The frustration in Marc Andreessen’s post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: “a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to ‘build.’” Why don’t we have vaccines and medicines, or even masks and ventilators? He writes: “We could have these things 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.’”
...Grove wasn’t just worried about the lost jobs as production of iPhones and microchips went overseas. He wrote: “Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”
The pandemic has made clear this festering problem: the US is no longer very good at coming up with new ideas and technologies relevant to our most basic needs. We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.
I talk about stuff like this quite a bit, and I think that what is described here is just a symptom of a larger problems I call it MBA syndrome. The idea that anything done to increase profit in a three month period is good and proper, and by the way we won't worry about long term effects because all we care about is satisfying shareholders in that three month period. This is what leads to offshoring jobs and the means of production. It doesn't matter that 5 years down the road it's going to bite you in the ass because, "I got my bonus". No we are starting to see the outcome of these decisions come home to roost. (Actually we started seeing it in 2016, it is just really acute right now.) I don't know how this is going to play out over the next few months but I think there is going to be some rethinking especially now that we have seen how fragile supply chains and how overblown a lot of tech solutions are.
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