While I agree that much of what is wrong with society boils down to a lack of civic participation and familiarity with institution-building, what I think this article perhaps misses is that social and technological changes militate against the effectiveness of a robust civil society. As conglomerates and governments can expand their reach through communications and management technologies, it becomes more feasible for institutions to manage large jurisdictions at a distance without intermediaries. And that same ability to grow to a large size also prevents smaller organizations from arising and seeing any effectiveness in their efforts.<p>I also disagree that Silicon Valley represents any kind of solution to this issue. The centralization of power in the Valley is almost more extreme than in the "old world", as multinational companies dominate the industry and destroy competition. Most people will do better for themselves financially by joining the elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to build a smaller company or product, and the big companies keep it that way through massive networks of financialization and regulatory capture.<p>In order for civic and social institutions, or small self-built institutions, to be attractive to Americans, people who join them have to have some experience of succeeding in their aims, and I think this is less and less the case, as the institutions that already exist suck the oxygen out of the space of potential action.
<i>"While this was happening, the civic and religious institutions that Americans traditionally relied on to manage their own affairs were quietly disappearing. Some organizations, like religious boards, unions, and bowling clubs, declined in number; others, like charities and NGOs, switched from a model of mass participation to a model of mass donations. Add it all together and you find that the percentage of Americans expected to be familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order shrunk precipitously."</i><p>This is a good point. Do you belong to any non-governmental organization where the members can vote to fire top management, and this happens once in a while? A golf club? A maker space? A gym? A homeowners association? A mutual insurance company? A savings and loan? A school? Anything? Such institutions used to be common for non-profits. Now they are rare.<p>Robert’s Rules of Order is for meetings where the members hold the power. Motions are voted upon and then are binding on the organization. Unless the members have power, it's just a talk shop.<p>When someone set up a local maker space, they set it up as a nonprofit with a self-perpetuating board. That is, the management chooses its own successors. I declined to contribute.
Cultural sclerosis may "simply" be a mix of unintended consequence and deliberately intended consequence (sabotage). The impetus for much of our legal system might be fine but not paying attention to unintended consequences then results in sclerosis. This is easy to achieve in an accreting system of rules and laws: "Let's just add one more rule - that will sort it out right up".<p>There are fields of (american) activity that clearly understand the strength in building things fast - and that are designed for that. The startup world is still one of these - both for starting a new venture and for deploying fast and sorting out the details later. This is about the "rules of the game" and the infrastructure (funding, legal entity formation, getting people to join, hosting, software tools...) All around, the infrastructure and culture support the principle.<p>Other institutions seem built as-if for endlessly delaying projects. In most cases this was not the goal. And in some cases, that IS the goal: it works so well that some don't let it go to waste.<p>Still other institutions DO exist so as to allow moving legislation at a decent pace but have fallen out of favor - with the executive prefering endless ad-hoc informal processes in the vague hope of achieving unity, consensus, peace well in advance of actual change. With not much change possible as a result.<p>That is not to say that "emergency committees" don't make plenty of harm. Brings to mind the ruling against fat and in favor of carbs: [Senator: I do not have the luxury. My constituents are dying. I can't wait for your scientific data.]<p>But this should be a deliberate area of effort: improving institutions for time effectiveness and correctness. Even from a basic economics point of view, there is quite a bit of economic growth potential that comes merely from responsiveness. Same from a quality of life point of view. When need is recognized, pouring money in study (scientific, engineering, legal...) including study of unintended effects, then moving on with a ruling. Which does not mean in the sense of "environmental impact study" which seems to have become a weapon: a financial barrier against doing anything.<p>In other cases, strength should be in recognizing that headline cause X is not actually an emergency and tabling it until it naturally accretes more data or is simply forgotten.
Discussed at the time:<p><i>On Cultures That Build</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638</a> - June 2020 (189 comments)
> today’s children rarely leave the sight of adult authority figures, and have learned instead to solve conflicts by appeal to authority<p>My niece who dealt with the kid hitting her on the playground every day by throwing a cinderblock at his face respectfully disagrees. I'm not sure this author has seen a modern public school.
We don’t appreciate the maintainers much. Look at Linux, Git or any other open source project. The initial inspiration was absolutely needed but continued maintenance culture is what made them successful and have lasted decades.
This could just be a bunch of errors. The subway issue is a good example of this. The initial NYC subway was put in place with cut and cover construction. Because it was so long ago there were minimal obstacles. The Second Avenue subway was proposed early on, but even back in the day it was rejected as being far too expensive because of the complications caused by the soils, existing subway routes, and other infrastructure. Over the years the possibility of a Second Avenue subway was repeatedly raised and rejected as being far too expensive because of unavoidable complications. Then in the 1990s NYC politicians decided that miraculous new tunnel boring technology would make the Second Avenue subway easy and cheap. Modern technology solves all problems. It was a "no brainer". They decided to it was time to be a culture that builds. And the result was a terrible mess. The tunnel boring technology eventually worked, but only after much complication and multiple explosions of costs.<p>So what is being advocated here appears to be the opposite of the truth. In the past things were relatively quick because we knew our limits and when to stop. We used to be a culture that could refuse to build. In contrast, this modern idea of being the culture that decides now is the time to build leads us astray so vast fortunes end up being spent on misguided adventures. Want to be a culture that is good at building quickly? Start by saying no to most things. And try to understand history as it is and not through meaningless comparisons of cut and cover subway construction to the modern wonders of tunnel boring machines.
I'm a big believer in infrastructure.<p>Slow building in layers, with each layer providing a context and a foundation for the next.<p>That takes time, and can be V E R Y, V E R Y, B O R I N G.<p>In order to do infrastructure successfully, we need to commit to a long, protracted development process, with a shitton of testing at every stage, and refusing to go on to the next stage, until we have the one we're working on, now, <i>complete</i>.<p>And we may not even see the final results. We may simply be the first-stage booster of the project, and our name may be buried in the dust, raised by the folks that stand on our shoulders, and get the credit.<p>It's not easy. I've done it, multiple times.<p>American culture, as it stands now, is no so good at this kind of mindset.
Robert Moses and a few others like him are why we don't build fast. We can - we have just learned the hard way that some things are not worth building and so we threw roadblocks in the way to prevent those abuses. (safety standards are another thing we threw in that makes building take longer for what I think we would all agree is good reason)<p>Sometimes I think we went too far the other way, but lets not swing too far back.
> Private enterprise was caught as unprepared as everyone else, and has subsequently struggled to produce a tenth of the innovative counter-virus workarounds their Chinese counterparts managed to dream up (and that under much greater time pressure).<p>It's absolutely mind-boggling that the first 3 countries hit hard by covid were China, Korea and Italy. China and Korea appeared to keep it contained and given everything we know about trusting these two countries, we chose to trust the Chinese model?<p>In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was posting documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0], but we chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis of our lifetime?<p>Meanwhile, Korea was being pretty open with their approach and while I don't think it would've been effective in the U.S. it was certainly the more palatable approach and less damaging to the poor and most vulnerable population.<p>We also saw Italy using the Chinese model for containment and it failed miserably, yet the U.S. stood firm in following their failures. Insisting that we protect the middle and upper class while demanding the lower class keep the "important" jobs running and giving the poverty class nowhere to turn.<p>[0] <a href="https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Lies-Spread-by-the-Chinese-Communist-Party-CCP-V2-2.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/...</a>
Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is. Nature will not permit unbounded growth, but she will permit the pursuit of arbitrarily tight tolerances. To me, this is the key cultural shift that America requires: not to build to expand, but build to improve. There is a feeling of compression, intricacy, delicacy here. That is, we can stay legitimately busy increasing the fractal complexity (and beauty) of society and infrastructure without expanding. If we nostalgically fetishize growth, we may feel better in the short term but we become a destructive virus in the long term.
This article reads like typical doomerism. Can we replace the United States with any other highly developed (G7-level) nation and get the same result? Yeah, pretty much. For example: Swap in Germany or France. What big stuff have they built that amazes the world in the last 30 years? Not much. "Oh no, Germany/France is doomed." No, they are doing fine.<p>These article presuppose that China will grow fast and endlessly and "take over the World" (economically, then perhaps militarily). Haven't we seen this before? Oh yeah, Japan in the 1980s.<p>Now for my ad hominem attack: The about page on this blog is hysterical. Choice quote:<p><pre><code> taught Homer to the children of Beijing billionaires</code></pre>
Best part was in the footnotes.<p>> There was a time when average Americans could get together and, in one afternoon, build an entire barn.<p>> Yes! A barn! Can you imagine average Americans doing that today? Not a chance!<p>> They’d spend weeks debating the membership and organizational structure of the Barn Architect Selection Committee, whose members would then get into a lengthy squabble over the design of the logo to appear on their letterhead. Ultimately this issue would become a bitter and drawn-out dispute, be taken to court, and the people involved would start complaining of depression and anxiety, and psychologists would announce that these people were victims of a new disease called Barn Committee Logo Dispute Distress Syndrome, or BCLDDS, which would become the subject of one-hour shows by Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael, after which millions of Americans would realize that they, too, were suffering from BCLDDS, and they’d form support groups with Hot Line numbers and twelve-step programs. That’s what we modern Americans do.
This article really did not age well.<p>As misguided as our policies were during the pandemic, It’s sort of ironic reading this article knowing that American companies “built” the coronavirus vaccine.