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ITS TIME TO REBUILD

Marc Andreessen’s essay, “IT’S TIME TO BUILD ”, was a potent call to arms to builders, innovators, and entrepreneurs. However, there was a crucial piece missing:
What is actually keeping us from building?
It’s clearly not an issue of money, resources, or raw materials. Is it effort or imagination? It doesn’t take much imagination to realize how broken our institutions are now, as Americans pay the most in the world per capita for healthcare and rent.

It’s time to rebuild the crumbling foundation of our society.


This is a message of encouragement to those who want to create new systems of health, housing, education, finance, and law. We live in a society where it’s become more advantageous to discourage people who want to create change than it is to actually create. Until we break that, we can’t hope to build things faster than they fall apart.

How we got here

The American Dream began as a linear function of time and effort. If you put in hard work and time to get a good education and a good job, you’ll be taken care of in the long run. The idea of earning your way to a comfortable middle class life was a valid one, because society championed a system that made it possible for many: freely available debt, affordable schooling, and a thriving domestic manufacturing sector made it possible for (almost) anyone with enough grit to chase the American Dream. Labor unions were created to protect workers and win them better working conditions: better compensation for their time and effort. Unions became powerful intermediaries between laborers and companies who wanted to use them. However, these unions collapsed as people within it learned how to bend the system to their own advantage at the detriment of their fellow laborers. No longer was it possible to achieve the American dream through just time and effort. You needed to shape the system to your own advantage.
Enter the era of global commoditization. The proliferation of manufacturing on a global scale made it possible to create individual components in areas across the world and assemble them in another to sell it somewhere else. The shipping industry exploded as costs plummeted and shippers consolidated and became more efficient. All who stood in the way, like labor unions, smaller shipping conferences, and protectionist bureaucrats, got steamrolled in the process. Those who succeeded made a fortune. Those who failed found other work. The American Dream was no longer a function of time and effort. You could engineer your fortune to fit any function you wanted by creating new systems entirely.
Bolstered by the advent of globalization, a cambrian explosion of automation and technology established a race for bigger, faster, cheaper. The nation’s scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs were mobilized to start building the future. Spurred forward by an arms race and the existential threat of nuclear warfare, we accelerated space travel, digital communication, and energy research which resulted in technologies we still use today. A new variable was added to the American Dream: technological leverage. With communication and automation, you can get exponentially more output from your time and effort. The innovation era allowed people to play a positive-sum game by adding more value than ever before.

Where we are

This will be the last period of major technological innovation until we’re able to rebuild our societal foundation. Basic healthcare, education, and housing don’t require new technologies, but would enable a new generation of inventors to begin the next era of innovation. We’re currently in the era of disruption, as we try to undo the damage created by decades of faulty systems.
We’ve learned to view disruption in a positive light, but disruption should be uncomfortable by definition. Disruption means that the failure of an incumbent brought forward a massive business opportunity. What do these opportunities look like? Millions of working hours and billions of dollars of capital allocated to fix a fundamentally broken system. Uber sought to replace taxi medallions, Airbnb fought to replace hotel zoning restrictions. Both unlocked economic value which was being suppressed by systems meant to protect incumbents. Education, healthcare, and housing are next. Companies will emerge that will rebuild these systems from the ground up, and will unlock trillions in economic potential by doing so. But once we’ve rebuilt, will we be stuck in an endless cycle of rebuilding as disruptors become the incumbents? As Facebook and Twitter monopolize communication and Amazon solidifies itself as the distribution layer of our entire economy, will they drive themselves forward as value creators or will they create systems of value-extraction?
When we rebuild, private companies will have more control over the public services they’re replacing. The question remains whether or not we’ll be forced into an endless cycle of replacing incumbents, or if we’ll hold these disruptors accountable to creating positive social value so that we can finally start building again.
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