It’s Time To Build

Author: Marc Andreessen URL: https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ One-line: The coronavirus exposed not a failure of foresight alone but a deeper inability to build — and the cure is to want, and to build, the things we need.

Key Highlights

• Every Western institution was unprepared for the pandemic despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade — and it traces to two failures: a failure of imagination (foresight) and, more importantly, a failure of action — “our widespread inability to build.”
• The complacency is everywhere, not just in the pandemic: in healthcare, in housing and the physical footprint of cities, in Education, in manufacturing. “You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.” #City Building
• Housing: we can’t build enough housing in high-potential cities, so prices skyrocket (San Francisco) and regular people can’t move in to take the jobs of the future. We can’t build the cities themselves — when Westworld wanted to portray the American city of the future, they filmed in Singapore, not Seattle or LA or Austin.
• Education: top-end universities teach only a microscopic share of the world’s 18-year-olds. The last major K-12 innovation was Montessori (1960s); we’ve done 50 years of education research that never reached deployment. We know one-to-one Tutoring yields a two-standard-deviation gain (the Bloom two-sigma effect), and we have the internet — so why haven’t we built systems to match every learner with a tutor? #Synthesis School #Apprenticeship
• Manufacturing: US output is at an all-time high, yet key production is offshored to cheaper labor. We know how to build highly automated factories and the higher-paying jobs they create — so why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts,” giant state-of-the-art factories across the country? #offshoring
• The problem is not money (we fund endless wars, bank/airline/carmaker bailouts, a $2T rescue package in two weeks), not capitalism (Nicholas Stern: capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know; these fields are already lucrative), and not technical competence (we already built the homes, schools, cars, and smartphones we have).
• The real problem is desire, inertia, regulatory capture, and will. “We need to want these things.” We need to want new companies to build them even if incumbents object — if only to force the incumbents to build. And both sides must contribute: separate the imperative to build from ideology and politics. #Compromise
• Build as the answer to every domain: solve climate by building a few thousand zero-emission nuclear reactors (start with 10, then 100, then the rest); reboot the American dream by breaking the price curves of housing, education, and healthcare — because the things we build in quantity (computers, TVs) drop in price, while the things we don’t (housing, schools, hospitals) skyrocket. #Climate Change #The New American Dream
• The closing reframe: to everyone around us we should be asking what are you building? — directly, or helping/teaching others to build, or taking care of the people who build. If your work doesn’t lead to something being built or to caring for people, “we’ve failed you,” and we need to get all available talent onto the biggest problems. Kyle’s distillation: instead of “what do you do for work?” ask “what are you building?” #Build a Better On Ramp For Life

Notable Quotes

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

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build.

When the producers of HBO’s “Westworld” wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn’t film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore.

The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

Milton Friedman once said the great public sector mistake is 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 things and show the results!

The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price.

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?

Kyle: Instead of asking “what do you do for work?” — ask “what are you building?”

How It Connects

• Marc Andreessen — author; a16z co-founder. This is his most-cited public essay.
• The Build-Nothing Country — Noah Smith’s later, more mechanistic diagnosis of the same failure (permitting, land use, NIMBYism). Direct intellectual descendant.
• To Save America, Restore Our Frontier — Joe Lonsdale’s parallel argument that bureaucratic capture, not ideology, is the real decline.
• City Building — the cities-we-can’t-build thread.
• The New American Dream / American dream — build to break the housing/education/healthcare price curves.
• Nuclear Energy / Climate Change — build reactors as the climate answer.
• Elon Musk / alien dreadnoughts — automated factories as the manufacturing answer.
• Bloom two-sigma effect / Tutoring / Synthesis School — the education-building thread.
• Nicholas Stern — “capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know.”
• Milton Friedman — judge by results, not intentions.
• Progress Studies — the broader build/progress movement this essay helped catalyze; the “want and build the things we need” framing is a foundational text for it.