Thoughts on American Dynamism

Once upon a time, A16Z talked about the need to start building again — a fairly balanced call to reboot the American dream, to build more manufacturing, education, healthcare, and infrastructure capacity, and to achieve cheaper energy, all to make American lives better across the board.   The essay criticized the right and the left for their respective failures, and called on all of us to start building again.  This seemed reasonably inspirational to me.  I want to live in a country where we are all focused on making lives better for all of us every day, where we are aiming at a target where we all live longer, live healthier, learn more, work on the things that fulfill us, all enabled by new investments in infrastructure, life sciences, material sciences, and energy.

A16Z has evolved these ideas into “American Dynamism” led in part by Katherine Boyle, and some of the strongest points of view have shifted from the original goals:

• The country’s path forward involves cultural conservatism and more weapons production
• building companies that support the national interest — a new language of “patriotic investing,”
• a portfolio heavy on defense tech, including Anduril, Hadrian, Apex Space, Castelion, Saronic, and the American Dynamism 50.
• Strong advocacy for fixing defense procurement processes

Some of this I can go along with.  Boyle makes a strong argument for shifting risk assessment and capital allocation away from government bureaucracies and into the hands of private investors, and this makes sense.  An example is what has happened in the space industry as we have moved towards a private launch industry away from a captive NASA capacity.  The US is now the leader in launch and LEO operations thanks to this shift, and we should encourage more private investment and risk-taking across almost all areas.  

And I get that having a strong and competent defense capacity is essential.   There are forces and countries that are inimical to the American dream of freedom and democracy, and we need to be able to defend ourselves.  But “American Dynamism” seems almost exclusively focused on blowing things up and killing people, in ever more efficient ways.  There are no other legs of the stool.  

And so, I reject this entirely as a vision for the country, the tech industry, for an investment firm, and as a personal philosophy.   There is no level at which this is appealing.  We need a national strategy and technology strategy that empowers every person to do their best and make the most significant contribution they can.  We need excellent low cost education, we need great policy and financial support for entrepreneurship, we need to rebuild our infrastructure, we need much greater levels of housing development, we need to encourage the best brains from around the world to come to the US, we need to build out the modern industrial electrical stack and modern energy sources, we need to continue to scale up our space industry, we need to encourage more biotech breakthroughs, we need to keep investing in our AI and software and chip technology, etc.   We need a positive vision of building the greatest society on the planet, with the benefits delivered to every citizen.  Defense technology is needed, but it is just a modest ingredient of this.

And we need this great economy humming, because that is how we can fund defense technology.  We didn’t win WWII because we spent years building up great defense technology — we won because we had a great economy we could turn to the purposes of defense production.  We arguably won the Cold War because our economic growth swamped the USSR’s ability to keep up.   We need to start building again.

Shorts

From Spyglass: “…if a pocket of power generation appears, a data center will form around it.”  A very succinct articulation; energy and technology are completely intertwined now.

From Simon Willison: “Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP”.  It is so much fun to follow the rapid back and forth of AI these days.  Every part of the technology industry has been reinvigorated.

Very grounded advice from Ethan Mollick on how to use AI right now.

From Madhu Gurumurthy:  “AI is accelerating product bloat…Speed is abundant.   Craft is Scarce.”  Making the argument that thoughtful measured use of technology remains a scarce skill.

From Paul Krugman:  “China Has Overtaken America, And Trump’s policies guarantee that we will never catch up.”  Oof.  But look, we are playing golf, not tennis.  We can measure ourself against others, but their success does not limit our success.  We can keep improving our game.   There is still plenty of time and opportunity for us to step up.

From Mike Dunne:  “How China Is Gutting Western Automakers: The Formula: Scale Up. Flood In. Starve Out.”