Regarding "It's Time To Build"

An open letter to Marc Andreessen

April 22, 2020

Rebecca Henderson, Harvard University.

Dear Marc:

Thanks for your piece. As an engineer – I’m a Mech E from MIT, as well as a professor at HBS – I’m in complete agreement with the idea that our best way forward is to build – factories, hospitals, schools, universities, wind turbines – you name it, we need it.

But I don’t believe that wishing makes it so. I don’t see an alternative to doing the hard work of politics – mobilizing support, making the case for change, fighting for scarce resources and making the kinds of compromises that are necessary to get things done. You suggest that the world’s response to COVID suggests that no political party has the answer. Political parties are complicated things, and I wouldn’t suggest that we should follow any one of them blindly. But – with respect – responses to COVID have been dramatically different across the world, with some nations responding to the pandemic much more effectively than others. South Korea’s aggressive test and isolate strategy has meant that they have not had to lock down the economy. Beijing and Shanghai never saw major outbreaks, and China now is open for business. Death rates in Germany are much lower than those in Italy or Spain. Children are back in school in Denmark.

Why wasn’t the U.S. even minimally prepared for the pandemic, and why did the Federal government move so slowly and so ineptly when it first emerged in America? Why does our K-12 system fail so many of our children, and why don’t we have a stronger educational system? Why is our infrastructure a joke? Because a third of the population has decided that government is a menace, and the rest of us haven’t found a way either to persuade them they’re wrong or to overrule them.

But isn’t government inefficient and bureaucratic compared to the private sector? Sometimes, of course. But while a well-run government should strive to be efficient, that’s not its role. In a free society, beyond national defense, government has three primary roles – to ensure justice and the rule of law, to create and enforce the rules of the game that make free markets truly free and fair, and to control the public “bads” and create the public goods in ways that allow us all to thrive. It was the Congress of 1861-62 – no longer hamstrung by politicians from the Southern states determined to block federal power – that passed the Homestead Act that settled the west, the Pacific Railroad Act that tied the country together and that Morrill Land Grant Act that funded colleges that became the world’s greatest universities.

You’re right. We need to build. We cannot do so without the drive and innovativeness of the private sector. But we must also get the politics right. Only governments can mobilize resources at the scale required to give us a health care or an educational system that gives everyone genuine freedom of opportunity. Only governments can change the rules in ways that will enable us to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco, or to rebuild our transportation networks. Yes, the problem is desire. We do need to want these things. Yes, the problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. Yes, the problem is regulatory capture – incumbent firms are far too powerful.

But we cannot separate “the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics”. We cannot build at the scale we need without rediscovering government as a transparent, responsive, effective partner in building a free, thriving society. And we will not rebuild our government without building our politics. Engaging in politics is often frustrating, messy and slow.

But it is the only way.