There is a really good point in this article that is imperfectly articulated. This "We do not have this impulse today." isn't being supported.
Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale).
Picking on an industry, the supply of great home builders will be reduced if there are not also many incompetent home builders. Incompetent home builders are regulated out of existence because it isn't safe, so statistically a couple of really great builders never learned their craft because they couldn't muck around doing stupid stuff so they went to become shopkeepers instead or something. Costs associated with homebuilding will also rise.
So it isn't that the impulse is lost, it is that when America was a great builder the people had no choice but to accept a lot of shoddy work, and in amongst all the dross a few of the experiments turned up aces. They wouldn't accept that today (even though it is probably a really strong strategy) because the median voter is risk averse to the point of hurting themselves.
In countries where house building is poorly regulated, you don't end up with lots of aces, the opposite happens, the overall standards are reduced even at the top end.
On the other hand, houses do tend to be safe enough even without regulatory oversight. I definitely think that the years that people in developed countries spend working and saving in pursuit of an expensive house built to code is not a good balance of life spent to life risk.
Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale).
Care to share some links?
Prying into your profile I see you asked HN, whithout much luck, something of the sort time ago. (would you mind pinging me? my email is in my profile)
Don't have any especially good case studies or rigorous papers but the effect makes sense to me. Lots of practice leads to order-of-magnitude improvement, which suggests that a future-great system starts off producing some relatively questionable results.
> Prying into your profile I see you asked HN, whithout much luck, something of the sort time ago. (would you mind pinging me? my email is in my profile)
Thanks for the offer; won't take you up on it. I don't have spare time to read up on things like I once did.
Learning how to do something well involves a lot of failures/failed experiments (eg, there is some interesting research on learning curves that goes into similar ideas at a massive scale).
Picking on an industry, the supply of great home builders will be reduced if there are not also many incompetent home builders. Incompetent home builders are regulated out of existence because it isn't safe, so statistically a couple of really great builders never learned their craft because they couldn't muck around doing stupid stuff so they went to become shopkeepers instead or something. Costs associated with homebuilding will also rise.
So it isn't that the impulse is lost, it is that when America was a great builder the people had no choice but to accept a lot of shoddy work, and in amongst all the dross a few of the experiments turned up aces. They wouldn't accept that today (even though it is probably a really strong strategy) because the median voter is risk averse to the point of hurting themselves.