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Comment by HillRat | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Andreessen is becoming a humanities autodidact through Burnham (the later arch-conservative Burnham, rather than the Marxist Burnham, I assume) is ... well, it's an interesting choice, I suppose. About the only thing that's stood the test of time as anything more than a curiosity is "The Managerial Revolution," but as socioeconomic analysis Chandler did it later, and better; and as geopolitical theory Mahan did it first, and better. I have a hunch he's going back to "Suicide of the West" and its bloody-minded anti-liberalism (in the "western liberal democracies" sense of "liberal") which Carl Schmidt did first, and better (using that word advisedly). All in all, it's an idiosyncratic self-education that's mired in a very specific far-right midcentury worldview.

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Marc rides on the coattails of better thinkers and engineers who came before and had less to build on. At this point he’s a contemporary American elite grifter who relies on the small government meme despite being of a generation that benefited from a social safety net.

Seeing Gen X tech leaders as great thinkers when they’re riding the wave of the world rebuilding after WW2 is so bizarre to me; none of Marc’s work is fundamental to anything these days. Thousands of others understand these systems at the same level.

It’s a LARP, it’s propaganda. It’s taking intentional advantage of quirks in lizard brain biology. He’s smart but he’s not owed fawning deference. I just can’t under people with deferential behavior towards people like him anymore.

Not that you putting it out there like that. Just saying; to keep it’s all a rise and fall of biology. The spiraling rambling they put on is a show for people who don’t know better.

Marc grew up in the rural Midwest during Reagan's 1980s. Not sure what you mean that he's some great beneficiary of direct social welfare.

In what way did growing up in the rural Midwest in the 80s mean Andreesen didn't benefit from social welfare?

Public schools and universities like his alma mater UIUC are a pretty clear example of social welfare heavily subsidized by taxpayers, especially in the 80s when you could attend an elite public university for a very low price, and have little to no student debt.

Food stamps and SSI aren't the only forms of public assistance.

When I hear "social safety net" I don't think of public schools and universities. Perhaps other people have a different definition, but as someone who has studied tax policy (at a public law school!) this was never how we talked about safety nets.

> When I hear "social safety net" I don't think of public schools and universities.

The comment I responded to said social welfare, not social safety net. But personally I consider them not so different since education is a basic need like housing and food. But since middle and higher income people rely on the education subsidy, we don't like to use the same descriptors for it that we use for food and housing subsidies.

So what we mean by "Andreessen is a beneficiary of welfare" is that he got exactly the minimum that 330+ million other Americans have access to. That type of statement provides zero insight.

(less in fact. Government education spending is higher as a % of GDP than ever.)

> he got exactly the minimum that 330+ million other Americans have access to.

It is mistaken think that access to high quality subsidized public education has been uniformly or meritocratically accessible across the generations or class or other dimensions.

MA specifically addresses his education in this interview. He says that he learned most of what he knows via independent reading, that his high school was not high quality (his computer class teacher being a lucky accident that he almost missed), and that he identifies as part of the Midwestern farmer/tinker culture (e.g. Bob Noyce).

What’s funny is none of the rebuttals touch on the reality of the world rebuilding after WW2

Just defense of Marc. Talk about missing the forest for a tree. There was nothing but extreme growth to be had when exporting to the world the items needed to re-establish their manufacturing base.

But naaah; the world was rebuilt due to the brilliance of a handful of computer nerds in one nation.

The only quote that explains it for me is: “You took too much, man. You took too much, too much.”

Yes, Marc was more privileged than boomers or silent generation. I will concede that. Somehow I don't think that was the point of the original comment.

He also mentions Keynes shortly after that, I wouldn't call him a far-right follower just for being interested in that midcentury time-frame. He does make a very good point when he talks about Keynes being relatively easy to read when it comes to economics, I mean, compared to the economics of today which has been turned into basically maths.

Also, him being from Wisconsin and mentioning Burnham, is strange that he hasn't make at least a passing reference to George Kennan. I'm reading through Gaddis's biography of him and you can sort of see, if you look close enough, the "boy from Wisconsin who has made it to the outside world"-thingie all throughout his (Kennan's) career, even when he was residing in Moscow and when he was trying to understand how the Russians/Soviets basically think and act. It is my opinion that that outside view (meaning a view not centered on the US West Coast nor on the East Coast) is what made some of his dispatches so on point and, basically, so good and informative. I wonder if that also applies to people like MA, I mean, to people who get out of places like Wisconsin and who then reach the West Coast of today. Do they still have that "outside view"?

> I wouldn't call him a far-right follower

he's been getting into Moldbug, so uh

You seem to know this area well. How did you learn about it, and do you listen to Know Your Enemy? I learnt about all those people from Know Your Enemy.

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