, materials, ... heck, even pagerank, and a large fraction of the breakthroughs in ML/AI (till very recently) have come from academia -- through publicly funded research. Companies are very good at solving the "last mile" to apply technologies towards making products, but don't typically have the vision or the wherewithal to pursue deeper innovations.
Public funds for research is a tiny fraction of the funds that the government spends. There are trillions wasted elsewhere that shows that overall it is terrible with spending money productively.
All the same, the reason you have maps on your smartphone can be traced to GPS satellites and ultimately the space program itself, funded by the government.
Yeah yeah, SpaceX exists now, decades after all the very tough and very expensive initial work.
Nobody is denying that. The point is that the government is not lacking for funding but poorly spending the money it already has.
Imagine how much more we could have now if the space program budget was more than a fraction of a percent. That won't be fixed by just giving more money to the govt.
>So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"?
Sure, because the government is supposed to provide infrastructure, which in turn allows all kinds of other stuff to flourish on top.
All those examples that private capital gave - who built the internet and spent enough money to create the early market for computers?
>I still not getting it.
If the government is supposed to supply education, health, and infrastructure, then it needs to be paid for somehow. Corporations don't care since there is no immediate monetization possible (plus tragedy of the commons aspects) and the free market simply assumes this stuff appears out of the thin air (externalize the cost somewhere else).
There is 0 evidence to suggest that private corporations wouldn’t have figured out the same thing. Or those same people sitting around at MIT wouldn’t have built the same thing without darpa.
It’s not like “communication“ is an industry that is starving for investment or talent.
The government sucks at spending money. Giving to the banks is the least stupid thing to do. The banks at least have some way to propagate it down to large funds and eventually to smaller funds that have some sense in what is a worthwhile investment or not.
You could make a claim about the internet which would be reasonable but that is also a miniscule portion of what the federal government has done with our money so using a teeny tiny example is more of an exception that proves the rule type of thing. The amount we spend on the Federal government and what we get back for it is crazy bad. The problem is NOT the federal government having too little money. It's a huge proportion of GDP, especially compared to when our government was vastly more effective. The problem is that the institutions that make up our government are dramatically incompetent and squander the massive amounts of funding we give it.
> 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.
Definitionally, if private investors made money, so did the taxpayers:
1) The investors are taxpayers who benefitted.
2) The investors returns were taxed and all future economic activity that came from it was taxed.
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 'building' 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's dream to come true it seems like reducing the concentration of wealth and power is the first step.
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't see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value.
Modern govt isn't failing from lack of funds, it's how those funds are spent that is the problem.
Sure, govts. should tax the FAANGs of the world more, but having a "stake" in them means govt. interests suddenly align with corporate interests, meaning regulation for the public good gets sidelined. Net neutrality anyone?
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'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'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's not much of an obstacle.
Edit: More and more, I think we need worker-owned news.
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.
Unraveling the rotten mess that is the US political system from its legalized bribery and rewarding crony capitalism is probably necessary to "build again". And tax the damn rich.
> 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'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 "average" willpower to become obese.
Similarly, it's not as though people have less "desire" than before. There are large structural changes, many of which Andreesen doesn'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't fundamentally disagree with Andreesen's goals, but "try harder" is the sort of platitude that rarely brings about real societal change.
Germany also faced the China shock and Japan. They didn't deindustrialize. Policy choices matter. Leadership matters. And the social factors that lead to devaluing competence and doing things matter.
The US didn'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'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.
Perhaps desire is the wrong word to use. I don'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.
I don't think "ambition" is the correct root cause for "not enough surgical masks", 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't mean to pick on him. It's just an example of how even cranking AMBition up to 20 wouldn't have prevented our current predicament.
True, in the case of "not enough surgical masks", it's not ambition (and I don't mean it in a financial sense either). It's a combination of ambition, imagination, foresight and desire.
If Bill Gates had manufactured or stockpiled basic medical items, someone would be complaining about why he didn't do it sooner, or accusing him of profiteering, or somesuch. It shouldn't be up to one person to be responsible for the foibles of the human race, even if they have outsized resources. They just become a scapegoat for our own lack of responsibility.
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.
My point is that arguing that "try harder" is a solution to the American obesity problem is provably ridiculous, because we've been saying that for decades and it obviously hasn'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's quite clear that here it makes zero sense to just say 'try to resist taking these ubiquitous drugs which give short-term satisfaction' as a policy measure. You'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.
To what end do we put the onus of an individuals poor decisions on “policy measures”. Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games? Should we reinstate prohibition?
It’s dangerous to equate someone choosing to “get fries with that” in the same vein as a chemical addiction to drugs.
> Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games?
Of course, if it was necessary?
80% of US men for example are overweight, obese or extremely obese, all of which have substantial and known effects on health, with about half overweight and the other half (extremely) obese. Further, the trend is worsening. You also have a context in which one of the main reasons for caloric surplus is sugar which is priced in the food industry at 7700 calories per $1, way more expensive than many healthy choices, and is known to be addictive.
Then you have studies which show a gradually implemented sugar tax has beneficial policy outcomes, without destroying industries, saving many lives and reducing healthcare costs by orders of magnitude greater than the revenue losses (for which the food industry could be compensated, if you'd want), and improving the quality of life for many people who'd otherwise be diabetics, unhealthy, unhappy.
Now if you can show me statistics where 80% of your friends, colleagues, parents, teachers etc, have some kind of addiction to a particular niche of games, which have widely studied and known impacts on physical and/or mental health, and where a small gradual tax can be introduced to nudge people to other games, without destroying the gaming industry, and being able to compensate any losers in the market due to this policy change, then yes... absolutely I think we should put a tax on that.
> Should we reinstate prohibition?
No, we should not reinstate prohibition. We have no evidence that works. There's lots of evidence that a sugar tax works. As is there evidence that alcohol taxes work. All to a limit, introduced in balance.
I'll grant you that these are not trivial questions and we should not try to control people's lives. But I also think there are some policy decisions that make complete sense. Alcohol taxes by the way, are already quite widespread. This isn't some new big-government idea. It's science-based, experimental based, balanced policy making, that aims to give people a choice, but also incentivise the right choices. It's not treated as a moral judgement question, I love sugar, I keep consuming it, but it's also a public health problem and I'd really benefit from not being able to get a big coke for $1 with every meal, but rather for $4 every now and then. (That by the way, is a way more extreme example than any policy recommendations, which is typically 15%, e.g. $1 to $1.15, and works)
> Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years?
Um no. The people in the 40s didn'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.
>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.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 446 ms ] threadIt's not acceptable to depend on renewables like solar and wind to try to fill that minimum guaranteed role. They are low on the guaranteed scale, whereas nuclear is high on the guaranteed scale. Grid scale batteries do not fill that role either, not under any scenario short of magic batteries that self-fill perpetually.
Paying the added cost for nuclear at 20-30% of total national energy production, is a reasonable price to pay for higher diversification and higher guaranteed minimum energy production.
We should also boost the grid and build nuclear in low-risk weather locations and distribute from there to everywhere else. Climate change is going to hammer the coasts, right? Perhaps a super hurricane knocks out solar and wind across multiple states around Florida. We bring the lines back up and immediately have nuclear power flowing in from weather-safe foreign states to re-start everything with (those out of state nuclear plants are already handling 20-30% of Florida's power in this concept; if rebalanced properly, they could handle 50-60%+ of all the now-lower power demands in the early re-start phase after such an emergency).
You can get high-concentration of power output capability in a weather-safe area with nuclear, in this model, which solar and wind can't even remotely come close to competing with.
No, you want power production that meets demand, aka peakers.
Baseline power is only interesting when it's cheaper than peak power.
Your point about weather protection is a good one. Which is best handled through over capacity and interconnection IMO.
Nuclear could help but it is so centralized it really puts all control in the hands of big corporate and government types, with cost overruns and bankruptcies funded by ratepayers and taxpayers. “Too cheap to meter” was a lie yet the same lie continues to be recycled when talking about the next promised generation. No thank you. I’ll take local control, local and individual ownership, and individual freedom and self determination thank you very much.
Why maintain the status quo with solar and wind when we can go far beyond it with nuclear?
So, what are you building?
We run on proprietary printers built in house with advanced features like support-less 5-axis FDM, multi-material/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's wrecking every other 3D printing hub right now, and subsidizes 100-1000x more in-house hardware "testing" than any regular OEM can afford to do, which lets you build great new machine tools at lightning speed.
To quote Mencius directly -- " 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?", which is basically tl;dr of Marc's article.
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!
The big problem is that we have to test it long term on a bunch of live human beings to make sure it doesn'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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/coronavirus-va...
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 the coronavirus death rate was comparable with the Spanish flu - around 10% instead of 1%, and severe in young healthy people - we'd be a lot more justified in rushing through untested treatments.
[0]https://www.jnj.com/johnson-johnson-announces-a-lead-vaccine...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
[2]https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/researchers-rush-to-star...
How many people do you think questioned the Queen of Spain's logic in paying for Columbus to go yatching? But it lead to the "discovery" 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'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 "web browser"?
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'm probably wrong) is the computer revolution, which was a grass-roots development.
So, how many of the things you list are you building?
See also: https://a16z.com/portfolio/
I checked the portfolio. I don't see many that address the big challenges he talks about.
Yours is a hopelessly cynical response that I hope you will reflect a little deeper on.
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'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.
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.
This is the mood of the article which begins:
> Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
If you want to be prepared for a pandemic you need stuff built with orders from the government.
Of course startups can help with innovation and may create things that make it easier to be prepared such as a low cost ventilator, but government needs to take care of preparing whatever the tech happens to be.
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.
I am doing what he asked at the bottom of the essay. :)
On a more serious note, I don't disagree with the essay. I don't view his point as wrong. It just applies a lot more relevantly to him than most other people who might read it.
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't what it should be, they can start by looking in the mirror.
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.
Yeah, NY also put out a "desperate call" for "40000 ventilators" in spite of needing only 6000. So that's really not a good indicator of anything.
Not to disagree with the core premise of the article, of course. We must be able to manufacture all critical equipment and supplies on US soil, with significant surge capacity.
> In 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't been laid off yet.
And small businesses so far got $350B, with more blocked by austere scholars of pork in Congress.
> We should have gleaming skyscrapers
The utter devastation high density living is causing in NY would suggest otherwise. We need to spread the fuck out.
> not a good indicator of anything
One 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 "boy who cried wolf" grounds, we can go ahead and dismiss the rest of your comment, since you also got something badly wrong and are therefore "not a good indicator". (But of course you and we and the world don't REALLY dismiss people in the way you'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!
> 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'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'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.
So to be clear, you believe: Cuomo deliberately ignored credible data from his people suggesting that the state would not need 30,000 - 40,000 ventilators in order to attempt to do political damage to Trump?
> In the meanwhile I'm glad Trump ignored the political damage Cuomo was inflicting
A notable feature of Trump's response to the crisis has been his inability to ignore criticism from others. One could argue that the silly video he aired last week was a byproduct of his total inability to ignore political damage from folks like Cuomo!
> Doing so would be utterly disastrous to other hotspots
I agree, in hindsight. But it would also have been far fewer than New York said it needed. Cuomo believed he needed 30,000. The national stockpile is around 9,000.
From The Guardian on 2nd April: "[New York state] has 2,200 [ventilators] in its stockpile and Cuomo said 350 people severely afflicted by the virus are coming into hospitals every night needing such breathing assistance."
Ummm. Yeah? Politics is certainly not be the main reason why he did it, but are you going to argue that it did not factor into Cuomo's initial, confrontational tone? He (and Newsom) seems to be pretty pleased with the federal government now. Trump aired a clip of Cuomo today during his presser which you will never in a million years see on CNN. You should watch it. They at first botched it in the live stream, but then played it again a little later. Had I not told you about it, you wouldn't even know it exists. Think about that for a second before you read further.
> One could argue that the silly video he aired last week
You people still don't see that he does this on purpose. He's not speaking to you, anything-but-Trump voter. He speaks to his base, and swing voters, and he successfully penetrates the confinement the mainstream press tries (unsuccessfully) to put him into. He really has no other choice.
Look, I'm not a fan of his public speaking skills, and I wish he tweeted less, but I can see that it works 100% of the time. Whether you like it or not, this is why he won, and this is why he's going to win again. You can't deny that whatever it is he's doing is effective, even if you don't understand it.
Shit, the dude maneuvered the DNC into nominating a gaffe-master with dementia and a closet full of extremely damaging skeletons before the real race even starts, while dealing with impeachment (successfully) and then with a country-wide disaster (also, so far, successfully - see the projected vs actual casualty counts).
I agree with WSJ, Trump is rewriting the book on responding to country-wide disasters. This is the biggest disaster the country has ever faced, by any reasonable measure. Instead of responding with centralization and authoritarianism (like pretty much all previous presidents), Trump responds with decentralization and constitutionalism. Even DPA is not used willy-nilly. This is what an experienced manager does: he delegates. It wouldn't even occur to a lawyer to do this. We'd get Stalin-style "prodrazvyorstka" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka) bullshit with that. It'd all be on manual control, and fucked up beyond any recognition because manual control does not work at this scale.
> inability to ignore political damage from folks like Cuomo
There's punching back (which Trump will do 100% of the time) and being guided by political pressure. Those things are different. Watch what he does, not what he says.
> Yeah? Politics is certainly not be the main reason why he did it, but are you going to argue that it did not factor into Cuomo's initial, confrontational tone?
Cuomo's original criticism of the government came on March 8th, when he said "they've been slow and they continue to be slow". After this, on March 16th, Trump singled him out as a governor who "needs to do more". On March 25th, Trump said Cuomo was "happy with the job we're doing", which prompted Cuomo to reply that he was not happy.
> Trump aired a clip of Cuomo today during his presser which you will never in a million years see on CNN. You should watch it. They at first botched it in the live stream, but then played it again a little later. Had I not told you about it, you wouldn't even know it exists. Think about that for a second before you read further.
I watch his entire press conference every day, and you're right that they did include a clip of Cuomo saying that he was happy with how the response had gone. If I recall (apols if wrong - a lot of these clips are blurring into one!) the same clip outlined the basis for his requesting 30,000 vents. Something he has done elsewhere, too: ""I hope the President's right. I'll go better than what the President said -- I hope I don't need any ventilators. But I can't govern that way -- I govern on the data and on the numbers and on the science," he said, adding that if "you count the numbers and the trajectory, we're looking at 40,000 possible ventilators, 140,000 possible hospital beds -- those are the numbers."
And it doesn't really have anything to do with whether Cuomo was right to go public with the ventilator need.
> You people still don't see that he does this on purpose. He's not speaking to you, anything-but-Trump voter.
I see what he's doing. Every time Trump appears like a moron to me I know that he's engendering support and approval from his constituents. I call that video silly because it was an extremely clear manipulation of events. You might argue (and you might be right) that his misrepresentation of his actions as being perfect is a necessary correction to the media's presentation of his every action as moronic. But you cannot escape that the President was for several weeks comparing COVID-19 to the flu (he's now done a 180 on this) and pushing a dangerous drug cocktail ("What have you got to lose?") which resulted in at least one person dying.
The damage to his credibility is done by his attempt to whitewash his response. The man clearly isn't prone to intense self-reflection, but he has missed a spectacular opportunity to win over moderates by saying, "You know what? I got these things totally wrong." Nobody expects him to be perfect, and doing so would show everyone a contemplative side of himself. (By most accounts he has the capacity to change his mind when wrong privately, and he listens to expert advice.)
> He speaks to his base, and swing voters, and he successfully penetrates the confinement the mainstream press tries (unsuccessfully) to put him into. He really has no other choice.
The way I see this, and I might have bias here, is that his language is so vague and imprecise that he leaves himself room for misinterpretation at every step. The counterpoints he has presented -- what I think you're referring to as the confinements the MSM puts on him -- are not "you said X, but the truth was Y" disproof by counterexample. They are "you guys are nasty and I'm doing a very good job and here are videos of people saying I am doing a good job".
If he was an employee of yours or mine, you'd say that there is an optics issue. He is, in his opinion, maligned and misunderstood and misperceived so frequently that it becomes inc...
I do agree it's not enough though. Take it up with your representative.
But let’s not do the “both sides”, “it needs to come from everywhere” stuff. Look at a chart of who’s been making off with all the money for the last, let’s say, decade. Let it come from there.
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.
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'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's benefit.
As an example I look at China and think - they build a lot of stuff but I wouldn'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 "progress" coming close to my door. Maybe I'm just getting cynical.
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.
Edit: Otto von Bismarck actually instituted the health insurance system of Germany, certainly not a socialist!
Marc and his family have donated so much for emergency medicine, the last resort for the uninsured, which is awesome.
What makes me sad is to see how people can end up in an existential crisis, both for their health and financially, because the system is failing them.
The RKI (German CDC equivalent) developed and distributed a PCR test in mid January, so they were primed.
It's not obvious to me at all you can make a political judgement from covid19.
What makes Washington, Illinois, and Michigan so bad compared to Texas, Virginia or California?
Texas and Virginia had the benefit of getting hit when most people were taking this seriously (i.e. they didn't want to become NYC). You also have to consider public transportation use which is way higher in places like Seattle and Chicago than it is in Dallas, Houston, etc.
So again it's mostly about exposure: density, travelers, being in contact with travelers, being in contact with people who've been in contact with travelers, etc. How quickly shelter in place was ordered (getting a testing system set up would also have worked but you have to act even faster and spend upfront money, which of course we were never going to do) has a direct effect in exposure. And then it's all about how well you get supplies to treat the infected.
2. Maybe they haven't broken 200k tests because there isn't an obvious population to test when you've had an order of magnitude fewer covid deaths?
Germany is capable of doing 123k tests per day currently (https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...)
So, if we were to to scale Texas' to Germany's "3x population", Germany could still handle that in a week. The implication stands.
> 2. Maybe they haven't broken 200k tests because there isn't an obvious population to test when you've had an order of magnitude fewer covid deaths?
No, it's that they're willing to die for Whataburger. There's nothing else that would tangibly explain a complete refusal by the 9th largest economy in the world to attempt to protect itself.
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 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't generalize quite so intensely and that doesn't use such an ineffective tone, this 'essay' (I don't really think it counts as one; it's more what you'd expect to hear in a speech) might have actually had legs.
It's sort of a Jonathan Swift-style critique of American plutocracy in the early millennium. Very clever!
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.
His objection is that those ideas are not being worked on.
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?
This is a drastic over-generalization, and a very controversial one at that. He played a big role in popularizing the Web, which many people believe to be the worst of available options at the time of creation. He also arguably started the trend of "Make the WWW browser do as much as possible."
I personally don't share most of these views, but let's not go overboard here.
I know who he is.
> 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?
If he is on the bench and is talking about how performance is desperately needed, yes. Michael Jordan is old. He can't play as well anymore. Marc Andreessen is in the best position to be a builder in his life.
> So a player moves to becoming a coach or some support character after decades in the game and that’s your great comment?
Players generally stop playing once they for some reason can't (injury, age, etc) or begin to have other priorities and don't view the effort of playing as worth it.
I don't see a reason that he can't, so this is of lesser significance to him than the essay alone would indicate.
Taunting?
If you stand in a room full of people and say "the sky is blue", you'll get a weird look at most.
If you say instead "Most of you will think it's controversial and criticise me, but I think the sky is blue - you're free to voice your opinion though", you'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.
Yet, this is the first one which crossed 300 votes, as far as I can tell (only checked 8 pages back or so) and is currently the highest scoring one. It may be that it's the most interesting one too. But adding popularity didn't hurt.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=andreessen
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=andreessen&type=comment
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pmarca
Measure twice, cut once, respect our forebears.
Yes!
Feel free to downvote me, but the truth is harsh.
Maybe this should be rephrased as ‘ubridled capitalism’.
Capitalism is working well, definitely better then communism.
> 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. > > 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'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.
Getting rid of regulation is the ultimate regulatory capture.
That being said, this is not an example of regulatory capture.
Many "right-wingers" I have talked to want to dismantle many of the regulations that have been put in place for expressly that purpose and actually do pretty well in that regard.
I don't generally want "more regulation". I want the right regulation.
Most voters think that some level of regulation is beneficial and support it. Politicians who advocate for the complete removal of regulations don't usually do well in the polls, but this is a widely held belief in right-wing thought. The market will do all the regulating necessary. This has quite obviously been proven incorrect over the years. Nevertheless, the idea persists.
The next most effective way to have no regulations is to keep the appearance of regulations and have the enforcers be completely ineffectual, thus regulatory capture.
So, you end up with the externally perverse-looking, but internally consistent situation where the right will support regulators' existence and even promote their people into those institutions.
Your explanation explains why regulatory capture may arise out of an interplay between right-leaning politicians and their constituents. Regulatory capture in your view arises when right-leaning politicians succumb to voters (not necessarily right-leaning ones) desire for regulation. However, this is an emergent phenomenon, not a tenet of right-leaning thought.
No, it isn't.
> You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities.
Not in many cities in Europe. Take look at their urban development and housing policies.
> You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year
Again, Europe. Not rocket science here guys.
> You see it in transportation.
Again, Europe, but also Japan. This isn't hard.
> Show that new models of public sector healthcare can be inexpensive and effective
Look at every other industrialized nation.
America seems to have a not-invented-here syndrome. There's a fundamental inability to look elsewhere and adopt foreign ideas with some humility.
And that syndrome is MUCH stronger on the right than the left side of the political spectrum.
Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution.
Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?
They are also a "non-profit" and so don't pay property taxes even though they have a ludicrously-sized endowment fund which certainly accrues a lot of "profit".
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.
> Endowments over $1 billion should be taxed if the university doesn’t grow freshman seats at 1.5x the rate of population growth. Harvard, MIT, and Yale have combined endowments (approximately $85 billion) greater than the GDP of many Latin American nations.
So maybe the issue isn't with expectations, but with incentives: to effect change in these old hierarchical systems, you need elitists to be anti-elitist; to make decisions against one's interests for the betterment of others.
[1] https://www.profgalloway.com/how-i-got-here
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.
If by "normal private institutions" you mean companies, sure, that'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.
> 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.
> 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.
I'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?
In this context, it sounds like he'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Stern,_Baron_Stern_of...
A somewhat stronger formulation of the same idea is from David Friedman: "People do things for other people for three reasons: love, money, or force."
He asks what the reasons could be, and lists several rejecting each of them. One reason that he rejects for why more building hasn't happened is capitalism.
Andreessen thinks capitalism can't be the reason for us not building because the fields he mentions are places where it's profitable ("highly lucrative") for businesses to operate. Replacing capitalism with another system (say communism) wouldn't solve our inability to build, in Andreessen's view.
Since the PRC's timespan was post-WWII, it's fair to compare them to the Asian tigers and Japan. It's easy to see which did better. Edit: Same goes if we're talking about "building more" rather than doing better.
Capitalism is why we're in this mess - we're valuing short-term gains over long-term/far-fetched/society-changing results - and a16z is part of that system. Sure, he'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's time to build. I would say it's time to change our system of motivation. Money does not, and will not ever, solve these problems BEFORE they become problems.
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't "what to build", it'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's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.
One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/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'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.
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
All those item were needed 3 weeks ago, but the stock were never fully replenish since. Most of those things are perishable.
WTF.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
FWIW CA's tax system is pro-cyclical, because they do tax the richest 1%'s more, but the result is that 1%'s don't make any capital gains in recession years so state tax revenues get obliterated during recessions.
I don't think printing money is the answer, if I'm understanding you correctly.
Instead we basically did the opposite, starving federal programs everywhere possible (virtually every entitlement or program that existed in the 80's is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we're seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response.
So I'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.
Otherwise, "tax the living hell out of capital" will just cause some more big BOOM sounds somewhere in middle east, and deplete private capital from making more investments at the same time.
There are lots of easy (and easily verifiable) ways to spend government money on things people value. That you think there aren't is sort of the triumph of modern conservatism in a nutshell.
And Vietnam, depressed inner cities, social strife, crime and unemployment...
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.
1. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving.
2. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure out in 2020, are the pieces of cloth on my face help to fight the virus or not? Seems it's still up for discussion.
3. Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff.
So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"? I still not getting it.
I was perhaps too coy.
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660...
I'm not even sure what to say about maps.
Science is incremental, often is done with out clear end products, and value can only really be measured much later typically in terms of wide spread effect. Like the internet existed decades before everyone used the internet. And only because tax dollars supported it.
Thus if you want more output, they only true solution is to fund much more science than is funded today.
That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.
Where did the foundational ingredients for each of those things come from? Computers, networks, video compression, touchscreens, materials, ... heck, even pagerank, and a large fraction of the breakthroughs in ML/AI (till very recently) have come from academia -- through publicly funded research. Companies are very good at solving the "last mile" to apply technologies towards making products, but don't typically have the vision or the wherewithal to pursue deeper innovations.
Yeah yeah, SpaceX exists now, decades after all the very tough and very expensive initial work.
Imagine how much more we could have now if the space program budget was more than a fraction of a percent. That won't be fixed by just giving more money to the govt.
Sure, because the government is supposed to provide infrastructure, which in turn allows all kinds of other stuff to flourish on top.
All those examples that private capital gave - who built the internet and spent enough money to create the early market for computers?
>I still not getting it.
If the government is supposed to supply education, health, and infrastructure, then it needs to be paid for somehow. Corporations don't care since there is no immediate monetization possible (plus tragedy of the commons aspects) and the free market simply assumes this stuff appears out of the thin air (externalize the cost somewhere else).
It’s not like “communication“ is an industry that is starving for investment or talent.
The government sucks at spending money. Giving to the banks is the least stupid thing to do. The banks at least have some way to propagate it down to large funds and eventually to smaller funds that have some sense in what is a worthwhile investment or not.
> 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.
Definitionally, if private investors made money, so did the taxpayers:
1) The investors are taxpayers who benefitted.
2) The investors returns were taxed and all future economic activity that came from it was taxed.
3) Societally we got the "digital libraries".
By the way, the formal name for COVID-19's virus is SARS-COV-2.
I don't see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value.
Modern govt isn't failing from lack of funds, it's how those funds are spent that is the problem.
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's not much of an obstacle.
Edit: More and more, I think we need worker-owned news.
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'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 "average" willpower to become obese.
Similarly, it's not as though people have less "desire" than before. There are large structural changes, many of which Andreesen doesn'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't fundamentally disagree with Andreesen's goals, but "try harder" is the sort of platitude that rarely brings about real societal change.
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't mean to pick on him. It's just an example of how even cranking AMBition up to 20 wouldn't have prevented our current predicament.
If Bill Gates had manufactured or stockpiled basic medical items, someone would be complaining about why he didn't do it sooner, or accusing him of profiteering, or somesuch. It shouldn't be up to one person to be responsible for the foibles of the human race, even if they have outsized resources. They just become a scapegoat for our own lack of responsibility.
Yes it’s never been easier to eat like shit and have hobbies that require no movement, but the opposite is also true.
If we are talking about weight loss (which we are) “healthy” foods are not a requirement, a calorie deficit is.
I think it's quite clear that here it makes zero sense to just say 'try to resist taking these ubiquitous drugs which give short-term satisfaction' as a policy measure. You'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.
It’s dangerous to equate someone choosing to “get fries with that” in the same vein as a chemical addiction to drugs.
Of course, if it was necessary?
80% of US men for example are overweight, obese or extremely obese, all of which have substantial and known effects on health, with about half overweight and the other half (extremely) obese. Further, the trend is worsening. You also have a context in which one of the main reasons for caloric surplus is sugar which is priced in the food industry at 7700 calories per $1, way more expensive than many healthy choices, and is known to be addictive.
Then you have studies which show a gradually implemented sugar tax has beneficial policy outcomes, without destroying industries, saving many lives and reducing healthcare costs by orders of magnitude greater than the revenue losses (for which the food industry could be compensated, if you'd want), and improving the quality of life for many people who'd otherwise be diabetics, unhealthy, unhappy.
Now if you can show me statistics where 80% of your friends, colleagues, parents, teachers etc, have some kind of addiction to a particular niche of games, which have widely studied and known impacts on physical and/or mental health, and where a small gradual tax can be introduced to nudge people to other games, without destroying the gaming industry, and being able to compensate any losers in the market due to this policy change, then yes... absolutely I think we should put a tax on that.
> Should we reinstate prohibition?
No, we should not reinstate prohibition. We have no evidence that works. There's lots of evidence that a sugar tax works. As is there evidence that alcohol taxes work. All to a limit, introduced in balance.
I'll grant you that these are not trivial questions and we should not try to control people's lives. But I also think there are some policy decisions that make complete sense. Alcohol taxes by the way, are already quite widespread. This isn't some new big-government idea. It's science-based, experimental based, balanced policy making, that aims to give people a choice, but also incentivise the right choices. It's not treated as a moral judgement question, I love sugar, I keep consuming it, but it's also a public health problem and I'd really benefit from not being able to get a big coke for $1 with every meal, but rather for $4 every now and then. (That by the way, is a way more extreme example than any policy recommendations, which is typically 15%, e.g. $1 to $1.15, and works)
Um no. The people in the 40s didn'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.
Weren't they rationing foodstuffs?