It's like it was written to be the perfect example of SV myopia for the rest of the world. Some examples:
>Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard?
Because the main purpose of Harvard and other elite schools like it is to pick out the best ~18 year olds and set them on the course to be leaders in business, government, law, and other areas. Harvard isn't Harvard because they're better at education. Harvard is Harvard because they get the pick of the litter. Extending their enrollment to a million doesn't mean we get a million more elites.
The funny thing is that we basically do have the education system he asks for in some places. For example, half of medical students attend lectures rarely or never instead opting for online resources. But they still plunk down 100k for those two years because the knowledge is worthless without the credential. (And years 1/2 are the gate way to the clinical education in years 3/4 that must happen in person).
Go look at the a16z team. How many of them don't have a Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/et al type pedigree? So to answer his own question, people like him are the reason why 1 million students a year can't attend those types of places. Otherwise, their graduates wouldn't be as attractive to people like him.
>Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country
Because there's no magic factory you can build to make every conceivable product cheaply. Obviously we don't do it because it's cheaper/more efficient to produce stuff in single purpose factories. Contrary to his argument, we wouldn't get richer by manufacturing more stuff. We'd get poorer.
>You see it in transportation. Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?
Because none of this stuff is economically or physically practical. He seems to want us to live in a science fiction fantasy world.