Marc Andreessen calls our unpreparedness for the pandemic a “monumental failure of institutional effectiveness.”

Renowned entrepreneur, software engineer, investor and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen writes  a hard-hitting essay titled “It’s time to build.”

It’s not just the inexcusable dearth of coronavirus tests, cotton swabs, reagents, ventilators, ICU beds, surgical masks, and medical gowns.

“We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses,” writes Andreessen.

Andreessen: We chose not to build

What is worse, we have no direct method to transfer desperately needed money to millions of unemployed workers and businesses, he observes.

What happened?

“We didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now,” writes Andreessen. “And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.”

“We chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.”

How the system is failing Americans

Andreessen cites a long list of failures that crush the dearest aspirations of most Americans.

“The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream?”

“The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”

The lack of will

Why are housing prices skyrocketing in San Francisco?

Where are the gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities?

Why can’t we educate every 18-year old at Harvard?

Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnought”-like factories – why can’t we build them across the country?

Why don’t we replace all carbon-based power plants with zero-emission nuclear reactors?

According to Andreessen, we lack the desire, the will to build these things. “We need to *want* these things.”

Rebooting the American dream

Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building, by our forefathers and foremothers.

‘There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build,” writes Andreessen.

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