Build institutions, not apps

That sounds totally reasonable, lest your city become clogged with broken-ass scooters after the n-th scooter startup goes on their "incredible journey" to the stars.

Perhaps if you're going to litter the streets with scooters you should be required to post up cash in escrow for unlittering said scooters if/when you disappear.

Really? Technologists are offering real solutions to the challenges of poverty and inequality in America? Looking around at the bay area, you certainly could've fooled me.

Few would dispute that the U.S. is in a bad way. But judging from Silicon Valley's major successes of the past decade, at least some skepticism seems in order.

But nations do have the capacity to act rationally, so when I these posts and wonder if the world really needs more strategies. Do we need to spend more time strategizing, rather than getting on-board with the solutions that already have steam (as imperfect as they might be)?

Anyway, here is my contribution to the noise: https://paul.copplest.one/blog/why-nations-succeed.html

    [1] happy/positive, whatever word you want without derailing the point of the comment
    [2] for anyone with depression, please read this with positive intent. Depression is horrific and I wouldn't wish it on my enemies

He cites some obviously real examples of institutional dysfunction (hi, San Francisco zoning!). But these examples are all (or are all portrayed as) institutions "hindering", "stifling" or "limiting" otherwise beneficial processes. This implies a worldview in which the only thing institutions do is get in the way of "the freedom to build", and the only implied remedy is to get them out of the way.

This is counterproductive, because it takes us straight back to the "government is [bad/good]" argument. These arguments haven't got us anywhere so far, even - indeed, especially - in Silicon Valley, which features one of the world's highest concentrations of libertarians.

(My amateur hypothesis: If you approach institutional reform with an agenda of dismantling those institutions, that's a recipe for scorched-earth resistance from anyone who believes in that institution's goals - however well or poorly that institution is currently functioning. This leads to the worst of both worlds: dysfunctional institutions, held in stasis by the tug-of-war going on around them.)

If you really believe in institution-building, you should be able to cite some examples of what they should be able to do more or better. Otherwise, you're just advocating old-school deregulation and calling it "building".

Tyler Cowen's summary of "state capacity libertarianism", which this article cites, is much preferable on this score: It is explicit about what Cowen believes institutions should do (and do well), as well as what they should not: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/wh...

I think this is a good question, why do tech companies spend so little money on YIMBY lobbying? (At most a few million, AFAIK.)

Andrew Carnegie was a robber baron bastard, but it was him actually cutting checks that gave us museums and concert halls that persist to this day.

The Silicon Valley "elite" like to bitch, but they want everyone else to cut the check.

I find Ezra Klein's recent line here useful:

"[W]hatever the recommendations, the same thing is needed: A sustained and concerted movement that cares about institutional reform. But people get much more excited about building something, anything, than about reforming existing institutions. Meta-building isn’t a popular pastime, and the patient, focused work it requires is particularly frustrating, in my experience, to entrepreneurial personalities." [1]

I confess that I myself find it incredibly frustrating. See a government program that's incredibly difficult to deal with, friction-laden up and down, with reams of paperwork with legalese?

One can build a layer on top that eliminates most or all of the friction. But it will always be limited by the resource models that can sustain it. And many problems simply have no workable models other than state financing and operation (market failure, in other words).

Instead, doing the work to make that program much better institutionally involves long-term (frustrating) strategies like:

- Think tanks / white papers: influencing the epistemic landscape among policymakers

- Organizing: shifting the Overton Window to make the change you want to see broadly accepted

- Coalition-building: working with allies with overlapping agendas to get more muscle behind your own priorities

And even... waiting. You often have to wait — years! decades! — for a window to come where you can get a big thing done. People worked on big healthcare reform for 3 decades of effectively zero progress — and then in a year they passed Obamacare.

That work is long, hard, much more probabilistic than product work, and much less directly-controllable by a given person.

BUT there are playbooks to get it done. And I do wish technologists looked to those tools more to make the institutional changes we need to make it so the opportunities (individual and societal) of entrepreneurship were more widely accessible.

One concrete example: I've long thought that a basic source of friction in public services is because user experience isn't well-monitored, and therefore not well-considered in public policy decisions.

Technologists are great at measuring friction. It is a craft well-honed in an environment where conversion is a live-or-die metric. But translating that craft into institutional change requires something like a think tank, and/or an organized movement with an agenda.

I think we'll get there, but it will take some risk-takers who understand that long game and financial backers who aren't as well-versed in it, but who have the risk tolerance of SV and the savvy to see that playbook does work, and point it at a problem with significant leverage.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build...

Technologists playing a more active role in government?

VCs in cabinet positions?

The idea that a city can 'target' a population is laughable and absolutely terrible. Honestly, I stopped reading right there.

Politics is quite complex and full of its own jargon. It is not simple to understand.

Why not to develop apps, which will streamline a complex political process? Take zoning for example. There are new construction hearings, which only few NIMBYists attend, while pro-builders do not even know where to search for those. Say I'm a pro-builder busy with my own career. I have many questions. Where are those hearings held? Can I attend them, or there are some requirements? How do I meet those requirements? Is there any voting taking place? Where is it actually decided whether to build or not? What is the next action I can take given I am an average city dweller able to dedicate few hours per month for politics? If there is an app that would bring the tasks down to small actionable points with descriptions, and offer simplest step by step instructions, I may find it actually fun to do.