Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time To Build is almost a year old now. It was published on the heels of the pandemic’s outbreak last year, and served as a harsh reality check on our general lack of preparedness globally as a civilization. It acted as a call to arms for America to get back into making the things we need, not just to deal with the coronavirus, but things our society needs in general. Things like better cities, better education, better transportation, better healthcare… It was perhaps exactly what we needed to hear at the time, a kick in the nuts to jolt us awake from our nap. But the truth is, just a call to build isn’t enough.

After all, we did build. Quite impressive things in fact. In 2020, if I wanted to sell something to 35-45 year old single parents who own pets and live in suburban neighborhoods in Missouri, I can do that with a few clicks on a website sitting half way across the world. If I found a weird looking plant on a walk in the park and wanted to show it to my botanist friend who lives on the opposite coast, I can do that in real time (and in crisp HD quality) with the small gadget in my pocket. If I’m deep down the rabbit hole of researching some niche historic figure during the Third Crusade, I can fairly reliably find the information produced by a handful of experts in the subject area, by simply typing the relevant words into a text box.

All of these are things that, a few decades ago, only existed in most people’s imagination. Yet we’ve built them into reality, and much more. Just not what we really needed in 2020. Is that really due to our “widespread inability to build”? Are the things that we need during a pandemic really that much harder to build than the things we have built? I don’t think so. Andreessen is right, we simply chose not to build them, but only because we chose to build other things instead.

Except it wasn’t really a choice that the builders made, at least not explicitly. It was a choice made by no one in particular, but by the incentives of the market. The free, competitive market has always incentivized things that produce unaccountable negative externalities, as long as their benefits can be easily captured internally, and discouraged things that have uncapturable positive externalities, no matter how great they may be. And it was exactly things in the latter category that we needed in 2020. They weren’t available not because we literally couldn’t produce them, but because stockpiling medical supplies for a once-in-several-decade global health catastrophe is not a viable business strategy for any private enterprise, and the people that we have to rely on for producing such things failed us.

It’s Time To Build almost perfectly presented this classic tragedy of the commons problem, but without really taking it into account in its solution. I think this was intentional, it made for a much more galvanizing call to action, to directly get the builders to go build, immediately. But such a calling is only effective for a short while, under a crisis. Faced with the threat of a global pandemic, many people will be driven to build solutions for the grave problems at hand. But to address the broader problem over the medium to long term, we have to deal with the underlying incentive problem.

So it isn’t just about getting people to build (we are already doing that!), but more importantly, it’s about the what and the why. We have to create environments and forces that give builders reasons to produce the things we need. These may be things that cannot yield returns within the time frame demanded by venture capitalist firms like the one that Andreessen founded. Or in areas where value capture and extraction is too difficult (at least currently) to offer enough reward for builders to work in.

No single person has all the answers nor the means to address these systemic incentive problems. But there are things that we as individuals can affect, in a distributed, bottoms-up way. As I’ve realized before, attributing problems to perverse incentives and over-relying on top-down structural solutions somewhat abdicates individual agency and responsibility. Even from within a flawed system, we can alter our perspectives on what drives us. It can change how we are personally incentivized, and in turn lead to decisions that could make things a bit better. It’s time to reflect on what we are building, and what we should be building.