It’s Time to Build
This is an upsetting article, sadly, I usually quite like what a16z has to say.<p>&quot;We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?&quot;<p>NO thank you, we are not part of your ultra neoliberal project.<p>China is the place with the &#x27;most skyscrapers&#x27; and it&#x27;s a craphole for most citizens.<p>There is absolutely no reason to &#x27;massively build&#x27; other than cram more people in and line the pockets of the investor class.<p>&quot;We have top-end universities, yes, ... Why not educate every 18 year old?&quot;<p>Marc, with all due respect, do you remotely grasp the notion of &#x27;class&#x27; and what&#x27;s going on with our schools? (Edit - I&#x27;m not saying I agree with it, but it exists for certain reasons)<p>First - the US sends a huge percentage of it&#x27;s youth to College - far more than other places.<p>Second - many of them <i>do not qualify</i> and more and more are having to attend remedial classes. LA County kids were graduating at 55% rate, then &#x27;poof&#x27; they lowered the standards to get a 77% rate.<p>US students are largely NOT ready for elite education. The issue is not &#x27;getting everyone to harvard&#x27; - the issue is &#x27;getting everyone who deserves to go to a decent school - into one&#x27;. This actually isn&#x27;t a huge problem in the US.<p>Third - we DONT need more college! College was a legit mark of the elite (legitimately) but it&#x27;s not anymore. We are <i>failing</i> huge cohorts of kids that do <i>not</i> go to college! The &#x27;problem&#x27; is that we provide <i>no path</i> for non-college educated kids to get into the system. We also like to most college kids who think they get a free job. Nope.<p>Fourth - Education will always be at least somewhat elite. There will always be 5% who are considerably more spectacular, and they deserve a place to go. The US system is not perfect, but it&#x27;s not bad either.<p>And this Thiel-esque bit: &quot; Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?&quot;<p>No - this post WW2 vector is the wrong kind of &#x27;brute&#x27; Engineering. You know what matters more than &#x27;supersonic flight&#x27;? Getting a much cheaper and safer flight. And guess what, that has been happening. The market pushes innovation in a specific direction and sorry, it&#x27;s not &#x27;to the moon&#x27; it&#x27;s to &#x27;LA to NY&#x27; for 1&#x2F;2 the price.<p>Finally his bit about factories. I share his concern, but at the same time, he writes as though he completely ignores market realities again. We don&#x27;t build more factories in the US because we&#x27;ve * externalized human rights* to another nation. If Chinese factories can pay pennies, fire people for going to the bathroom, spy on everyone 24&#x2F;7, pollute up the yang, have the government back national players with money from the central bank and force international competitors out of business ... when then you see why there are &#x27;few factories&#x27; in the US.<p>The &#x27;answer&#x27; to &#x27;more physical building&#x27; is something he is unwilling to say and that is a nationalist cause with trade barriers, something that neoliberals absolutely hate.<p>With issues such as lack of PPE, ventilators and chems. for testing it becomes much more clear obviously.<p>What would happen if the government literally said &#x27;We declar this, that and this sector to be &#x27;strategically imperartive&#x27; and therefore all production must happen within the country&#x27;. Well guess what? Those &#x27;fancy factories&#x27; would get built. It would still be more expensive than China - but - the huge benefit from that is that this would entail a huge transfer of wealth to the poor and less educated for their doing actual, meaningful work. Which is always better than welfare or UBI.<p>Now - combine this &#x27;factory&#x27; problem with the &#x27;what do we do with all these no-college people&#x27; and you start to see how these issues resonate.<p>So yes we need to be &#x27;building&#x27; but we need to be building &#x27;up&#x27; not &#x27;out&#x27;.<p>&#x27;Building out&#x27; is a 19th and 20th century strategy. More more more, bigger bigger bigger. Sorry - we are at least for now more advanced than China et. al. and the plan should be &#x27;better&#x27;.<p>We do <i>not</i> need large scale migration or even construction. What we need is a way to make our system fair, accessible, to make sure that &#x27;everyone gets a spot&#x27; in the system that has dignity. All of our institutions to work at a higher level - for example, government IT is a complete mess - our services could be improved dramatically with smart policies. US University Systems could expand in the 5 Billion-person developing world, for example. The US is going to help fare more people in the world by being better on all fronts than just having a bigger body count.<p>I think we can all kind of agree with the impetus of Marc&#x27;s rant, but I think this is not particularly well thought out, he could take this one as a first draft.