Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s much closer to economics, right? Well, this is the other thing. Economics pre — what was it — the 1950s, 1960s, it wasn’t all these formulas. It wasn’t all these formulas. It wasn’t a branch of physics, like it seems like it is today. It was descriptive. It was verbal. If you read Keynes, it’s like this, and even the people that preceded him. I was fascinated by the Second Industrial Revolution a while ago, and I found this book on Google Books about David Wells, who was an economist in the 1880s. He basically just describes how the Second Industrial Revolution rolled out at that time. He just tells the story. He goes through, like, “Here’s what’s happening.” That was an economics book with no formulas. The form of humanities that resonates me is like that. It’s history, economics, philosophy, politics merged. And then, at least in my case, you’re trying to find the people who are analytical and descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, but it was a different kind of thing. You could argue that they were not rigorous. You could argue that they were storytelling and not being scientific, but I think they were being scientific in their way at that time. They had their issues, but they didn’t have our issues. Everything today is filtered through our politics. It’s really hard to understand, in my view, how people thought, especially before the 1960s, and again, I think, even before the 1930s, through our political lens. You have to go back and reconstruct what they actually talked about at that time. It turns out to be more interesting than I would have thought. We learned from Twitter that today’s supposedly rigorous thinkers are often not very rigorous at all. They often use rigor against themselves, in a sense, right?…

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