We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. Solve the climate crisis by building — energy experts say that all carbon-based electrical power generation on the planet could be replaced by a few thousand new zero-emission nuclear reactors, so let’s build those.
We know how to build highly automated factories.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, American manufacturing output is higher than ever, but why has so much manufacturing been offshored to places with cheaper manual labor? Famed software pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is out with a new piece, called “ It’s Time to Build,” that is making the rounds among the "thinkfluencer" crowd. Then 100?

That seems hard to believe when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers. Where are the millions of delivery drones? In America!We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing. To which I say, prove the superior model! It’s very easy to feel helpless in the face of it all, to throw up one’s hands. NEXT And we need to demand more from one another. We chose not to *build*.You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally.

Maybe we can start with 10 new reactors? But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. Clearly not, or we wouldn’t have the homes and skyscrapers, schools and hospitals, cars and trains, computers and smartphones, that we already have.The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. 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.Sign up to get our best articles, latest podcasts, and news on our investments emailed to you.Sign up to get our best articles, latest podcasts, and news on our investments emailed to you. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. Lacey produces and hosts The Energy Gang and Interchange podcasts, two of the most popular podcasts on energy and cleantech.

When the producers of HBO’s “Westworld” wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn’t film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore. We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. The problem is inertia. Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. Why not build a far larger number of universities, or scale the ones we have way up? The problem is regulatory capture. What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?You see it in education. Stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future. Why not educate every 18 year old?