It’s Time to Build
The most sorely lacking in self-awareness aspect of his post is that a16z is a <i>primary driver</i> of a flavour economic (and social) neoliberalism that is a &#x27;root cause&#x27; of almost everything he lamented.<p>1) If non-college educated kids had a legit path into the market (like they do in Germany) then surpluses would be more evenly distributed and housing wouldn&#x27;t be such a problem.<p>But they don&#x27;t have path because a) industry won&#x27;t train and b) the US is an economically liberal place - there is no communitarian impetus (like Japan&#x2F;Germany) to structure. The US doesn&#x27;t really care that much about citizen v. non-citizen - the economic benefit in the short term is outsource&#x2F;insource - there is no consideration for the population.<p><i>US Citizens are an externality to the business world</i>.<p>2) On the college side, the US has already financialized the college race, arguably to a nearly corrupt degree. There are tons of kids going to Uni in the US, many of them ill-prepared, and then will be over-indebted.<p>3) Silicon Valley VC does <i>not</i> want longer-term risky bets, they want to make short term bits with big near term payouts, with long term outcomes again, irrelevant.<p>It makes <i>much</i> more sense to invest in something like Twitter&#x2F;TikTok&#x2F;SnapChat than most other things in this context.<p>4) And <i>who</i> exactly built those supersonic planes? Was it VC&#x27;s? No! It was generally the government, with the impetus of war, specifically WW2 and the Cold War! Literally ARPANET.<p>5) &#x27;Building here&#x27; would entail a coordinated national strategy that is anemic to free-market types they usually can&#x27;t even contemplate it. It would take something like an economy-destroying epidemic (!) to realize the consequences of their lack of strategic investment at very least in things like specific manufacturing (medical, medicinal) and food production. All of a sudden those farming subsidies start to look a little different!<p>6) So what issue ties all of Marc&#x27;s seemingly disparate points together? Why didn&#x27;t he look deeper at Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore as examples? What&#x27;s actually going on there at a more fundamental level that&#x27;s different from the USA?<p>I&#x27;m not necessarily advocating for some big &#x27;state-managed&#x27; anything or huge governmental intervention. But I am certainly advocating for rational and specific nationalist intervention, with a communitarian attitude - or at very least the contemplation of it.<p>The fact someone so enormously intelligent and influential &#x27;didn&#x27;t even go there&#x27; I feel is because the language is literally lost in North America. They have no idea what it even means. Much like entrepreneurialism, especially &#x27;creative destruction&#x27; is a really hard concept for many business circles in Europe to get. It&#x27;s like a foreign language.