21 ms·

On Cultures That Build

222 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

barry-cotter 6y ago
> First, the TLDR version: In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds." > The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture. I believe it is possible; Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.
- rubidium 6y ago
  Hilarious that the capital of ad-tech and useless app proliferation is considered “Building things”. You want builders, go blue collar. Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers. They know how to get * done. Not Stanford CS grads ensconced in their golden FAANG coffins.
  - tlb 6y ago
    What are the most impressive or valuable things they are building recently?
    - cameldrv 6y ago
      One is Neural Machine Translation, as embodied by, for example, the new Google Translate. For many language pairs you can get automated translation that is actually mostly plausible. It's an incredible aid to global communication.
      - godelski 6y ago
        I think they meant "Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers." To which I would say a lot. Spaceships, CERN, LIGO, giant skyscrapers, and a lot more.
        RubenvanE 6y ago
        And those are just the high-tech, high-profile projects. Even a mundane bridge near a small town saves thousands of people a day of making a detour. This might not sound 'impressive', but imagine a bridge that gets used by just a thousand people a day and that replaces a detour that takes 15 minutes longer. That's a 1000 people * 0.25 hours * 2 times a day = 500 human hours saved per day, or over 180.000 hours saved per year. With a lifespan of 50 years equals that to close to 10 million(!) hours or 4500 'working years' saved. This is an example of just a small bridge near a small town, just imagine the benefit of larger bridges (and other infrastructure projects) near the big cities.
    - watwut 6y ago
      If you demand the things to be impressive in order to count, you can not build culture of building. You will build culture of impressing. And impressing in most cases requires a lot of money thrown on pr.
      - Kye 6y ago
        This is so true. I'm more impressed by the focused and successful long-term (~20 year) plan of revitalization of the local downtown than I am by most things out of Silicon Valley. It started with a cheesy video [1] and now you can go find small businesses [2][3][4] operating in what used to be the hollowed out husks of a past era. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4 [2] http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/ http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA / https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/ https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/ [4] http://hometownrhythms.com/ http://hometownrhythms.com/ This is in a place where every building used to look like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,296.98h,94.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbRddvf2sgXLrxR6dlxRq_g!2e0!7i3328!8i1664 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,2... It started from a dying post-WW2 textile town and now it's showing up in movies and TV shows as an idyllic small town. It's not even that kind of idyllic small town. The local paper's editor wrote articles in favor of marriage equality, trans rights, and racial equality and still hasn't been run out of town.
      - exolymph 6y ago
        You're not wrong, but it's like you didn't read "or valuable" in the comment you're responding to.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I mean, it's been about a decade since Silicon Valley invented the iPhone. Things take a while to produce clear, unambiguous transformations of the world.
    - rubidium 6y ago
      To quote the inventor of that himself: The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t. That’s going to break people’s hearts. I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all. These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important. […] Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        The idea that the iPhone didn't change the world is just so strange I'm not sure how to engage with it. There's a whole new category of device that billions of people own, and we're saying that didn't matter?
        rubidium 6y ago
        Yep. That’s what Steve Jobs said. Have kids? Ever had to rely on someone else for your livelihood or had someone rely on you? What matters most in the world is how we treat each other. Technology doesn’t do much there... its effect is mostly neutral.
- pnathan 6y ago
  Ironically, San Francisco is known as the city that refuses to build, because the voluntary associations refuse to let it happen. I'll save my belief in the Bay Area being a real change agent for when I see real change happening in their systems. I think the author of the article is on to something. I'm not sure precisely that the author has all points right, but directionally and at least fuzzily, it feels right.
Layvier 6y ago
I think it's also related to how capitalism derives towards ultra specialisation of individuals. We help solving a very specific (often very indirect as well) need of society, extremely efficiently, and expect all our needs to be fulfilled in return. Or at least that's what we assume the system should do. But the system is never well adjusted, we just inherit it from another time. And no one makes the effort to try to improve it. We think voting is the only job we have to do in that regard, when in practice we simply contribute to perpetuating an inefficient "management", that accumulated a lot misaligned incentives over time...
wayoutthere 6y ago
So is it just me or is this guy basically advocating for anarcho-communism? Like I don't disagree that's probably the direction we need to head towards, but I never thought I'd see ancoms on HN.
- rm445 6y ago
  It's the paradox of the firm. Centralised authority seems to be effective for small and local efforts, while not being how you'd want the whole society to be run.
bsder 6y ago
Perhaps if we taxed like 1955 we might build like 1955, eh?
- dilap 6y ago
  I don't think that's the issue. SF has tons of tax revenue, but it can barely build anything, and it can't keep the streets clean or safe.
  - topkai22 6y ago
    Total (federal) receipts are also relatively unchanged as a percentage of GDP since 1955. On top of that there is A LOT more GDP to go around. The real differences are source of revenue (Payroll taxes massively up, corporate income tax down) and the spending of the income (basically, anything that isn't Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid). We could potentially spend like the 1950s, but it'll be a tough sell to cut Social Security and Medicare in half or more. You might get some right wingers behind doubling the military budget though.
    - dilap 6y ago
      The amazing thing about all that $ for medical care is we're barely any better off than people in the victorian era: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/ And actually, if weight by quality of years lived, almost certainly worse off. (That's a British paper, but let's say US and UK are roughly equal.) This is, I think, because we're basically poisoning ourselves w/ poor diet, then trying to mitigate w/ medical care. Probably most people would more or less agree with the above statement, but then you'd find very little agreement about what exactly about our diet makes it so unhealthy. (I think the #1 culprit is excessive linoleic acid.)
      - antepodius 6y ago
        Well, also because of the societal trap of health insurance. If you have health insurance, you're (hopefully) not paying for your medical costs. So the medical costs get jacked up- after all, you, the buyer, don't front the bill. If nobody had health insurance, medicine would be cheaper. Of course, for every individual who can afford it, health insurance is a good choice (individually).
groby_b 6y ago
It fell apart when he made his management/free individual comparison, and then went > You see this in the difference quite clearly between Black Lives Matters on the one hand and the Civil Rights Movement on the other, I'm flabbergasted. If there's one thing in recent times that is self-organizing, it's BLM protests. And before that, OWS. That prompted me to re-read, with an eye towards "is this claim substantiated" any time he makes a claim, and no, most of the time, it isn't. I'll pick another example: "Crises demanded organizing at the local level to try and meet the problem head on. We do not have this impulse today." Yes, yes we do. The amount of ad-hoc work done to distribute food, rustle up PPE, deliver food to populations in need was truly amazing. On the larger scale there was the (bipartisan) #stayhome effort. The clear leadership the Seattle Flu Study took. > in the America of the early 20th century, the default solution to any problem encountered was to assemble a coalition of Americans to defeat it. [citation needed], counselor. The Great Depression didn't exactly have "coalitions of Americans" - it took the government to step in. (And needed it to step in - it turns out scale matters). No civil organizations sprang up to deal with the KKK in the '20s. And so it continues. It's simply a "good old times" article, with little connection to facts. (As those articles always are, because the good old times weren't)
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I think what’s less relevant here is “builder” vs. “non-builder” but whether or not governmental authority is properly hitched to the will of the citizens on average. The vast distributed efforts by citizens to produce PPE that the government seemed incapable or unwilling to acquire seems to hint at some serious dysfunction.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    Full agreement there. (Plus a side of vicious anti-science sentiment, with a good helping of a complete misunderstanding what "freedom" is) I do believe that we as a society are currently trying to decide if we want to build something communal, or if we want to commit to extreme selfishness. It'd be more fun to read about it in a history book, but it sure is interesting.
Sniffnoy 6y ago
Non-mobile link: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that...
pphysch 6y ago
The US elite have been waging total war on (domestic) collectivism for the past half century. An atomized populace buys more products and services than one that shares and cooperates freely. This is good for business but disastrous for society, as we are seeing in the 21st century. Capitalists want the worker ants without the ant colony.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  This is a pretty vague claim. Can you go into more detail on who the elite are and which kinds of collectivism they've been fighting against?
  - pphysch 6y ago
    Elite: corporations, financiers, and their media and military arms. The "successful" capitalists. On collectivism: Gutting organised labor wherever possible, gutting education & social programs in general, pushing identity issues to divide the population, "war on drugs", terrorism & FUD, ideological war on socialism/communism/Marxism. I guess the anti-war and adjacent movements of the 70s is what really set them off.
- tathougies 6y ago
  This is ridiculous, because what the author describes here is not 'collectivism' in the sense that free marketers are against. Nowhere in the post is there anything about needing to get rid of private property or even to socialize ownership of goods. What is discussed is individuals collectively taking responsibility for their own lives and those of their neighbors -- as demonstrated in the highway and obstacle example. That is not an instance of 'big government collectivism'. Quite the opposite, and one not only compatible with, but encouraged by the libertarian free market capitalists you decry. In reference to the highly authoritarian European regimes, Toqueville states that Americans are different: > This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue. This sounds like something a 'far-right', liberty obsessed gun afficionado may say as he points out the importance of the second amendment and self-defence and the importance of a small government
tathougies 6y ago
> This begins to become apparent when school starts and children, even in their games, submit to the rules they have established and punish offenses following their own definitions This is really the issue right here. Our schools neither allow children to play freely to make up their own rules. And certainly if any children decided to dole out their own punishments, that would be met with immediate hostility.
- pphysch 6y ago
  I don't think "Toddler justice" is the fix to our societal problems. Although props to POTUS is trying his best to set an example!
- watwut 6y ago
  Yeah, school nowdays tolerate bullying much less.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Yes, but their approach to it is essentially relative lockdown of the students. Obviously that has benefits, but there are also costs.
    - antepodius 6y ago
      Now everyone gets a boot on their head!
  - unishark 6y ago
    > Yeah, school nowdays tolerate bullying much less. I'm not convinced of this. School is now largely seen as a day-care service everyone has a right to, so even when bullies get expelled, they often just get put at a different school to cause trouble for people who's parents care less.
carapace 6y ago
You want people to build, give them money. Folks aren't living in tents because it's fun. "For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
- jseliger 6y ago
  "Living in tents" is more a problem with restrictive zoning laws; zoning needs to be liberalized. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new-hsieh-moretti-paper-land-use-restrictions-economic-growth.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/ne...
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    So there isn't an issue with minimum wage stagnating compared to inflation?
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      yes there is, but it's a separate issue
    - scatters 6y ago
      Inflation is influenced by minimum wage. If wages rise but people are competing for access to an artificially restricted housing market, all that will happen is house price and rents go up to absorb the increase; the only people better off will be landlords and homeowners with a larger house than they need.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      If we don't allow the housing supply to match demand, no minimum wage will be enough.
  - verall 6y ago
    Yup, that's why Houston with it's "we couldn't even begin to care" zoning laws has solved homelessness.
tommilukkarinen 6y ago
I was reading the original article and thinking tomyself ’am I feeling this’. Apple and Google came to my mind, they are the governments in digital business whose regulations and tantrums I have to abide by. Past are the times this kind of business could have thrived without restrictions. Maybe we should build a reasonable choise to them?
- dannyw 6y ago
  These companies compete with each other, but they work together to implicitly suppress anyone who may join the league and compete with them. The 30% platform tax is a fantastic example. A giant will always win, or be able to stall a fast-growing company, if they can tax 30% of the revenue and build a competitor without this headwind. Even allowing apps that require people to sign up outside the app, that is a significant growth and conversion hurdle. Advertising-based apps are untaxed and hence incentivised. However, Google and Facebook have acquired and monopolised the market so that you really can't make good money unless you go through them -- and they get to take a 40% clip. Thus, FAAMG will always grow faster than you because collectively enforce a tax on anyone who might be able to challenge them. FAAMG is the modern day OPEC, just relying on subtly and game theory instead of outright cartel meetings.
  - hiptobecubic 6y ago
    Except that these cloud providers are trying to undercut each other as much as possible all the time, and you really honestly don't have to use them to build your service if you don't want to. If you want a bunch of super convenient features like elastic compute, you will, but they didn't have those features when they built their flagship products.
    - pphysch 6y ago
      Public cloud providers are very much in the customer acquisition phase. There are still a lot of on-prem datacenters out here that they are trying to compete over for business. Once the entire customer base is locked in more or less, the cartel effect will kick in.
spyckie2 6y ago
I think the title and vocabulary used should be centered more on resource utilization rather than the build metaphor. This is because we have a lot of capability (which is stated multiple times by many authors). We just have a poor system to funnel those capabilities to the right places. This conversation reminds me of startup growing pains when there is dysfunctional org structure and communication lines. I'll reference some reading material for those who are seriously interested in learning more: https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy https://www.thee-online.com/Documents/SMC-HiQ.pdf https://www.thee-online.com/Documents/SMC-HiQ.pdf The basic idea is that hierarchy/structure is needed to allocate resources in a more complex way. BUT American values has traditionally gone away from an explicit hierarchical structure and instead tends towards a flat org structure. The issues described all sound like issues that come from a poorly run flat organization, or an organization at a pragmatist stage (if using the vocabulary in the 2nd link) - mainly that hierarchy is implicit and there is still people at the top, its just hidden and undocumented how to get there or how changes happens. To me, it makes sense to look into organization theory literature as a direction for potential solutions and try to fit them into our societal context. === Another way to describe the article's point is the fact that we were once the employees of America, but have now become the shareholders. The wild west era is characterized by the people not being separate from the livelihood of their community. The town is a self contained unit where everyone in the town is helping to keep the town running, and every townsman has a role to play in order to keep the town lively. Nowadays however, it seems that there is a distinct line between the people running the town and the rest of the town. The actors are not the townsfolk; they are the bureaucrats, the designated representatives, the people put in charge. The rest of us are spectators, benefactors, shareholders benefitting from their work but effectively cut off from participating in it. They are the clergy and we are the laity. This is either built into the culture over a long period of time, or there's some pernicious systematic law that pushes mature ecosystems into a clergy-laity state. Either way, both explanations need an active structural solution to combat it.
aylmao 6y ago
IMO this sentence resonates: > He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement. I read this sentence and I think it carries a lot of truth. I think it's not hard to believe that people today just don't "own" the USA like they did before. Literally, home ownership has been in decline for generations [1]. Millennials are in debt [2], and younger generations go longer without even having a family to root them in [2]. Back in my home country you stay in your city— in the USA everyone seems to be moving about all the time; first for school, then for the job. Morale wise, patriotism has been stained by rampant nationalism, so who wants to own that title? What's the "American" identity, when everyone clings to their differences? I've met people born and raised in the USA who introduce themselves as Salvadorian, Venezuelan, Japanese before saying they are American, because in the USA that's what they are— something else first, then American. Moreover, it's easy to be disappointed with Americanism. Generational memory exists. People built last century expecting a better future this century, but capitalism and irresponsibility failed to make it happen. This country built roads and bridges it cannot afford to maintain [3], a health care system that bankrupts people and sells them addictions, an economy that disproportionately favors the rich, and a government that has spurred some dystopian agencies [5], destabilized many other governments [6] and is constantly at war [7] while failing to address the needs of its population. If you don't own your house or your whole paycheck, if you don't own your culture or what your country stands for, if you don't feel connected to your neighbor or feel like you could even connect with them, or if you're not proud of where you are, then yeah, you're a tenant. And tenants don't build. [1]: https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-generation https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-gene... [2]: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-yo... [3]: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-how-to-improve-american-education.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-ar... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-century_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
roenxi 6y ago
There is a really good point in this article that is imperfectly articulated. This "We do not have this impulse today." isn't being supported. Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale). Picking on an industry, the supply of great home builders will be reduced if there are not also many incompetent home builders. Incompetent home builders are regulated out of existence because it isn't safe, so statistically a couple of really great builders never learned their craft because they couldn't muck around doing stupid stuff so they went to become shopkeepers instead or something. Costs associated with homebuilding will also rise. So it isn't that the impulse is lost, it is that when America was a great builder the people had no choice but to accept a lot of shoddy work, and in amongst all the dross a few of the experiments turned up aces. They wouldn't accept that today (even though it is probably a really strong strategy) because the median voter is risk averse to the point of hurting themselves.
- mantap 6y ago
  In countries where house building is poorly regulated, you don't end up with lots of aces, the opposite happens, the overall standards are reduced even at the top end. On the other hand, houses do tend to be safe enough even without regulatory oversight. I definitely think that the years that people in developed countries spend working and saving in pursuit of an expensive house built to code is not a good balance of life spent to life risk.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Hmm, not so sure I'd trust "safe enough" in a flood plain, earthquake zone or valleys around a volcano. Some people won't be able to afford the difference, and every so often you'll get a news story about 1,000-100,000 dying in a natural disaster.
- narag 6y ago
  Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale). Care to share some links? Prying into your profile I see you asked HN, whithout much luck, something of the sort time ago. (would you mind pinging me? my email is in my profile)
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
+1 for the Dave Barry Does Japan reference. Watching the Japanese build stuff is amazing. I would visit once or twice a year. First visit, looking out my hotel window: big ol’ hole in the ground. Next year: Thirty-story skyscraper, fully occupied.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  And in summer 2019 when we were there a lot was being built, repaired and improved all over the place infrastructure wise, most likely expectimg the now canceled 2020 Olympics.
NalNezumi 6y ago
From the original article of the article: >You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. Isn't the problem with housing not "willingness to build" but actually heavy regulations that penalize builders to favor the "already-have" people? It seems to me like a shallow argument to point it toward "willingness". Seems more like bad incentive systems. The overall message I agree with; we should build more. But the root cause of it, my take, is not "willingness" but in expectation and reaction to failure. Most of these regulation was put in place with well intention. Some landlord/teacher/constructor made a shoddy work (mistake or with malicious intent), people make demands "to be better" after media outcry, policy maker put regulation in place. Unintended consequences is that landlords/teachers/constructors that was doing nothing wrong (and people that cause honest mistakes) also get penalized. Same attitude can be seen outside regulators and policy makers; On the internet: the entire "cancel culture" or social media witch hunt is all about finding a mistake someone did, ascribe intention to it and shame them to inaction. In hiring, new grads are expected to have a work-experience equivalent skill-set already gained in university. (Effectively penalizing allowance of mistake by hiring someone that have to learn at work.) Our "willingness" seems to be the same but "expectation" seems to have been blown out of proportion, and the fallout of failure to meet this expectation is constantly growing, so less and less people would even like to try.
rm445 6y ago
I have a heuristic. A 'code smell' for social science articles, which is something like, is all of Western society explained by happenings in the USA? Caveats: there's nothing wrong with writing an American article about America. And it's not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The 'smell' occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon. This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate in all kinds of places - it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys. How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway? The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to the author's ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it's not a perfect correlation. Building stuff is straightforward where there's not much stuff already - because it's wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it's something new like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there's hardly any government, and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in. If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive authority. But there's no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.
- naravara 6y ago
  I think your point is correct in general, but I’d like to nitpick in a specific part here: > it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. Just looking at the cost of rail infrastructure, it looks like the US has a significantly harder time generating value for money with what we build. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-1-billion-doesn-t-buy-much-transit-infrastructure-anymore https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-1-bil... The cost difference per km of rail comparing Tokyo or Berlin to NYC is insane. It’s literally an order of magnitude difference in some cases. And this issue arises in many parts of our society. IT modernization projects in the federal government cost boatloads of money, yet never seem to make any real headway. Even in the private sector, real value adding things like transitioning to electronic medical records never really took until insurance companies and the government started forcing it. And once they did the focus on their design was entirely around billing and coding and not really improving the physician’s workflow or enhancing care. So while the point may be true everywhere, I think there really is a baked in tendency to veto and strike down proposals for change in the US that doesn’t seem to get quite so rampant in other places.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
The pivotal moment in USA's history was WW II. The USA was the only major country _not_ ravaged by the war. Once the war was over, the other countries had to focus on recovery and rebuilding. The USA supplied the materials and goods for those needs. It was a great time to be the USA. But now that the playing field remains level and that historic outlier long gone, the USA's self-proclaimed tag line (i.e., "greatest country in the history of the world") is more myth than it is reality. The sociopolitical fallout from perpetuating the myth,and not keeping pace with reality, isn't over yet.
snikeris 6y ago
If we want more builders, we should work on the disincentives that builders face. The original American builders weren't saddled by a progressive tax system where they were penalized according to their degree of success. Perhaps we're witnessing Rand's strike of the mind in slow motion. The headwinds to building in public are so strong that the builders have retreated to build things in private, no longer sharing their gifts with the world.
discreteevent 6y ago
I think that a lot of the problem of not building things comes from profits being the only measure of what matters. The cultural imperative to get rich above all else. Some western technology companies changed at some point where a lot of them were driven by MBAs rather than engineers. They had no problem outsourcing everything to China in order to increase profits. Building things was "too costly". But the cost was only measured in profits not in lost capability etc. The original founders of these companies built things because they wanted to build them and profit was a means to sustaining that. The Chinese are doing the same. The current culture in some western companies is weak and unsustainable in the same way that just eating sugar is weak and unsustainable.
- abecedarius 6y ago
  But China's current dynamism kicked off when its government started to allow people to work to get rich. It seems very odd to claim we have more of that motive, indeed so much more that it makes a huge difference. It must be about the channels this motive has available to be directed into, I'd think. Does the invisible hand push you more to rent-seek or to build?
  - webmaven 6y ago
    This may be overly obvious, but... Just because some of a thing is judged to be good does not necessarily imply that more of it would be better.
    - discreteevent 6y ago
      Yes that's exactly the problem. Thinking that if something is good, more of it has to be better. Its the same with regulation. Of course too much registration is bad but this fundamentalist idea that good will just emerge from pure free trade is nonsensical. It's like seeing the benefits of event sourcing and then deciding that if we use that everywhere a stable system will just emerge.
      - abecedarius 6y ago
netcan 6y ago
As a european, I don't understand why the european response is seen as significantly better on this front than the US', especially in the context of Andreeson's criticism. I mean, Europe has had some of the worst outbreaks, mortality rates, failures of the hospital system, elderly care... The horror of peak covid in northern Italy was, largely, a preventable failure. We also see a similar helplessness when it came to actions that required "building." Ability or inability to do "lockdown" well varied, but that's not building. The one obvious thing that did need "build" was testing, contact tracing and such. Very few countries managed to scale up testing fast, even by now.
swyx 6y ago
> In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds." this is a very powerful statement. as someone who just did this this week I feel very called out.
- azhu 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing that. We need more humble folks willing to learn leading by example.
leetsquad 6y ago
I believe it might just be that we are used to safe incremental building now. For example, building a feature on top of a successful product will get 5% gain with 80% certainty. Building something completely new will give 10x gain with 2% certainty. Management is more likely to favor the 5% gain because it gives safe returns and they can explain it well to whoever they are reporting to. Also, I believe the same applies to startups. A founder has to explain crazy bets to investors, employees and everyone in the company. That's notnas easy as it sounds.
mempko 6y ago
If you want people to build, do what the Chinese do (who learned it from the Japanese). Give smart people lots of money and get out of the way. China told it's thousands of regional banks to lend towards productive purposes. This was called "Window Guidance". The best thing you can do is give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way. There are three ways to do this; Bank lending, government spending, and private equity. The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. One reason is that very few large banks make most of the loans. Government spending on high technology and research has also been declining over 30 years. The reason people build today in Silicon Valley is private equity is funding projects (giving smart people money and getting out of the way). The problem with Silicon Valley is that private equity is a drop in the bucket compared to the capacity of bank lending or even government spending. In fact most of the tech, including the fact that Silicon Valley exists in the first place, was because of federal government spending. (fyi Google started as a government grant, google maps, waymo) Lets look at the USA. There are 15k Banks in the US but the majority of lending happens in the top 3. The US can just instruct it's thousands of local banks to lend for projects instead of real-estate/asset purchases and suddenly you will have a lot of people with money to build things. Alan Kay who was at Xerox Parc, which is estimated to have produced trillions in wealth cost only 100 million dollars, says that Parc worked because smart people were given money and management stayed out of the way. That they invested in people. In fact, the vast majority of high technology was funded this way. Government gave labs lots of money and they created computers, the internet, rockets, GPS, AI, etc etc etc. So a combination of government spending + bank lending can kickstart building. Lots of smart people out there can't build because of the lack of funds. Give these people money! Let them build! Don't make them do a dog and pony show in front of VCs about WHAT they are going to build. Just invest in people and stay out of the way.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. I'm not sure I agree with this. A lot of lending is for mortgages, and a lot of those go into new construction, not purchases of existing buildings. In my area, there is a ton of vacant office space that has been built over the past decade or so because of the availability of cheap loans for new construction. The problem is that it was new construction that was not needed--hence the buildings are still sitting vacant years after completion. In other words, I think the problem is not that lending is being done for asset purchases instead of new production, but that lending is being done for the wrong new production--producing things that nobody wants instead of things people do want. That misallocates resources and creates shortages of things that are actually wanted. Imagine if all the resources that went into building those vacant office buildings had gone into making PPE for disease protection instead.
fuball63 6y ago
My favorite line was: > I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do. I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up approach and cultural shift to start moving again. I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough support from the bottom up.
- azhu 6y ago
  Agreed. A possible "between the lines" reading of what the author is saying is that good overall solutions are formed from the balance of many different ones.
asdfman123 6y ago
Random thoughts: > One common mechanism was the establishment of an emergency committee— sometimes at the state level, other times at the level of the county or city— to deal with the overwhelming need for organization, communication, and cooperation among individuals, agencies, and organizations. It's interesting they brought this up because the debate is often framed by the right as the "zippy right wing free market capitalists" versus "the slow and inefficient left." Yet from my perspective as a left-leaning individual, Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable -- i.e., Obamacare. Or they sabotage attempts to deal with COVID-19 reasonably. If I'm being fair, it seems like institutional rot goes much deeper than any political ideology. > It is striking to me how many of the old Silicon Valley builders—people of Andreeson's generation—were social outcasts in their youth. These people felt estranged from the established corsus honorum of American society. Ironically, they were social outcasts because they spent the majority of their time focusing on stuff that mainstream society didn't understand the value of -- messing around with computers. Now that internet-based businesses have become so profitable, upper middle class kids with sufficient aptitude are generally encouraged to mess around with computers. Someone tells their grandparents they want to be a software developer, and they're proud of them (thinking of all the people who've gotten rich off the internet), instead of saying "what the hell is that?"
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable Republicans are conservatives which comes from > averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values. They don't want to change the system because they like the system (even if objectively the system is bad for them and they've been told it isn't or that Issue A is all that matters, ignore B through Z while we decimate you). Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in charge. From an outsider perspective I frequently wonder why it's not more visible, I certainly see it my countries national politics though not to the same extent. And even when people do realise there is a problem they then hang around waiting for the perfect single solution to fix it forever which is an ideal opportunity for politicians who don't want the problem fixing. If I'm been ultra cynical (and I try not to be) as an example, Roe V. Wade been over-turned would be a disaster to the GOP, the promise to try to do so is far more powerful at getting people out to vote than actually doing it - which requires both doing it and then having to promise something else. Divide and conquer all the way down.
rossdavidh 6y ago
I found the Andreesen article interesting in the first few paragraphs, where he says, essentially, that you need to look beyond your own city, state, or national government, since all of Western society was caught unprepared for this. Then he spends almost the entire rest of the essay talking about aspects of America specifically, as if they were an explanation for the problem. It's like he didn't read the start of his own essay. Whatever the source of the problem, it cannot be something uniquely American, as France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Belgium, etc. all had the same (or greater) state of unpreparedness, as measured by per capita mortality. But, if you look at countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc. that had far lower per capita mortality, it's not clear what they have in common. I think it is more important for us to be asking "why were those countries better off, what do they have in common?" than to be trying to answer what we should be doing different. You can't find the right answer until you've asked the right question. Most of the things that Andreesen says we should be building (like many more nuclear reactors, or mile-higher skyscrapers to increase population density) are, to say the least, not something for which there is a consensus. I wouldn't want to see most of what he lists. Including, by the way, flying cars, which would make our current fatality rate from transportation even higher.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  They simple locked themselves down very early.
  - rossdavidh 6y ago
    In Japan's case, definitely not true.
- azhu 6y ago
  We are larger and more diverse. It's like the difference between a lean small company and a bloated corporation. The reasons why SmallCo A and MegaCorp B are different could be infinitely variable, but at the population level, it's generally agreed that the differences between the small company and mega corporation populations are simply due to scale.
N1H1L 6y ago
I was visiting one of the dams at TVA yesterday. It was a beautiful day for running on the river trails, and because this is 2020 and I am addicted to my cellphone - I was looking up on the Wikipedia article on TVA. TVA is a huge, massive behemoth - but this lines from the Wikipedia page caught my attention: >> Opponents, such as Dean Russell in The TVA Idea, in addition to condemning the project as being socialistic, argued that TVA created a "hidden loss" by preventing the creation of "factories and jobs that would have come into existence if the government had allowed the taxpayers to spend their money as they wished." Now Dean Russell is an Austrian school economist, and his assertion here has no factual backing here. No evidence is ever given. And I was wondering, how much building has been also been stalled today by the fetishization of free-market economics?
pragmatic 6y ago
But we do build things. Those things are software. Software has sucked Ali The air out of the room. Our top talent is sprinting away their life building adtech and SaaS, not buildings and spaceships. Hard to believe Andreessen can't see this as he's part of the "problem" I'd you think it's a problem. Software has eaten the world, meatspace is in second place now.

222 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

> First, the TLDR version: In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds." > The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture. I believe it is possible; Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.

rubidium 6y ago
Hilarious that the capital of ad-tech and useless app proliferation is considered “Building things”. You want builders, go blue collar. Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers. They know how to get * done. Not Stanford CS grads ensconced in their golden FAANG coffins.
- tlb 6y ago
  What are the most impressive or valuable things they are building recently?
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    One is Neural Machine Translation, as embodied by, for example, the new Google Translate. For many language pairs you can get automated translation that is actually mostly plausible. It's an incredible aid to global communication.
    - godelski 6y ago
      I think they meant "Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers." To which I would say a lot. Spaceships, CERN, LIGO, giant skyscrapers, and a lot more.
      - RubenvanE 6y ago
        And those are just the high-tech, high-profile projects. Even a mundane bridge near a small town saves thousands of people a day of making a detour. This might not sound 'impressive', but imagine a bridge that gets used by just a thousand people a day and that replaces a detour that takes 15 minutes longer. That's a 1000 people * 0.25 hours * 2 times a day = 500 human hours saved per day, or over 180.000 hours saved per year. With a lifespan of 50 years equals that to close to 10 million(!) hours or 4500 'working years' saved. This is an example of just a small bridge near a small town, just imagine the benefit of larger bridges (and other infrastructure projects) near the big cities.
  - watwut 6y ago
    If you demand the things to be impressive in order to count, you can not build culture of building. You will build culture of impressing. And impressing in most cases requires a lot of money thrown on pr.
    - Kye 6y ago
      This is so true. I'm more impressed by the focused and successful long-term (~20 year) plan of revitalization of the local downtown than I am by most things out of Silicon Valley. It started with a cheesy video [1] and now you can go find small businesses [2][3][4] operating in what used to be the hollowed out husks of a past era. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4 [2] http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/ http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA / https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/ https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/ [4] http://hometownrhythms.com/ http://hometownrhythms.com/ This is in a place where every building used to look like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,296.98h,94.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbRddvf2sgXLrxR6dlxRq_g!2e0!7i3328!8i1664 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,2... It started from a dying post-WW2 textile town and now it's showing up in movies and TV shows as an idyllic small town. It's not even that kind of idyllic small town. The local paper's editor wrote articles in favor of marriage equality, trans rights, and racial equality and still hasn't been run out of town.
    - exolymph 6y ago
      You're not wrong, but it's like you didn't read "or valuable" in the comment you're responding to.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I mean, it's been about a decade since Silicon Valley invented the iPhone. Things take a while to produce clear, unambiguous transformations of the world.
  - rubidium 6y ago
    To quote the inventor of that himself: The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t. That’s going to break people’s hearts. I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all. These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important. […] Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      The idea that the iPhone didn't change the world is just so strange I'm not sure how to engage with it. There's a whole new category of device that billions of people own, and we're saying that didn't matter?
      - rubidium 6y ago
        Yep. That’s what Steve Jobs said. Have kids? Ever had to rely on someone else for your livelihood or had someone rely on you? What matters most in the world is how we treat each other. Technology doesn’t do much there... its effect is mostly neutral.
pnathan 6y ago
Ironically, San Francisco is known as the city that refuses to build, because the voluntary associations refuse to let it happen. I'll save my belief in the Bay Area being a real change agent for when I see real change happening in their systems. I think the author of the article is on to something. I'm not sure precisely that the author has all points right, but directionally and at least fuzzily, it feels right.

Layvier 6y ago

I think it's also related to how capitalism derives towards ultra specialisation of individuals. We help solving a very specific (often very indirect as well) need of society, extremely efficiently, and expect all our needs to be fulfilled in return. Or at least that's what we assume the system should do. But the system is never well adjusted, we just inherit it from another time. And no one makes the effort to try to improve it. We think voting is the only job we have to do in that regard, when in practice we simply contribute to perpetuating an inefficient "management", that accumulated a lot misaligned incentives over time...

wayoutthere 6y ago

So is it just me or is this guy basically advocating for anarcho-communism? Like I don't disagree that's probably the direction we need to head towards, but I never thought I'd see ancoms on HN.

rm445 6y ago
It's the paradox of the firm. Centralised authority seems to be effective for small and local efforts, while not being how you'd want the whole society to be run.

bsder 6y ago

Perhaps if we taxed like 1955 we might build like 1955, eh?

dilap 6y ago
I don't think that's the issue. SF has tons of tax revenue, but it can barely build anything, and it can't keep the streets clean or safe.
- topkai22 6y ago
  Total (federal) receipts are also relatively unchanged as a percentage of GDP since 1955. On top of that there is A LOT more GDP to go around. The real differences are source of revenue (Payroll taxes massively up, corporate income tax down) and the spending of the income (basically, anything that isn't Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid). We could potentially spend like the 1950s, but it'll be a tough sell to cut Social Security and Medicare in half or more. You might get some right wingers behind doubling the military budget though.
  - dilap 6y ago
    The amazing thing about all that $ for medical care is we're barely any better off than people in the victorian era: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/ And actually, if weight by quality of years lived, almost certainly worse off. (That's a British paper, but let's say US and UK are roughly equal.) This is, I think, because we're basically poisoning ourselves w/ poor diet, then trying to mitigate w/ medical care. Probably most people would more or less agree with the above statement, but then you'd find very little agreement about what exactly about our diet makes it so unhealthy. (I think the #1 culprit is excessive linoleic acid.)
    - antepodius 6y ago
      Well, also because of the societal trap of health insurance. If you have health insurance, you're (hopefully) not paying for your medical costs. So the medical costs get jacked up- after all, you, the buyer, don't front the bill. If nobody had health insurance, medicine would be cheaper. Of course, for every individual who can afford it, health insurance is a good choice (individually).

groby_b 6y ago

It fell apart when he made his management/free individual comparison, and then went > You see this in the difference quite clearly between Black Lives Matters on the one hand and the Civil Rights Movement on the other, I'm flabbergasted. If there's one thing in recent times that is self-organizing, it's BLM protests. And before that, OWS. That prompted me to re-read, with an eye towards "is this claim substantiated" any time he makes a claim, and no, most of the time, it isn't. I'll pick another example: "Crises demanded organizing at the local level to try and meet the problem head on. We do not have this impulse today." Yes, yes we do. The amount of ad-hoc work done to distribute food, rustle up PPE, deliver food to populations in need was truly amazing. On the larger scale there was the (bipartisan) #stayhome effort. The clear leadership the Seattle Flu Study took. > in the America of the early 20th century, the default solution to any problem encountered was to assemble a coalition of Americans to defeat it. [citation needed], counselor. The Great Depression didn't exactly have "coalitions of Americans" - it took the government to step in. (And needed it to step in - it turns out scale matters). No civil organizations sprang up to deal with the KKK in the '20s. And so it continues. It's simply a "good old times" article, with little connection to facts. (As those articles always are, because the good old times weren't)

ashtonkem 6y ago
I think what’s less relevant here is “builder” vs. “non-builder” but whether or not governmental authority is properly hitched to the will of the citizens on average. The vast distributed efforts by citizens to produce PPE that the government seemed incapable or unwilling to acquire seems to hint at some serious dysfunction.
- groby_b 6y ago
  Full agreement there. (Plus a side of vicious anti-science sentiment, with a good helping of a complete misunderstanding what "freedom" is) I do believe that we as a society are currently trying to decide if we want to build something communal, or if we want to commit to extreme selfishness. It'd be more fun to read about it in a history book, but it sure is interesting.

Sniffnoy 6y ago

Non-mobile link: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that...

pphysch 6y ago

The US elite have been waging total war on (domestic) collectivism for the past half century. An atomized populace buys more products and services than one that shares and cooperates freely. This is good for business but disastrous for society, as we are seeing in the 21st century. Capitalists want the worker ants without the ant colony.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
This is a pretty vague claim. Can you go into more detail on who the elite are and which kinds of collectivism they've been fighting against?
- pphysch 6y ago
  Elite: corporations, financiers, and their media and military arms. The "successful" capitalists. On collectivism: Gutting organised labor wherever possible, gutting education & social programs in general, pushing identity issues to divide the population, "war on drugs", terrorism & FUD, ideological war on socialism/communism/Marxism. I guess the anti-war and adjacent movements of the 70s is what really set them off.
tathougies 6y ago
This is ridiculous, because what the author describes here is not 'collectivism' in the sense that free marketers are against. Nowhere in the post is there anything about needing to get rid of private property or even to socialize ownership of goods. What is discussed is individuals collectively taking responsibility for their own lives and those of their neighbors -- as demonstrated in the highway and obstacle example. That is not an instance of 'big government collectivism'. Quite the opposite, and one not only compatible with, but encouraged by the libertarian free market capitalists you decry. In reference to the highly authoritarian European regimes, Toqueville states that Americans are different: > This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue. This sounds like something a 'far-right', liberty obsessed gun afficionado may say as he points out the importance of the second amendment and self-defence and the importance of a small government

tathougies 6y ago

> This begins to become apparent when school starts and children, even in their games, submit to the rules they have established and punish offenses following their own definitions This is really the issue right here. Our schools neither allow children to play freely to make up their own rules. And certainly if any children decided to dole out their own punishments, that would be met with immediate hostility.

pphysch 6y ago
I don't think "Toddler justice" is the fix to our societal problems. Although props to POTUS is trying his best to set an example!
watwut 6y ago
Yeah, school nowdays tolerate bullying much less.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Yes, but their approach to it is essentially relative lockdown of the students. Obviously that has benefits, but there are also costs.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    Now everyone gets a boot on their head!
- unishark 6y ago
  > Yeah, school nowdays tolerate bullying much less. I'm not convinced of this. School is now largely seen as a day-care service everyone has a right to, so even when bullies get expelled, they often just get put at a different school to cause trouble for people who's parents care less.

carapace 6y ago

You want people to build, give them money. Folks aren't living in tents because it's fun. "For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

jseliger 6y ago
"Living in tents" is more a problem with restrictive zoning laws; zoning needs to be liberalized. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new-hsieh-moretti-paper-land-use-restrictions-economic-growth.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/ne...
- aaomidi 6y ago
  So there isn't an issue with minimum wage stagnating compared to inflation?
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    yes there is, but it's a separate issue
  - scatters 6y ago
    Inflation is influenced by minimum wage. If wages rise but people are competing for access to an artificially restricted housing market, all that will happen is house price and rents go up to absorb the increase; the only people better off will be landlords and homeowners with a larger house than they need.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    If we don't allow the housing supply to match demand, no minimum wage will be enough.
- verall 6y ago
  Yup, that's why Houston with it's "we couldn't even begin to care" zoning laws has solved homelessness.

tommilukkarinen 6y ago

I was reading the original article and thinking tomyself ’am I feeling this’. Apple and Google came to my mind, they are the governments in digital business whose regulations and tantrums I have to abide by. Past are the times this kind of business could have thrived without restrictions. Maybe we should build a reasonable choise to them?

dannyw 6y ago
These companies compete with each other, but they work together to implicitly suppress anyone who may join the league and compete with them. The 30% platform tax is a fantastic example. A giant will always win, or be able to stall a fast-growing company, if they can tax 30% of the revenue and build a competitor without this headwind. Even allowing apps that require people to sign up outside the app, that is a significant growth and conversion hurdle. Advertising-based apps are untaxed and hence incentivised. However, Google and Facebook have acquired and monopolised the market so that you really can't make good money unless you go through them -- and they get to take a 40% clip. Thus, FAAMG will always grow faster than you because collectively enforce a tax on anyone who might be able to challenge them. FAAMG is the modern day OPEC, just relying on subtly and game theory instead of outright cartel meetings.
- hiptobecubic 6y ago
  Except that these cloud providers are trying to undercut each other as much as possible all the time, and you really honestly don't have to use them to build your service if you don't want to. If you want a bunch of super convenient features like elastic compute, you will, but they didn't have those features when they built their flagship products.
  - pphysch 6y ago
    Public cloud providers are very much in the customer acquisition phase. There are still a lot of on-prem datacenters out here that they are trying to compete over for business. Once the entire customer base is locked in more or less, the cartel effect will kick in.

spyckie2 6y ago

I think the title and vocabulary used should be centered more on resource utilization rather than the build metaphor. This is because we have a lot of capability (which is stated multiple times by many authors). We just have a poor system to funnel those capabilities to the right places. This conversation reminds me of startup growing pains when there is dysfunctional org structure and communication lines. I'll reference some reading material for those who are seriously interested in learning more: https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy https://www.thee-online.com/Documents/SMC-HiQ.pdf https://www.thee-online.com/Documents/SMC-HiQ.pdf The basic idea is that hierarchy/structure is needed to allocate resources in a more complex way. BUT American values has traditionally gone away from an explicit hierarchical structure and instead tends towards a flat org structure. The issues described all sound like issues that come from a poorly run flat organization, or an organization at a pragmatist stage (if using the vocabulary in the 2nd link) - mainly that hierarchy is implicit and there is still people at the top, its just hidden and undocumented how to get there or how changes happens. To me, it makes sense to look into organization theory literature as a direction for potential solutions and try to fit them into our societal context. === Another way to describe the article's point is the fact that we were once the employees of America, but have now become the shareholders. The wild west era is characterized by the people not being separate from the livelihood of their community. The town is a self contained unit where everyone in the town is helping to keep the town running, and every townsman has a role to play in order to keep the town lively. Nowadays however, it seems that there is a distinct line between the people running the town and the rest of the town. The actors are not the townsfolk; they are the bureaucrats, the designated representatives, the people put in charge. The rest of us are spectators, benefactors, shareholders benefitting from their work but effectively cut off from participating in it. They are the clergy and we are the laity. This is either built into the culture over a long period of time, or there's some pernicious systematic law that pushes mature ecosystems into a clergy-laity state. Either way, both explanations need an active structural solution to combat it.

aylmao 6y ago

IMO this sentence resonates: > He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement. I read this sentence and I think it carries a lot of truth. I think it's not hard to believe that people today just don't "own" the USA like they did before. Literally, home ownership has been in decline for generations [1]. Millennials are in debt [2], and younger generations go longer without even having a family to root them in [2]. Back in my home country you stay in your city— in the USA everyone seems to be moving about all the time; first for school, then for the job. Morale wise, patriotism has been stained by rampant nationalism, so who wants to own that title? What's the "American" identity, when everyone clings to their differences? I've met people born and raised in the USA who introduce themselves as Salvadorian, Venezuelan, Japanese before saying they are American, because in the USA that's what they are— something else first, then American. Moreover, it's easy to be disappointed with Americanism. Generational memory exists. People built last century expecting a better future this century, but capitalism and irresponsibility failed to make it happen. This country built roads and bridges it cannot afford to maintain [3], a health care system that bankrupts people and sells them addictions, an economy that disproportionately favors the rich, and a government that has spurred some dystopian agencies [5], destabilized many other governments [6] and is constantly at war [7] while failing to address the needs of its population. If you don't own your house or your whole paycheck, if you don't own your culture or what your country stands for, if you don't feel connected to your neighbor or feel like you could even connect with them, or if you're not proud of where you are, then yeah, you're a tenant. And tenants don't build. [1]: https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-generation https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-gene... [2]: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-yo... [3]: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-how-to-improve-american-education.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-ar... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-century_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

roenxi 6y ago

There is a really good point in this article that is imperfectly articulated. This "We do not have this impulse today." isn't being supported. Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale). Picking on an industry, the supply of great home builders will be reduced if there are not also many incompetent home builders. Incompetent home builders are regulated out of existence because it isn't safe, so statistically a couple of really great builders never learned their craft because they couldn't muck around doing stupid stuff so they went to become shopkeepers instead or something. Costs associated with homebuilding will also rise. So it isn't that the impulse is lost, it is that when America was a great builder the people had no choice but to accept a lot of shoddy work, and in amongst all the dross a few of the experiments turned up aces. They wouldn't accept that today (even though it is probably a really strong strategy) because the median voter is risk averse to the point of hurting themselves.

mantap 6y ago
In countries where house building is poorly regulated, you don't end up with lots of aces, the opposite happens, the overall standards are reduced even at the top end. On the other hand, houses do tend to be safe enough even without regulatory oversight. I definitely think that the years that people in developed countries spend working and saving in pursuit of an expensive house built to code is not a good balance of life spent to life risk.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- barrkel 6y ago
  Hmm, not so sure I'd trust "safe enough" in a flood plain, earthquake zone or valleys around a volcano. Some people won't be able to afford the difference, and every so often you'll get a news story about 1,000-100,000 dying in a natural disaster.
narag 6y ago
Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale). Care to share some links? Prying into your profile I see you asked HN, whithout much luck, something of the sort time ago. (would you mind pinging me? my email is in my profile)

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

+1 for the Dave Barry Does Japan reference. Watching the Japanese build stuff is amazing. I would visit once or twice a year. First visit, looking out my hotel window: big ol’ hole in the ground. Next year: Thirty-story skyscraper, fully occupied.

m4rtink 6y ago
And in summer 2019 when we were there a lot was being built, repaired and improved all over the place infrastructure wise, most likely expectimg the now canceled 2020 Olympics.

NalNezumi 6y ago

From the original article of the article: >You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. Isn't the problem with housing not "willingness to build" but actually heavy regulations that penalize builders to favor the "already-have" people? It seems to me like a shallow argument to point it toward "willingness". Seems more like bad incentive systems. The overall message I agree with; we should build more. But the root cause of it, my take, is not "willingness" but in expectation and reaction to failure. Most of these regulation was put in place with well intention. Some landlord/teacher/constructor made a shoddy work (mistake or with malicious intent), people make demands "to be better" after media outcry, policy maker put regulation in place. Unintended consequences is that landlords/teachers/constructors that was doing nothing wrong (and people that cause honest mistakes) also get penalized. Same attitude can be seen outside regulators and policy makers; On the internet: the entire "cancel culture" or social media witch hunt is all about finding a mistake someone did, ascribe intention to it and shame them to inaction. In hiring, new grads are expected to have a work-experience equivalent skill-set already gained in university. (Effectively penalizing allowance of mistake by hiring someone that have to learn at work.) Our "willingness" seems to be the same but "expectation" seems to have been blown out of proportion, and the fallout of failure to meet this expectation is constantly growing, so less and less people would even like to try.

rm445 6y ago

I have a heuristic. A 'code smell' for social science articles, which is something like, is all of Western society explained by happenings in the USA? Caveats: there's nothing wrong with writing an American article about America. And it's not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The 'smell' occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon. This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate in all kinds of places - it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys. How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway? The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to the author's ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it's not a perfect correlation. Building stuff is straightforward where there's not much stuff already - because it's wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it's something new like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there's hardly any government, and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in. If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive authority. But there's no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.

naravara 6y ago
I think your point is correct in general, but I’d like to nitpick in a specific part here: > it's hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. Just looking at the cost of rail infrastructure, it looks like the US has a significantly harder time generating value for money with what we build. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-1-billion-doesn-t-buy-much-transit-infrastructure-anymore https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-1-bil... The cost difference per km of rail comparing Tokyo or Berlin to NYC is insane. It’s literally an order of magnitude difference in some cases. And this issue arises in many parts of our society. IT modernization projects in the federal government cost boatloads of money, yet never seem to make any real headway. Even in the private sector, real value adding things like transitioning to electronic medical records never really took until insurance companies and the government started forcing it. And once they did the focus on their design was entirely around billing and coding and not really improving the physician’s workflow or enhancing care. So while the point may be true everywhere, I think there really is a baked in tendency to veto and strike down proposals for change in the US that doesn’t seem to get quite so rampant in other places.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

The pivotal moment in USA's history was WW II. The USA was the only major country _not_ ravaged by the war. Once the war was over, the other countries had to focus on recovery and rebuilding. The USA supplied the materials and goods for those needs. It was a great time to be the USA. But now that the playing field remains level and that historic outlier long gone, the USA's self-proclaimed tag line (i.e., "greatest country in the history of the world") is more myth than it is reality. The sociopolitical fallout from perpetuating the myth,and not keeping pace with reality, isn't over yet.

snikeris 6y ago

If we want more builders, we should work on the disincentives that builders face. The original American builders weren't saddled by a progressive tax system where they were penalized according to their degree of success. Perhaps we're witnessing Rand's strike of the mind in slow motion. The headwinds to building in public are so strong that the builders have retreated to build things in private, no longer sharing their gifts with the world.

discreteevent 6y ago

I think that a lot of the problem of not building things comes from profits being the only measure of what matters. The cultural imperative to get rich above all else. Some western technology companies changed at some point where a lot of them were driven by MBAs rather than engineers. They had no problem outsourcing everything to China in order to increase profits. Building things was "too costly". But the cost was only measured in profits not in lost capability etc. The original founders of these companies built things because they wanted to build them and profit was a means to sustaining that. The Chinese are doing the same. The current culture in some western companies is weak and unsustainable in the same way that just eating sugar is weak and unsustainable.

abecedarius 6y ago
But China's current dynamism kicked off when its government started to allow people to work to get rich. It seems very odd to claim we have more of that motive, indeed so much more that it makes a huge difference. It must be about the channels this motive has available to be directed into, I'd think. Does the invisible hand push you more to rent-seek or to build?
- webmaven 6y ago
  This may be overly obvious, but... Just because some of a thing is judged to be good does not necessarily imply that more of it would be better.
  - discreteevent 6y ago
    Yes that's exactly the problem. Thinking that if something is good, more of it has to be better. Its the same with regulation. Of course too much registration is bad but this fundamentalist idea that good will just emerge from pure free trade is nonsensical. It's like seeing the benefits of event sourcing and then deciding that if we use that everywhere a stable system will just emerge.
    - abecedarius 6y ago

netcan 6y ago

As a european, I don't understand why the european response is seen as significantly better on this front than the US', especially in the context of Andreeson's criticism. I mean, Europe has had some of the worst outbreaks, mortality rates, failures of the hospital system, elderly care... The horror of peak covid in northern Italy was, largely, a preventable failure. We also see a similar helplessness when it came to actions that required "building." Ability or inability to do "lockdown" well varied, but that's not building. The one obvious thing that did need "build" was testing, contact tracing and such. Very few countries managed to scale up testing fast, even by now.

swyx 6y ago

> In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds." this is a very powerful statement. as someone who just did this this week I feel very called out.

azhu 6y ago
Thank you for sharing that. We need more humble folks willing to learn leading by example.

leetsquad 6y ago

I believe it might just be that we are used to safe incremental building now. For example, building a feature on top of a successful product will get 5% gain with 80% certainty. Building something completely new will give 10x gain with 2% certainty. Management is more likely to favor the 5% gain because it gives safe returns and they can explain it well to whoever they are reporting to. Also, I believe the same applies to startups. A founder has to explain crazy bets to investors, employees and everyone in the company. That's notnas easy as it sounds.

mempko 6y ago

If you want people to build, do what the Chinese do (who learned it from the Japanese). Give smart people lots of money and get out of the way. China told it's thousands of regional banks to lend towards productive purposes. This was called "Window Guidance". The best thing you can do is give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way. There are three ways to do this; Bank lending, government spending, and private equity. The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. One reason is that very few large banks make most of the loans. Government spending on high technology and research has also been declining over 30 years. The reason people build today in Silicon Valley is private equity is funding projects (giving smart people money and getting out of the way). The problem with Silicon Valley is that private equity is a drop in the bucket compared to the capacity of bank lending or even government spending. In fact most of the tech, including the fact that Silicon Valley exists in the first place, was because of federal government spending. (fyi Google started as a government grant, google maps, waymo) Lets look at the USA. There are 15k Banks in the US but the majority of lending happens in the top 3. The US can just instruct it's thousands of local banks to lend for projects instead of real-estate/asset purchases and suddenly you will have a lot of people with money to build things. Alan Kay who was at Xerox Parc, which is estimated to have produced trillions in wealth cost only 100 million dollars, says that Parc worked because smart people were given money and management stayed out of the way. That they invested in people. In fact, the vast majority of high technology was funded this way. Government gave labs lots of money and they created computers, the internet, rockets, GPS, AI, etc etc etc. So a combination of government spending + bank lending can kickstart building. Lots of smart people out there can't build because of the lack of funds. Give these people money! Let them build! Don't make them do a dog and pony show in front of VCs about WHAT they are going to build. Just invest in people and stay out of the way.

pdonis 6y ago
> The problem in the west is that the majority of lending goes into asset purchases (buying existing wealth) instead of new production. I'm not sure I agree with this. A lot of lending is for mortgages, and a lot of those go into new construction, not purchases of existing buildings. In my area, there is a ton of vacant office space that has been built over the past decade or so because of the availability of cheap loans for new construction. The problem is that it was new construction that was not needed--hence the buildings are still sitting vacant years after completion. In other words, I think the problem is not that lending is being done for asset purchases instead of new production, but that lending is being done for the wrong new production--producing things that nobody wants instead of things people do want. That misallocates resources and creates shortages of things that are actually wanted. Imagine if all the resources that went into building those vacant office buildings had gone into making PPE for disease protection instead.

fuball63 6y ago

My favorite line was: > I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do. I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up approach and cultural shift to start moving again. I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough support from the bottom up.

azhu 6y ago
Agreed. A possible "between the lines" reading of what the author is saying is that good overall solutions are formed from the balance of many different ones.

asdfman123 6y ago

Random thoughts: > One common mechanism was the establishment of an emergency committee— sometimes at the state level, other times at the level of the county or city— to deal with the overwhelming need for organization, communication, and cooperation among individuals, agencies, and organizations. It's interesting they brought this up because the debate is often framed by the right as the "zippy right wing free market capitalists" versus "the slow and inefficient left." Yet from my perspective as a left-leaning individual, Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable -- i.e., Obamacare. Or they sabotage attempts to deal with COVID-19 reasonably. If I'm being fair, it seems like institutional rot goes much deeper than any political ideology. > It is striking to me how many of the old Silicon Valley builders—people of Andreeson's generation—were social outcasts in their youth. These people felt estranged from the established corsus honorum of American society. Ironically, they were social outcasts because they spent the majority of their time focusing on stuff that mainstream society didn't understand the value of -- messing around with computers. Now that internet-based businesses have become so profitable, upper middle class kids with sufficient aptitude are generally encouraged to mess around with computers. Someone tells their grandparents they want to be a software developer, and they're proud of them (thinking of all the people who've gotten rich off the internet), instead of saying "what the hell is that?"

noir_lord 6y ago
> Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable Republicans are conservatives which comes from > averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values. They don't want to change the system because they like the system (even if objectively the system is bad for them and they've been told it isn't or that Issue A is all that matters, ignore B through Z while we decimate you). Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in charge. From an outsider perspective I frequently wonder why it's not more visible, I certainly see it my countries national politics though not to the same extent. And even when people do realise there is a problem they then hang around waiting for the perfect single solution to fix it forever which is an ideal opportunity for politicians who don't want the problem fixing. If I'm been ultra cynical (and I try not to be) as an example, Roe V. Wade been over-turned would be a disaster to the GOP, the promise to try to do so is far more powerful at getting people out to vote than actually doing it - which requires both doing it and then having to promise something else. Divide and conquer all the way down.

rossdavidh 6y ago

I found the Andreesen article interesting in the first few paragraphs, where he says, essentially, that you need to look beyond your own city, state, or national government, since all of Western society was caught unprepared for this. Then he spends almost the entire rest of the essay talking about aspects of America specifically, as if they were an explanation for the problem. It's like he didn't read the start of his own essay. Whatever the source of the problem, it cannot be something uniquely American, as France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Belgium, etc. all had the same (or greater) state of unpreparedness, as measured by per capita mortality. But, if you look at countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc. that had far lower per capita mortality, it's not clear what they have in common. I think it is more important for us to be asking "why were those countries better off, what do they have in common?" than to be trying to answer what we should be doing different. You can't find the right answer until you've asked the right question. Most of the things that Andreesen says we should be building (like many more nuclear reactors, or mile-higher skyscrapers to increase population density) are, to say the least, not something for which there is a consensus. I wouldn't want to see most of what he lists. Including, by the way, flying cars, which would make our current fatality rate from transportation even higher.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
They simple locked themselves down very early.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  In Japan's case, definitely not true.
azhu 6y ago
We are larger and more diverse. It's like the difference between a lean small company and a bloated corporation. The reasons why SmallCo A and MegaCorp B are different could be infinitely variable, but at the population level, it's generally agreed that the differences between the small company and mega corporation populations are simply due to scale.

N1H1L 6y ago

I was visiting one of the dams at TVA yesterday. It was a beautiful day for running on the river trails, and because this is 2020 and I am addicted to my cellphone - I was looking up on the Wikipedia article on TVA. TVA is a huge, massive behemoth - but this lines from the Wikipedia page caught my attention: >> Opponents, such as Dean Russell in The TVA Idea, in addition to condemning the project as being socialistic, argued that TVA created a "hidden loss" by preventing the creation of "factories and jobs that would have come into existence if the government had allowed the taxpayers to spend their money as they wished." Now Dean Russell is an Austrian school economist, and his assertion here has no factual backing here. No evidence is ever given. And I was wondering, how much building has been also been stalled today by the fetishization of free-market economics?

pragmatic 6y ago

But we do build things. Those things are software. Software has sucked Ali The air out of the room. Our top talent is sprinting away their life building adtech and SaaS, not buildings and spaceships. Hard to believe Andreessen can't see this as he's part of the "problem" I'd you think it's a problem. Software has eaten the world, meatspace is in second place now.