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Economy | Opinions and Analysis

It's Time to Build - OpEd

Apr 19, 2020   •   by   •   Source: Proshare   •   eye-icon 1904 views

Sunday, April 19, 2020   / 07.57AM / OpEd ByMarc Andreessen via pmarca Blog   / Header Image Credit: FirstChristian Church  

 

 

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A call to arms (action) by Marc Andreessen who submits "Our nation andour civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers andforemothers-built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, themicrochip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we nowtake for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide forour well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create thefuture we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build."

 

We are in this situation because we didn't build enough, we couldn'tbuild fast enough, we didn't value building enough. We will get out of this bybuilding, not talking and bailing ourselves out. Read and see what we canlearn, if only if its understanding the responsibility and winning mindset.

 

 

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic,despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutionaleffectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not tooearly to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

 

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party oranother, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it allfailed - no Western country, or state, or city was prepared - and despite hardwork and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within theseinstitutions. So, the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponentor your home nation.

 

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. Butthe other part of the problem is what we didn't *do* in advance, and what we'refailing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically ourwidespread inability to *build*.

 

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don't have. Wedon't have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials - including, amazingly,cotton swabs and common reagents. We don't have enough ventilators, negativepressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don't have enough surgical masks, eyeshields, and medical gowns - as I write this, New York City has put out adesperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In2020! In America!

 

We also don't have therapies or a vaccine - despite, again, years ofadvance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Our scientists will hopefullyinvent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturingfactories required to scale their production. And even then, we'll see if wecan deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter - it took scientistsfive (5) years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccineafter that scourge's 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives.

 

In the U.S., we don't even have the ability to get federal bailout moneyto the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workersand their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serioustrouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them moneywithout potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money fromall its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system todistribute money to us when it's needed most.

 

Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financialconduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccinesare hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have thesethings but we chose not to - specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms,the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.

 

You don't just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with thestatus quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcaregenerally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughoutAmerican life.

 

You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. We can'tbuild nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential - which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like SanFrancisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and takethe jobs of the future. We also can't build the cities themselves anymore.

 

When the producers of HBO's "Westworld" wanted to portray the Americancity of the future, they didn't film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin - theywent to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular livingenvironments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now;where are they?

 

You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with thecapacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18-yearolds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18-year olds in the worldeach year. Why not educate every 18-year-old? Isn't that the most importantthing we can possibly do? Why not build a far larger number of universities, orscale the ones we have way up? The last major innovation in K-12 education wasMontessori, which traces back to the 1960s; we've been doing education researchthat's never reached practical deployment for 50 years since; why not build alot of greater K-12 schools using everything we now know? We know one-to-onetutoring can reliably increase education outcomes by two standard deviations(the Bloom two-sigma effect); we have the internet; why haven't we builtsystems to match every young learner with an older tutor to dramaticallyimprove student success?

 

You see it in manufacturing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Americanmanufacturing output is higher than ever, but why has so much manufacturingbeen offshored to places with cheaper manual labor? We know how to build highlyautomated factories. We know the enormous number of higher paying jobs we wouldcreate to design and build and operate those factories. We know - and we'reexperiencing right now! - the strategic problem of relying on offshoremanufacturing of key goods. Why aren't we building Elon Musk's "aliendreadnoughts" - giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing everyconceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowestpossible cost - all throughout our country?

 

You see it in transportation. Where are the supersonic aircraft? Whereare the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high-speed trains, thesoaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?

 

Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe when we have the moneyto wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks,airlines, and carmakers.

 

The federal government just passed a $2 trillion coronavirus rescuepackage in two weeks!

 

Is the problem capitalism? I'm with Nicholas Stern when he says thatcapitalism is how we take care of people we don't know - all of these fieldsare highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds forcapitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who areserved. Is the problem technical competence? Clearly not, or we wouldn't havethe homes and skyscrapers, schools and hospitals, cars and trains, computersand smartphones, that we already have.

 

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem isinertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent thesethings. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies tobuild these things, even if incumbents don't like it, even if only to force theincumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to buildthese things.

 

And we need to separate the imperative to build these things fromideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building.

 

The right starts out in a more natural, albeit compromised, place. Theright is generally pro production, but is too often corrupted by forces thathold back market-based competition and the building of things. The right mustfight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies,risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly buybacks in lieu ofcustomer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, even moreinvestor-friendly) innovation.

 

It's time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised politicalsupport from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in newindustries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.

 

The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector inmany of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model! Demonstrate thatthe public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, bettertransportation, better cities, better housing. Stop trying to protect the old,the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future.

 

Milton Friedman once said the great public sector mistakeis to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.Instead of taking that as an insult, take it as a challenge - build new thingsand show the results!

 

Show that new models of public sector healthcare can be inexpensive andeffective - how about starting with the VA? When the next coronavirus comes along,blow us away! Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with publicfunding; why can't 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard? Whyshouldn't regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build? Solve the climatecrisis by building - energy experts say that all carbon-based electrical powergeneration on the planet could be replaced by a few thousand new zero-emissionnuclear reactors, so let's build those. Maybe we can start with 10 newreactors? Then 100? Then the rest?

 

In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. Thethings we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly inprice. The things we don't, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket inprice. What's the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own,and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating pricecurves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every Americancan realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

 

Building isn't easy, or we'd already be doing all this. We need todemand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, ourinvestors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we needto demand more from one another. We're all necessary, and we can allcontribute, to building.

 

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking thequestion, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helpingother people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care ofpeople who are building? If the work you're doing isn't either leading tosomething being built or taking care of people directly, we've failed you, andwe need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contributeto building. There are always outstanding people in even the most brokensystems - we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have,and on building the answers to those problems.

 

I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here's a modestproposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build,conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There's an excellentchance I'll agree with you.

 

Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building.Our forefathers and foremothers-built roads and trains, farms and factories,then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands ofother things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that defineour lives and provide for our well-being.

 

There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future wewant for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

 

End.

 

Proshare Nigeria Pvt. Ltd.

 

About the Author

Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venturecapital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of thefew to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and oneof the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies.

 

Marc, who holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign; co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browserand co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. Healso co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold toHewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packardfrom 2008 to 2018. Marc serves on the board of the following AndreessenHorowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor,OpenGov, and Samsara. He is also on the board of Facebook.

 

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Credits

The post It's Time to Build first appeared in AndreessenHorowitz  on Saturday, April 18, 2020.

 

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