Marc Andreessen: "It's Time to Build"
The COVID pandemic has surfaced serious structural problems that go beyond our failure to make medical masks. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says the problem is we’ve stopped building.
Original link: https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
Original publication date: 2020-04-18
Hacker news thread: https://hnsummaries.substack.com/p/fd44f329-1c39-4a3b-82b6-635d40831f55
(Shortform note: In this article, Marc Andreessen addresses the Western world in general, though he focuses on the United States in particular.)
Failures from COVID
Every Western country failed to respond appropriately to COVID. That the problem is so widespread suggests it’s not a problem with any single actor, political party, or nation in particular. Instead, we failed to build the institutions that would have helped us weather the crisis.
Here are examples of American failures to respond to COVID:
We don’t have enough capacity for testing. This includes not just the diagnostic itself, but simple materials like cotton swabs.
We don’t have enough simple medical equipment, like masks and eye shields.
Even if we develop a vaccine, we won’t have the manufacturing capabilities to scale their production.
We don’t have the capacity to transfer the billions of federal stimulus money to the families that need it.
Failures in General
These are just symptoms of a deeper failure. The deeper reason we lack these things is we chose not to build the infrastructure that would make these things in time of need. We outsourced manufacturing instead of building world-class manufacturing domestically—surgical masks are not hard to make! The government chose not to build a system to distribute money back to us, even as it collects trillions of dollars in taxes from us.
And these COVID-related failures are actually just a small slice of our larger systemic failures to build new things. For deeper examples:
Why can’t we build more housing in economic hubs like San Francisco, avoiding exorbitant prices that drive people away from pursuing their potential?
Why hasn’t education materially changed in the past century? Why can’t we scale a world-class education out of the Ivy League and to the entire population?
Why can’t we develop world-class automated manufacturing facilities?
Why We Don’t Build
We can envision these things. Why don’t we have these things?
It’s not because we lack money. The government just passed $2 trillion in stimulus money in two weeks. And it’s not for lack of making money. These innovations should be immensely valuable and give riches to whoever can build them.
The problem is our complacency. We don’t seem to want these things—at least, not enough to get through all the barriers. We chose not to build.
Why We Need to Build
For us to avoid future failures like what happened with COVID, and for us to unlock everyone’s human potential, we need to build these things. Building will spread opportunity to more people. Building things in huge quantity, like computers, brought down the price dramatically; we need to apply the same treatment to housing, healthcare, and education.
Choosing to build needs to cross political lines:
The right tends to prize private sector innovation, but gets mired in counterproductive profit-seeking behavior (regulatory capture, stock buybacks).
The left tends to favor the public sector over private industry. This is fine—prove that public institutions can beat the private sector! Make the VA the best hospital in the country; demand that wealthy institutions like Harvard scale their education to millions of students.
Choosing to build needs all of us to get active. We need to get over our inertia. We need to demand more from each other, from political leaders and entrepreneurs, from our society. We need to individually stop working to perpetuate broken systems and move to build new things.
Shortform Takeaway Questions
Do you think we need to build more?
What is most important for us to build? Why?
What are you building to be part of the solution?