> Sure, Marc added some bite to the piece — he called it a manifesto, after all — but most of it was grounded in economics: if you can do more with less, you get more for less. Sadly, in the dozen responses from outlets like the New York Times and Gizmodo, that got zero airtime.
Both the economic and editorial observations are true, and miss the points by a wide margin. Without rehashing all of them here, it's simply that this wasn't the point of the manifesto. It was that everything only gets super better for everyone with no social or ecological downsides, and it's wrong to question what gets created how for whom, and everyone should just get out of his way and let him run everything.
So this is the motte to Marc Andreessen's bailey?
"Why are you upset about me namechecking fascists and anonymous twitter shitposters in an unhinged and uninformed rant calling for me and my friends to be unchecked by democratic oversight? I was just saying that iPhones have gotten better and books cost a lot more to produce in previous centuries!? Who can argue with that? Why do you hate progress?"
In any free market, at equilibrium, all prices for any good decreases to the absolute minimum required to produce that good. There is no profit--it is all competed away.
If you want profit, you can't be in a free market at equilibrium. You can either attack the "free" part (create an aristocracy or oligarchy) or the "equilibrium" part by introducing disruptive innovations, which will lower the cost of producing something, allowing you to extract some profit.
But eventually, a free market will return to equilibrium, by lowering all the prices to reflect the reduced costs of production, and profits will be competed away again.
All innovation is therefore deflationary, and happens in the context of a market which is not in equilibrium, i.e. is unstable, and therefore will crash from time to time.
Surviving these crashes is easier if you are an aristocrat or oligarch, so....we get what we have today, a mixed market, free enough to allow for innovation, but which most of the profits go to oligarchs.
Unfortunately, just because the market has to still be free enough to allow for innovation, it is still unstable, which is why it crashes every 10 years or so, and all the governments of the earth (controlled by the oligarchs) have to bail it out. Since the whole point is that the oligarchs don't have to use their own money to do this, the governments use money which is essentially just printed. This creates inflation. Balance is restored to the force.
For the past 40, 50 years or so policymakers have been remarkably able to maintain this balance to avoid both inflation and deflation, but its a very tight rope to walk, and currently we are on the inflation side of it.