It's Time to Build for Good

https://palladiummag.com/2020/04/30/its-time-to-build-for-good/

by ivanech • 6 years ago

109 126 6 years ago

brenden2• 6 years ago

What's the point? There are no rewards for doing good just for the sake of doing good. Hopium is a great way to get people to do your bidding, but why should people work hard for nothing while someone else gets rich?

samsquire• 6 years ago

There isn't any thing pulling people together to build things. There's no shared desire between people to demand a thing.

erjjones• 6 years ago

.. and there was a time to not build for good??

analognoise4• 6 years ago

Make weapons. It's good for you, bad for somebody else.

tick_tock_tick• 6 years ago

Corruption, environmental reviews, and labor costs make most major projects in the US a failure.

San Francisco's subway extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway

3 years behind schedule, with work starting in 2012 and a cost of 1.6 billion dollars for 1.7 miles of rail.

The same story repeats itself all over the country. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... New York clocking in at 2.7 billion per mile for a 6 billion dollar extension.

RangerScience2• 6 years ago

Anything jump out at you when you compare/contrast with non-failure projects?

AFAIK, examples are: 1) The east bay bridge ramp repair after that tanker fire 2) The Culver CIty <-> Santa Monica portion of the LA Expo Line

AFAIK, both of these finished early and the first one "under budget".

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

Great comparisons. I'm not familiar with these, so would you mind spelling out why you think those worked?

MAGZine2• 6 years ago

Doing anything in san francisco underground is a huge PITA. By nature, this consumes a lot of money, time, and expense.

As soon as you start digging underground you find a whole litany of old pipes, wires, mains, etc that do not appear on any drawing. You're unsure if they're in use or not, and some of them are so old that just pulling the earth away from them causes them to fail.

There's more to it other than politics. These things are hard to do in established cities, especially at the shallow depths that muni operates at.

novok4• 6 years ago

You compare america vs other even older cities in other developed european cities delivering new rail lines far faster and cheaper and those kinds of excuses just doesn't pass muster.

More context: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

bluGill• 6 years ago

Everything you say should apply to Madrid or Barcelona Spain, but worse as the city is older. Yet Spain manages to build subways for a small fraction of the cost.

pm90• 6 years ago

It’s certainly not an easy engineering task but it’s made even more complex by regulations.

At some point we need to understand the trade offs that come with regulations and either redesign them to enable large scale infrastructure projects or accept the fact that such projects are just not possible in the current framework.

So for eg environmental regulations to deter coal plants are fantastic because they encourage the alternatives. But regulations that prohibit anything seem as useless as no regulations: we need to generate power somehow.

wbl• 6 years ago

Rome has a subway that cost far less per mile.

jimthrow• 6 years ago

Here in the Bay Area we have local politicians who brag about all the building plans they’ve shut down and voters applaud this!

BurningFrog4• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but my impression is that San Francisco building projects are primarily intended for contracting companies, unions, and elected officials to make as much money as possible on.

The resulting built thing is a distant afterthought.

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

Especially when Dianne Feinstein's husband owned large portions of Tutor Perini. TPC were the guys who tried to pass off the low-quality steel rails they installed as equivalent to what was requested in the Central Subway.

My personal hypothesis is that Americans get very defensive about this because there's a cultural resistance to being the guy who got fooled, so many of us will invent reasons that fall down really fast like "SF is an old city with lots of underground things." or "SF is in an earthquake zone" or (my new favourite) "Liquefaction", etc. etc.

Paradox0• 6 years ago

Then why does Europe execute much better on infrastructure projects with similar labor costs (and more unionized workers and labor protections) and similar if not stricter environmental regulations?

Seems like corruption is potentially the only big differentiating factor here.

jcranmer• 6 years ago

The New York Times' report on the exorbitantly overpriced Second Avenue Subway work highlighted extensive union featherbedding in that instance, which probably explains some (but not all) of the cost premium.

Another plausible factor is the push to privatization and contracting in the US public sector removing effective management from the picture, so that the public sector is no longer capable of cost control. For example, by realizing when bidders on contracts are bullshitting too high or too low, or by pushing people to suggest cheaper designs.

A corollary to the previous point is that the US generally seems unwilling to look at foreign countries (especially countries not named Canada or the UK) for insights into what can be done better. This can result in people not adopting newer, cheaper technologies in a kind of NIH syndrome.

Another possible factor is that, for several kinds of projects, the US's diverging rules (e.g., FRA regulations basically banning all European rolling stock until they were revised a year or two ago) combined with a relatively low install base could be preventing economies of scale to make things cheaper.

There's lots of plausible factors. Actually digging into what makes them so expensive is very time-consuming, and I suspect there is very little pressure (let alone ability!) from anyone on any side of the political spectrum to actually make it happen. It's much easier to pick the factor you personally believe in and say it's so without any evidence to back it up.

lasermike026• 6 years ago

At the start of the covid crisis we realized that we did not have enough local manufacturing capacity to make what we need and we still do not. We have the facilities just sitting idle. It's time to get to it. There is little or no leadership to make this happen. Leadership is where it starts.

cs7023• 6 years ago

This essay is full of wishful expressions, such as "stagnation is a choice", "if we want to", and "we must circumvent", followed by exhortations to "regain the will" -- to do this or that thing for the good of everyone. It all sounds very reasonable, very worthwhile, very moral. As Larry the Liquidator would say, "Amen!"[a]

Alas, I think the root of the problem is that companies and people have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust (i.e., inefficient/redundant) socially beneficial infrastructure that everyone agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly diffuse, or might not be recouped until well after everyone alive today is dead.

No amount of exhortation will change rational behavior.

(Stronger, harsher mechanisms may be necessary.)

[a] From the movie "Other People's Money:" When Larry the Liquidator attempts to take over a company, the CEO gives an inspiring speech to shareholders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws -- to which Larry responds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q

throwanem5• 6 years ago

That's why the article also talks about state coordination, of the sort most famously seen at the tail end of the (first) Great Depression and through the Second World War - the use of government power to construct a scheme of incentives whereby building a durable future becomes rational behavior.

Which, granted, is also probably a pipe dream, the way things have gone lately. But it wasn't always, nor need it always be henceforward.

core-questions2• 6 years ago

There is a name for the third position where government works together to guide industry without centralizing everything, but it's gone out of vogue and is grossly mischaracterized most of the time by folks that don't understand the intention.

clairity• 6 years ago

a lot of it only seems rational because we allow externalities and other market corruptions to run rampant.

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

No amount of exhortation will change rational behavior.

Short-term thinking*. Rational behavior would be setting aside personal risks and benefits to do what needs to be done.

mgummelt2• 6 years ago

That's not what "rational" means, in economic terms.

MattGaiser7• 6 years ago

Rational behavior would be setting aside personal risks and benefits

We call that altruism or charity.

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

No long term is any good if you'll be broken by tomorrow.

bregma• 6 years ago

In the long term we're all dead.

seph-reed• 6 years ago

I see you. Thank you for saying this.

I will say though: if a person has no idea what they're missing out on, all of this seems very rational. Revolving the world largely around oneself is totally rational if you've never experienced a real community and can't understand how badly you're crippling your own life experience by not investing towards the good in others.

Most of the people I know who do good in the world; it's because they've glimpsed how good life can really be. They've tasted a bit of utopian paradise, and see absolutely no point in sticking around with this. It's not a story worth living through and everything people do to hold onto it just seems oblivious and short-sighted.

abtinf• 6 years ago

I agree with you that this post is really unclear. But it reminded me of another post I recently read that I liked a lot. I just posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23035794

DangitBobby• 6 years ago

Rational does not need to be synonymous with "self interested to the detriment of all else." You can be both rational and realise that everyone can benefit greatly if you're willing to benefit slightly less. Why is it that sociopaths are the only rational beings in economic theory?

nickff7• 6 years ago

Sociopaths are not the only rational beings in economic theory. Leisure and social goods can be factors in economic calculations, and most (good) economists do take them into account.

Adam Smith wrote: "[m]an naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love".

Those who say that economics is based on the pocketbook are either posing a straw-man, or are very bad economists.

raybb2• 6 years ago

"companies and people have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST"

This is true in traditional for-profit companies where money is the only motive. However, I'd like to add that we're seeing a rise in or organization structures that promote social impact over simple profit. On the more for-profit side there are B-Corps, which have been gaining ground in the past decade or so (at least based on google trends and branding on products).

Right next to B-corps are social enterprises (which have many definitions but we can broadly can think of as basically, social impact as primary goal and at least partially self funded). I don't know if they're really gaining popularity but it brings me hope to see organizations pop up that are trying to fit this bill of doing good first and making money second.

Shameless self plug for those interested in social enterprises. I've recently started collecting resources related to social enterprises (as an org structure, distinct from social entrepreneurship which tends to focus on the individual): https://github.com/RayBB/awesome-social-enterprise/

sparkie2• 6 years ago

There's a kind of social enterprise in the UK called a CIC, but the requirements to open a CIC essentially say that it can't have any political nature to it - in other words, you can't criticize or disagree with the government as part of the operation of your CIC. The CIC must be vetted before it can be established. This effectively limits CICs to following the status quo, with little chance they can be useful as a vehicle to bring about any social change that the government doesn't take a liking to.

Opening a CIC also establishes an "asset locked body," which effectively gives part ownership of the assets of the company to the government. There is no way that assets can be moved out of one of these bodies, but only transferred between them, which can include other CICs, non-profits and charities etc. No way of getting your assets back into private hands if you sign up for one and the government decides it doesn't like your plans for instance.

Simply running a private company, and donating some of your profits to charitable causes (with tax reductions) seems like a better way to keep control of your company and assets, and perhaps you could put into the company's bylaws restrictions on what shareholders can take out of the company, and what percentage of profits should be put towards community goals.

hinkley• 6 years ago

You get a really, really big dopamine hit by writing about something you imagine yourself doing (or, I expect, challenging others to do and thus feel like you made it happen).

Just showing up is a smaller dopamine hit, but more sustainable. On your worst day you can think, well, at least I did X. A rising tide lifts all boats. Chasing dopamine hits just gives you bigger mood swings, not better moods over all. It's a trap. Get out.

We have DIY groups, repair culture. We have craftsman trying to start a renaissance in various professions and quite a few hobbies. We have environmental groups, permaculture, people cleaning public spaces and parks. It's all 'out there' figuratively, and sometimes also literally. Just gotta go look for it.

And I think if you want it for other people, that you get far more traction working with an existing group to succeed, be it getting more things done, or making it more accommodating to newcomers. I worked with an amazing group that got 100 volunteers every month, probably a dozen new faces every time. Most of the work of the regulars was making sure that everyone else had something to do to feel included.

Basically what is at stake here is trying to get people to have more authentic, real world experiences, and that's not going to happen by using marketing tricks. By trying to sell to people who don't know they're buying. It's going to happen by doing things and helping other people explore doing things themselves.

Who is this Isaac Wilks guy? This appears to be his first post on Palladium. The twitter account that appears to be him is just some kid. What's he doing? What's he built? It looks like he might be into architecture. I hope there's some building going on, but I don't see it.

AndrewKemendo• 6 years ago

This is spot on. I'd add to it this way:

Humans have not been successful in identifying an explicit objective function for society and then building social, political and economic mechanisms to support/enforce those. We point to the Former Soviet Union, Great Leap forward etc... as failed experiments in authoritarian enforcement of an objective function.

As a result we have defaulted to the random walk and iterative nature of capital markets as the way of communicating, aggregating and forecasting individual objective functions into a collective function.

It's clear however that, for a lot of reasons, this system optimizes for short term rewards and not for long term planning.

That would make sense, since in effect the system is aggregating short time horizons and lack of capacity to plan long term. It's also fairly easy to hack parts of the system (marketing, arbitrage etc) for individual gain.

cs7023• 6 years ago

After decades of outsourcing ever more social policy to the invisible hand of "the market," many important components of the system we have in the US -- political, regulatory, financial, educational, healthcare, etc. -- now appear to be stuck in lousy Nash equilibrium after lousy Nash equilibrium. Everyone is worse off than they could be, and fully aware of it (judging by opinion pieces like the OP), but no one has an incentive unilaterally to break out of it.

daotoad3• 6 years ago

IMO, this is where regulation and government come into play.

Some things aren't ever going to be profitable if built and managed for the long run. These are things that should be government services.

Other things can be profitable but need to be those doing them need to be persuaded to do them in a prosocial fashion. This is can be done by internalizing externalities. Negative externalities appear as taxes or fees, and positive ones as subsidies. Particularly harmful actions may be flat out forbidden, with stronger disincentives attached.

The problem with this approach is that any significant regulatory system will have such a large economic impact that for many players, the most cost effective approach to regulation is cooption of the regulatory system.

centimeter3• 6 years ago

It's clear however that, for a lot of reasons, this system optimizes for short term rewards and not for long term planning.

This system optimizes for the aggregate weighted time preference of its participants.

To whatever extent its imputed time preference might be too high, this is almost entirely due to inefficiencies introduced by fiat money and loose monetary policy. If your annualized discount rate is 3% and the fed offers you a loan for 0.25%, you're going to take it and consume now. This increases the effective societal time preference.

Also, most people are probably a lot higher-time-preference than you are (inferring from the fact that you're on HN), so a lot of this is probably just you (and me) disagreeing with them.

the_af• 6 years ago

Thanks for the clip! I had forgotten that movie, "Other People's Money". It has so many funny dialogues between Larry and Kate. Larry is as likeable an antihero as it can get.

abvdasker• 6 years ago

I think what the article is alluding to is that "rational behavior" is relative. The behavior by large, established corporations to suppress competition, engage in rent-seeking, regulatory capture and short-term profit extraction is only rational within the current incentive structure and regulatory environment.

Both the author of this article and Andreessen know too little about the alternatives to our current mode of production to really diagnose the problem, let alone offer solutions. The economic problems facing the US lie outside of their vocabulary, so the best they can really imagine are vague ideas to "build", though I appreciate that Isaac Wilks at least understands that building with a kind of conscientious intention can never be divorced from politics.

Andreessen's original article comes across as almost laughably naive.

I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are served.

For some reason I always imagine people with Horowitz's level of wealth and influence as being smarter and more knowledgeable than they are. Anyone who dismisses possible solutions derived from criticism of capitalism so easily is not really serious about finding a solution and should be dismissed, no matter how much money and influence they may have.

mgummelt2• 6 years ago

"The only choice we seem able to make anymore is the choice not to make anything."

"American manufacturing output is larger than ever"

Which is it?

MattGaiser7• 6 years ago

It is not quite larger than ever, but pretty close.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

jbay8084• 6 years ago

Is this just that thing where the performance of intel processors is computed as being exponentially higher than in the past, so the accounting is inflated accordingly?

beefee• 6 years ago

How do we do this in the face of systemic, subsidized discrimination against American industry?

The ePacket program forces the USPS to subsidize shipping from the PRC to the US. End this immediately and let's start analyzing the forces behind this abusive practice.

MattGaiser7• 6 years ago

How many Americans are actually ordering stuff off Alibaba through ePacket? Is this actually having a major impact or is it just a very visible problematic practice?

MattGaiser7• 6 years ago

And I thought that Marc Andreessen’s original essay was light on substance...

the_reformation• 6 years ago

Been following this guy on Twitter for a while, he's great. I like him a lot because he's so eloquently defends beauty and humanism vs. what he calls "pod life"- the Zoom/UberEats/WFH triumvirate- the airportification of our cities, the bleh futurism imagined by contemporary sci-fi.

MattGaiser7• 6 years ago

airportification of our cities

I Googled this phrase and your comment right at the top, so can you explain it further?

novok4• 6 years ago

I think it's the bland sanitized global style that you see everywhere in in airport/mall combos around the world.

Bukhmanizer• 6 years ago

Just looked up his twitter, and Christ what a douche. Every post is just a pretentious word soup.

arithmetician• 6 years ago

as a Yale alum, I like to play the drinking game "take a shot every time a Yalie uses the word 'qua'"

in all seriousness, decent take, but it doesn't seem to add that much to Andreesen's essay. e.g. the whole bit about how building a new world is inherently political... yes, in a more philosophical sense. But when Andreesen writes "we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building," he clearly is referring to America's dysfunctional political climate, not "living together" / some conception you'd be considering in political philosophy.

fwiw, I do think Andreesen's essay could have more explicity (as Isaac's is) criticized out how creative/productive effort has been spent in recent times. I remember reading a quote about how crazy it is that the nation's (and globe's) top talent is being brought to Silicon Valley to, in large part, figure out how to more effectively addict young people to their apps (rather than, as it were, "build for good").

novok4• 6 years ago

We chose silicon valley because we'd rather build than waste our time in tar pits that we are not very good at navigating and frankly find excruciating to navigate.

I think many of us would of loved to work in pure physics, mech eng spaceX type stuff too.

starpilot2• 6 years ago

The problem with those other fields is they're about delayed gratification, which tech people are bad at. What you see as "wasting time" is just the normal development process for rockets, medical equipment etc.

starpilot2• 6 years ago

Everything up this point was building for bad in the attention economy. At least they admit it.

waingake• 6 years ago

Corporate America stopped building nationality once it realised it could offshore to failing states with populations who's alternative to wage slavery was starvation.

If you want to build for good, we need alternatives such as worker owned business where insentives align with the interests of the communities they are from.

aero142• 6 years ago

I genuinely want to believe that these are alternatives to the shotfalls of capitalism, but I find the evidence pretty sparse. When you say this, what is the best example you are thinking of that makes you believe it can work? I'm not asking you to do research for me, but I am curious if others have clear examples in mind when they suggest these.

luckylion• 6 years ago

An example for worker-owned might be Mondragon [1]. I don't know how well that works in different settings and how easy it is to replicate. I do know that cooperatives, even if not worker-owned but customer-owned do work quite well in Germany. They serve their customers, as their customers are also their members/owners, so their interests are aligned. They often also have social sub-goals (their primary goals being servicing their members).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

teachrdan• 6 years ago

You might compare the experience of being a member of a credit union to being a customer of a major bank. The CU, as a member owned non-profit, has fewer incentives to screw you over with hidden fees and high transaction costs.

pharke• 6 years ago

Functional industry requires a great deal of implicit knowledge that is not easily regained once traditions of manufacturing die out—like a master dying before they can find an apprentice to teach.

The masters aren't dead yet and neither are their apprentices. There are still quite a few old timers around that have retreated or retired to running small shops doing a greatly scaled down version of their trade. We could get a lot of them back in business if we made them competitive with overseas manufacturing. The word tariff is suspiciously absent from this discussion though.

lowwave• 6 years ago

How hard is to have a web site viewable without javascript? I mean it is not a web site that has maps or some kind of desktop app type of feature. At least make it so it will be viewable without javascript.

MattGaiser7• 6 years ago

I just flipped off my Javascript and it loaded fine. Are you sure that is the problem?

erik_seaberg• 6 years ago

The head is bulky but the body is readable in curl | less.

seltzered_• 6 years ago

This sparked a couple thoughts:

1) I recently learned from a friend about Manly P. Hall's[1] 1928 book "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" which delves a bit into people like Ernest Holmes, Emma Curtis Hopkins about doing things around a framing of doing "for good".

2) Venkatesh Rao recently wrote[1] about Andreesen's "It's time to build" piece and tried to explain what he think it really meant as now being a time for a "Macro Rebuild" and foundational changes to happen after earlier phases of tool-making, alternative-building, and disruption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_P._Hall

[2] https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/how-what-and-where-to-b...

jimmyvalmer• 6 years ago

The author can start with himself by abstaining from this kind of wordy pontificating. Unfortunately as a political science and Chinese major, he's rendered himself incapable of answering the call for "bridges not bullsh_t."

sudosteph• 6 years ago

Decent enough problem analysis, but the solutions proposed seem to fall into either the "absolute fluff" category:

Beauty is not simply some pleasant thing to be considered once we smash the zoning codes. It is the aesthetic force necessary to reach deep into our subconscious and activate our will to live in a new world (which, yes, includes new zoning codes).

or the "proven to be insufficient" category: > Reconstructing the better part of an industrial society will take decades; and with our present white-collar workforce left utterly directionless, inflated by elite overproduction, and medicated at world-historic levels, sending a million students to Harvard will not, as Andreessen suggests, help spur technological progress. Rather, it is the regeneration of practically-grounded trade schools and state-backed coordination that is needed to retrain a productive workforce.

Trade schools are great and all - but retraining efforts consistently fail when the jobs do not line up with an individual's self-image. Truckers will not line up to be trained as CNAs, no matter how many training programs or jobs are offered and jobs are demanded. Likewise, most white collar workers will not line up to be factory workers.

The essential thing he's missing is that the reason many Americans didn't freak out when Bill Clinton signed the bills which caused these jobs to overseas is the first place - is because the reality of factory jobs is at odds with the American dream of self-determination. Many humans don't like being a cog in the machine, even if it's a steady income. Many children of these manufacturing workers saw the harmful side of those types of jobs, and instead opted for college or service-industry jobs where they focus on developing soft skills and relationships with people. Yes they want good jobs and to not get abused by the gig job industry, but many Americans don't want to go back to being treated as human machinery in factories either. The real thing Americans want is better opportunity to use those skills to start their own businesses, to put their skills and creativity to use. That's part of the reason craft brewing took off so intensely - it's one of the only fields that young people can still break into and differentiate themselves even with limited starting resources.

All that said, I do admit that I was surprised when I saw that the author is just an undergraduate. His naivete is a bit less concerning with that in mind.

slx26• 6 years ago

probably out of topic and not too helpful, but lately I feel we spend so much time in intellectual discussion about other intellectual discussion that we kinda forget about the basics. what does people want and why don't we have it? maybe I'm just too tired today, but in my mind it's like nowadays debate about the world always ends up polluted by a never-ending collection of disconnected elements and a cloud of complexity that we can never manage to navigate with a clear sense of direction. To me Andreessen's essay sounded like just another political speech, and then this article diffuse echo around the former. Maybe I need some sleep.

It's Time to Build for Good

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