"Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long."
Any sufficiently deluded rhetoric is indistinguishable from trolling.
The "progressive left" has no such blinders. Nor does the "right," in my experience, or most other people. But you could easily reverse this and say that to Peter Thiel, technological progress automatically leads to progress in quality of life for everyone. Or, more disturbingly, that social justice is an irrelevant invention of identity politics. No: those are in actual conflict. The trick of identity politics is to subsume and trivialize real social problems, and it's Thiel who has fallen for it. This is essay is just weird.
Thiel sees economic growth being appropriated to justify misguided and counterproductive social policies. That's not even wrong, it's just mundane to the point that it's disingenuous to say that anybody doesn't see that.
Is this guy going to stockpile real nuclear waste under his house until a better solution is invented? No, he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules. A ten year old's fantasy, described by a man who can afford to ignore the practical consequences of his ideal future.
This is antithetical to the hacker ethic. Good hackers look at big social and technological problems and think "how do we hack that into something better" instead of whining about how nobody else accepts their top-down solution.
Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; how to build infrastructure without becoming Robert Moses; techniques for balancing competing basic needs in a large population; p=np; obesity epidemics; vaccination against destructive ideological memes like this one.
he actually wants to build a floating city where he can
make his own rules
Well, suppose just for the sake of argument that seasteading is technologically feasible (you might consider cruise ships a proof of concept). Wouldn't it be good if there was a mechanism for people who strongly and irreconcilably disagree to separate?
We have mechanisms for that on an individual level, as people can move from a city or job to a new city or job. We have mechanisms on the level of couples, like divorce. Perhaps most interestingly, we have mechanisms on the level of small to medium size organizations, in that one can start a new company. But right now there is no frontier, no way to peacefully start a new country.
If you do believe that there are multiple stable equilibria for societal organization, then it should be a good thing if all the reds and the blues could just separate and self-govern rather than endlessly squabble. Apple is not Google, but both are successful; Singapore is not Sweden, but both are very nice countries. Things that are legal in one jurisdiction are illegal in another (e.g. porn is legal in Sweden but prostitution is not; it's the other way around in Singapore).
Similarly, wouldn't it be better if all the fundamentalists could have their own island and teach prayer in their own schools without trying to make my child read the Bible? Or if the blue state residents could actually have a country in which stem cell research was legal without having to do backflips to accomodate religious objections?
I ask only that you reconsider the theoretical merits of seasteading as a peaceful means for separation. If nothing else, it'll mean that all these guys go off and drown and stop trying to influence US elections :)
>Well, suppose just for the sake of argument that seasteading is technologically feasible (you might consider cruise ships a proof of concept). Wouldn't it be good if there was a mechanism for people who strongly and irreconcilably disagree to separate?
The trouble is that it isn't even a good mechanism. Let's suppose for sake of argument that major governments are prepared to recognize a new country's sovereignty and let them exist. Putting that country in the middle of the ocean is pointless. There are thousands of square miles of empty land in the American West and other locations all over the world that could be sold to a new country if doing so was actually desirable.
Furthermore, even if it was a good mechanism, it isn't desirable for the same reason that secession isn't. Because sure, it would be nice to be able to do stem cell research or educate children about evolution without zealots objecting. But you're assuming that you would end up in the country that Does The Right Thing, and that the other countries will leave you alone. What about the country that decides it has no objections to genetic engineering for the purpose of racial purity? Or that bans educating children about science and promotes militarism, leading to a future in which there are millions of young men with no prospects for gainful employment other than to start a war to try to gain resources through conquest? Or that, like the former Soviet Union, develops nuclear weapons (and other dangerous things) and then falls apart and fails to secure them, leaving the risk they end up in the hands of terrorists or rogue nations?
You can't just ignore idiots and insane leaders. You have to fight them and you have to win. This is true even when they aren't part of your own country, but it's especially true when they are. "We'll leave and start our own country" is not a solution, it's just running away and hoping the blast radius on the explosion you leave behind isn't large enough to hit you.
and other locations all over the world that could be sold
to a new country
My understanding is that relatively few if any countries will sell federal land. The interesting thing about international waters is that by definition they don't belong to any country.
You can't just ignore idiots and insane leaders. You have
to fight them and you have to win.
But it would arguably have been better for everyone (American and especially Iraqi) in terms of net deaths if we had ignored Saddam Hussein in 2003. I'm not sold on the idea that need to fight with every country that has an idiot or insane leader. If they attack us, sure, but that's now a much smaller set.
But you're assuming that you would end up in the country
that Does The Right Thing
I guess the idea would be more that you would move from the country if it wasn't doing the right thing, in the same way you leave a neighborhood or a job or a little league group if you have evidence that things are really going in the wrong direction. Tongue in cheek: this does presume less of a role for patriotism in one's decisions, but if immigration is unpatriotic then most patriotic Americans are descended from unpatriotic people :)
and that the other countries will leave you alone. What
about the country...
I may not understand why these issues relate to seasteading. Are you arguing that new countries are particularly likely to do such things, more so than old ones? For what it's worth, the way in which new countries have been created over the last few centuries has heavily enriched for founders who started and/or won wars. This would seem to be at least one argument in favor of the concept that seasteading founders would be less militant.
it's just running away and hoping the blast radius on the
explosion you leave behind isn't large enough to hit you
Most of our ancestors left their home countries to come to the US. I think you may be overstating the impact of their emigration on their home countries. Poland did not go supernova because millions of Poles emigrated to the US in search of a better life. The UK didn't burn down when the Puritans left for the US. No?
>My understanding is that relatively few if any countries will sell federal land. The interesting thing about international waters is that by definition they don't belong to any country.
That still doesn't really help you get recognized as a sovereign nation rather than a bunch of pirates with a funny looking pirate ship. Moreover, everyone has their price, even governments. Federal land is "not for sale" only because no one willing to pay what it would cost has showed themselves. It's worth more than the value of the underlying real estate. But go to a nation with a small economy and a large land mass and offer a sizable chunk of their GDP for a piece of land the size of Rhode Island and you're liable to get an affirmative response.
>But it would arguably have been better for everyone (American and especially Iraqi) in terms of net deaths if we had ignored Saddam Hussein in 2003. I'm not sold on the idea that need to fight with every country that has an idiot or insane leader. If they attack us, sure, but that's now a much smaller set.
I don't mean fight in a strictly military sense. Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Ammo is last for a reason, and it goes the same for international relations. The first step is diplomacy. The problem in Iraq was that we didn't give diplomacy a chance, we just started dropping bombs in response to Saddam's empty saber rattling.
>I guess the idea would be more that you would move from the country if it wasn't doing the right thing, in the same way you leave a neighborhood or a job or a little league group if you have evidence that things are really going in the wrong direction.
There is a difference between a country and a little league group. When a little league group goes bad, enough people leave that the group is no longer sustainable and it shuts down, in almost every case with no bloodshed. When a country goes bad, not everyone can leave, so if anyone with the resources to leave does so then you're left with a country in decay and its people starving and dying. Even if you don't care about that, you might start to care after they've started a few wars and generally set fire to the world.
Re: the comparisons to immigration for a better life, I would make a distinction between leaving for a relative improvement in opportunity vs. leaving because where you are now is considered a lost cause. There is no real "opportunity" in seasteading other than the opportunity to be rid of a failed government. A sea platform doesn't have new job opportunities or natural resources not available at home. It doesn't even have the things we now take for granted, like arable land or a reliable power grid. The only reason to do it is if the existing government is considered too damaged to repair. But if it's really that bad then we have an obligation to fix it, because unchecked pathological governments inevitably commit atrocities. And if it's not really that bad then what's the point of moving to a sea platform in the middle of the ocean?
Similarly, wouldn't it be better if all the fundamentalists could have their own island and teach prayer in their own schools without trying to make my child read the Bible?
No. Marinating people in their own bullshit rarely helps. More often, it makes them get resentful and/or militant.
Why should living on floating things make it easier to get along with each other, though? I am a bit too pessimistic about the human nature to have high hopes for such a project. Also, I watched "The Beach".
Hmm, yeah, I take your point. Finding ways to coexist peacefully is a big problem and I think you're absolutely right to point out that existing strategies for that haven't scaled beyond a certain level. I'm a bit skeptical of seasteading both because it has an upper boundary of utility (size of the habitable ocean) and it seems like a really potent market externality generator (the ocean is already overfished and hugely polluted).
But my first objection is more theoretical than practical, and the second one is true of the status quo.
Perhaps seasteading is a good hack to a planet crowded with irreconcilable ideologies. Increased mobility between states could mitigate some of the harms of moral arbitrage. (There's a great long now foundation talk by Nils Gilman that bears directly on the problems of social differences between existing geographically bounded states.) I can dig that.
> Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; […]
On that one, we could start by dropping the word "democracy" altogether.
"Democracy" used to refer to something like Athenian democracy. The people participated directly to the policy making of the city, or were drawn at random when it wasn't practical. They really have the power to rule themselves.
What we have now used to be called "representative government". The people do not have the power to rule themselves, they instead elect an elite that presumably would be better at ruling than the people themselves.
This is not much, but the mechanism is very similar to "intellectual property". Technically, the correct term is "monopoly". But it has bad connotation, while "property" has good connotation. "Democracy" has good connotation, "representative government" is neutral at best.
I am quite sorry to say I agree with most of the article. The problem is not a lack of progress, but a very perceptible slowdown.
If you prefer to take it that way, we are no longer accelerating. Trace our economic progress on a plot, and the derivative will not be positive.
The problem is not so much in social programs or the leftist liberals, it's the burden they now represent and that we may not be able to afford for long if we do not start accelerating again.
Watch the parallel with the decline of the Roman empire:
"The historian Lactantius, who lived from 240 to 320, tells us that the problem was a bloated welfare state:
The number of [welfare] recipients began to exceed the number of contributors [taxpayers] by so much that, with farmers' resources exhausted by the enormous size of the requisitions, fields became deserted"
(http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/venezuela-inflation-price-c...)
It would be great to be accelerating again, if only to be able to pay for a welfare state since it does not seem possible to agree on dismantling it when we can't keep affording it.
I may be ideologically biased, but I would much prefer an acceleration of progress (and to pay for a welfare state) than matching my ideological beliefs in the current slowdown and cutting the welfare state.
Maybe it is cyclical - there have beens periods of slowdown before. In Atlas Shrugged, behind the libertarianism, you can see the same very dim view of the future when fascism and communism seemed like the only ways forward for the masses, a moment which must have frightened a lot of people (I sure would have been frightened!)
Maybe our problem is the lack of hope in the future, which is reducing our will to live? I like the author conclusion a lot, because it catches the moment in our time when this happened - the hippies.
He may be wrong in framing it on their political views - the ignition of culturals wars may have been a strong factor, but at least it contained a hope for a better future.
Maybe I'm a little biased, but I think we're headed toward a new revolution in science. My work in molecular dynamics has convinced me that we aren't too far away from enough computing power to completely simulate many phenomena that are too complex to otherwise understand.
Biology in particular is very complex, and I'm not entirely sure researchers can come up with models that are subtle and complete enough to accurately describe significant processes without becoming too mind-boggling for a human mind to grasp.
On the other hand, if you can just simulate all these processes, drug development becomes a series of algorithms that optimize the desired effect while minimizing undesired effects.
Some types of technology will require quantum computers. To simulate a system of N qubits using a classical computer requires 2^N states which quickly overpowers even the most advanced supercomputers. But if we can make even rudimentary quantum computers our simulation efforts will be significantly advanced (hey, we can factor the number 21, so it's a start!).
To give you an idea of the current state of simulation research, we still require a lot of approximation models. What would you do if you wanted the most accurate simulation of a system you could get? Well, you would create one wavefunction of all the particles in the system and simulate its time evolution (Dirac equation).
Of course, we can barely do this for simple atoms right now, so instead combinations of experimental data and basic QM simulations are used to get information about atomic/molecular interactions. For a large molecular system, these interactions are studied to create a new approximation model (like coarse-grain simulations). The problem is that each higher abstraction loses touch with experimental reality. Current biological simulations are really only "suggestive" instead of predictive. On the other hand, argon and nitrogen simulations match up almost exactly with experimental data.
Again, as computing power develops, less abstractions will be necessary and simulations will become closer and closer to their experimental counterparts.
To give an analogy for some of you computer graphics people, consider the huge number of "tricks" used in rasterization engines for video games to make the images look photorealistic. However, even a simple global illumination algorithm (bidirectional path tracing, photon mapping, Metropolis light transport) give incredibly realistic results but require far more time. It's a tradeoff between models (hard to come up with good ones) and computational capacity (but doesn't require much thinking).
"Leverage is not a solution for scientific progress."
But neither is PayPal an example of scientific progress.
It's squarely in the same category as credit. A way of separating people from their money.
Science is about learning and, hopefully, improving life through that which you find. Of course if you are involved with science for the sheer joy of discovery, improvement of life, yours, is virtually guaranteed.
Theil needs to live life as a postdoc in a hard science before he can start invoking science as a call to action to get people to support his investments.
National Review is not what it used to be. What would William F. Buckely Jr. say about posers like Theil? I'm pretty sure I know and it wouldn't be very flattering.
But the statement is not applicable to PayPal nor many of Thiel's "Web 2.0" investments. Yet it is used in the column as if it were. NB Section III. Do you understand?
Yea I get that. He shouldn't use that statement to defend what he has done, and I agree with that. It got me thinking about many of the Web 2.0 funding and if is has been used for developments that improve society as a whole. Many times yes, but not always. Either way, that simple statement holds a lot of weight and is very interesting, regardless of how he uses it to defend his own ventures. You just have to ignore that part and think about the idea he is presenting. I guess I would categorize his defense of his own funding as "fluff", because it adds nothing to his arguments, but only makes himself seem a little selfish.
The most important point I gathered from this is that the pumping of stimulus in the form of fiat currency has no meaning if it doesn't spur new forms of technological breakthroughs. The value of the currency comes from a foundation, and through many convoluted layers of society, that is built on education, discovery, and passionate individuals. We have many such people in America, but that population has not been growing fast enough to hold up the rest of the country. The economy is simply a way to try and measure the value of those individuals and the advancements they create for everyone else. The problem starts once we assume that more money fixes the economic measurement. It depends on where the funds are directed, and I believe that supplementing these funds to banks is how the Fed tries to create "perceived" value and growth. This creates a loop in the financial world that comes in the form of inflation. Inflation isn't good or bad, it is a by product of the real problem: trying to increase the value of an economy without actually supporting the creation of economic value. Economy is a measure of growth and innovation, and using fiat currency to increase the value of the economy, or more simply put, the "measurement" of economy, is a convenient way of fudging the numbers. The value or measure of economy then becomes based on societal beliefs instead tangible truths (increase in knowledge, health, etc).
I actually suspect inflation does fix aspects of the economy that do actually matter, just not ones that most of us think about because we're so used to them being the norm. Remember that money has no worth in itself - they're effectively tokens of exchange.
Now, inflation is effectively a tax on sitting on your money and not actually putting it to use. If a lot of people do that it causes problems for the parts of the economy that are actually doing useful trade - suddenly there aren't enough tokens to go around to represent the actual business they're doing, and you get some really weird economic effects that neither I nor anyone else can wrap their heads around because we've never actually experienced them. (I believe this may have actually happened in the past.)
True, there is certainly a level of healthy or optimal inflation. Careful though, trade is only useful if people are willing to spend their money on it. If they choose to hold their money because they believe that the good/service/trade isn't beneficial to them or others, they should hold their money or put it somewhere else. If society decides that the good/service/trade isn't beneficial to itself, then it will work to extinguish it. It is dangerous to create artificial demand. I don't think society should be so afraid of losing jobs or industries, because it frees up labor and resources that can be devoted to more important ventures (importance in society's eyes, which isn't always the optimal solution, but adequate. Similar process that happens in evolution).
That Peter Thiel is surprisingly blind to India and China's technological progress says it all. There are two forces at work here 1) world GDP growth deceleration 2) massive shift of economic base to emerging economies. The realignment can surely be expected to bring about massive innovations into these economies and that is not a bad thing at all.
You haven't seen much from Thiel it seems. He addresses the lage growth of economies such as China extensively, and identifies that much of their growth is not adding new science or technology to collective knowledge but simply "catching up" to the U.S., others, with much "copying" of technological process. This, he says, implies that eventually once they reach parity, there will be inevitable slowdown and in addition does not solve the overall situation of slowdown in worldwide technological and scientific innovation.
I have, but I don't think the analysis is worth it. He seems really shallow at it. The massive transformation technology has brought about in India and China cannot just be termed catchup. There are many innovations to list that western economies have not witnessed so far.
Spare us your fantasy-world rhetoric, Peter. Nothing is worse than a libertarian who thinks his success is anything more than a statistically probable anecdote.
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.” —Herman Melville
If you start with false premises, you end up with false conclusions. How is faster travelling a gauge of human progress today? If anything, we need to travel a lot less than we did in previous decades for reasons other than leisure. We can counter energy needs with green and sustainable living. 'More' is not necessarily better. The author may be unaware, but amazing and exciting things are happening in science, just not in computers or physics anymore (or alchemy, or agriculture, or psychoanalysis for that matter). We have more scientists and better tools than ever. There will be leaps, but they take decades to build up, genetic therapies and brain computer interfaces being 2 of them.
Yeah, the travel thing struck me as weird too. Even without supersonic travel, compared to even 10 years ago it's still much easier and cheaper for me to pick a destination anywhere in the world and be there within 72 hours. And in the developed world traveling with a smartphone is nirvana compared to before 2006 or so.
"Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. " central tenant of the article but kind of debateable. Western civilisation was around before the industrial revolution and esentially before science became science.
I would say Western civilisation stands quite firmly on the plinth of a its primary forms of social organisation. Most notable and most important of these structures is the corporation. And it is the export of the corporation to other cultures that has enabled their major advances in the last century.
"We are no longer moving faster"
This is weird, because right now you are reading my comment moments after I have typed it in, and we're likely are not even on the same continent.
This is just hokum. Collapse of art and literature? Soft totalitarianism of political correctness? The "sordid worlds" of popular entertainment? Thiel sounds likes just another rich guy losing all connection to reality and morphing into a know-it-all railing against popular tastes. What does he know? And all of this "nature red in tooth and claw" shit - "most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state" - who is he to spit on thousands of generations of living, breathing people, and say their lives were shit? What gives him that right?
The other thing I find strange is his talk of a still-to-come "energy revolution." Thiel sounds like just another false prophet of growth. I'm pretty sure we already had an energy revolution - fossil fuels. Massive reservoirs of stored energy that we discovered, learnt how to extract, process, and utilise, leading to a bewildering array of techniques and technologies. Does it dissapoint Thiel that the fruits of these achievements have gone to relatively simple things - more homes, cars, appliances, holidays and health care for more people. Does it disappoint him too that population and desire expansion soak up our technological advances? We live in the most resource-intensive society in history - and apparently it's still not enough. We need to grow some more. It hasn't worked before, but next time, it'll be enough, for sure.
So what does Thiel want? Science to break the fundamental rules of physics? Science to break the fundamental principles of living species? Seems like Thiel is pretty uncomfortable with human eistence. He wants that 50s vision - clean, pristine, glowing, perfect, anxiety-free (a vision invented to sell vacuum cleaners to the most anxious generation in history, if I recall correctly.) Thiel is the classic modern: living in the most disease, conflict, death and accident-free society of all time, terrified of the physical realities of human existence, callously dismissive of 99% of all that humans have experienced on this planet, bitterly dismissive of the achievements of modern technology, blithely dismissive of popular tastes, wanting to have his cake (liberal human rights and the free market system) and eat it (techno-transcendence and mass adoption of his political views) too.
My advice to Thiel would be to decide exactly what it is that he wants (more fundamental physics research, better solar/wind/algae, more noble pop culture, authoritarian domination by a cultural elite, space resource extraction, better education, better sci-fi novels), figure out what's at the heart of his chosen problem and (just like a good hacker) go and come up with an innovative solution to transform the problem himself. Either research or advocate or fund or all three. But he should stop trying to preach like this on the failures of our civilization, because he is just talking out of his ass.
Many people assume that we can spend money we don't have today because we will just earn more tomorrow. This is especially true on capitol hill, but you can see the assumption pretty much everywhere. Thiel's is basically pointing out that this assumption may no longer be true. Without technological progress, tomorrow won't be better than today.
If a society borrows from the future in times of growth, the additional prosperity will cover the debt payments and nobody really suffers. If society borrows from the future in times of stagnation or decline, however, both the debt payments and the cost of living now come from the same fixed income, so the quality of life suffers. This not only applies to financial debt, but to infrastructure, educational, and other kinds of non-monetary debt.
In other words, Theil's piece is a warning that we need to get our act together. We re-start the technological growth engine, stop borrowing from the future, or tighten our belts and prepare for a general decline in our standard of living. We may not be at the tipping point yet, but it is coming if we don't change course.
Funny. There are actually a whole bunch of libertarians of Thiel's ilk whose views have the same flaw but in reverse. They assume that if they can stop the government from "debasing" money and "devaluing" their savings, they can sit on money today safe in the knowledge that it will be worth more tomorrow. Of course, without technological innovation that won't happen either. Worse, if this were possible it'd be far more toxic to technological progress than any "welfare state" could ever be; taxes merely make it slightly less profitable, whereas this libertarian idea is pretty much guaranteed to drive returns on all but a handful of investments into the negative compared to just sitting on the money. With no financial incentive to innovate, why bother?
Exactly. What libertarians want sounds very similar to a feudal society where the landed gentry are able to live comfortable lives on their perpetual (across generations) investments while the have nots (and there have to be many of these...) become virtual serfs just to survive.
A dynamic economy where you can't just sit on wealth is necessary to promote technological innovation as well as economic mobility. If you look at history, we didn't really start moving forward very quickly until we got that (around the renaissance time frame).
Some of his philanthropic efforts may prove beneficial to science. He could just be a quiet philanthropist. But these sort of PR pieces, even putting aside how annoying they are in terms the total lack of sound thinking^1, are designed to sell people on investing in "Web 2.0" companies and Silicon Valley of which he is conveniently positioned as a beneficiary.
1. Sound thinking is, I thought, what National Review, or at least WFB, Jr., was all about. This kind of contribution is pure rubbish. It's a wonder he didn't start name dropping a handful of "Web 2.0" companies to whet investors' appetites, as Andreeson does when he writes for the NYT.
I don't agree on that one. Maybe it's in his interest or objectives, but such a writing sure won't make me invest a dime in web 2.0 companies or any companies based in a country engaged in a process of self destruction.
Why can't you consider the alternative, that he may truely very worried, and try to share his views, his warning?
Altruism is a human trait. The frequency can be debated, but when we see a problem we like to warn our fellows.
What if you are a policy maker, or someone poised to influence policy makers, that could affect the prospects for Silicon Valley and "Web 2.0"?
I cannot take him and his arguments about "science" seriously because 1. he is using the concept of scientifc progress, which many of use would agree always worthy of pursuing, under the guise of "Web 2.0" which you might guess is not my idea of science and 2. his background is Stanford Law School, a Wall Street trading desk, a hedge fund and then PayPal and Palantir. He has little credibility on this topic: science.
If he were focussed on preaching the merits of philanthropic donations to scientific causes, and he has some credibility on this, I would not be criticising his writings. But as we all know there is more to his agenda and these PR pieces. They always include references to "Web 2.0" and Silicon Valley. No harm in trying to pump up the market for web startups, as long as you're within the law, but when you start sugar-coating these pitches with talk of "scientific progress", then I take issue.
It's true he may warning of a general problem with a growing disregard for science. But why does he have to connect it to "Web 2.0" and Silicon Valley? Maybe because that is the only things he knows that is remotely reminiscient of science? Or is there some other reason? Because he is a venture capitalist in that sector? What is the purpose of Section III?
How does he know that science is being ignored? Is he working in a lab somewhere and short on funding for his research? No. He's a Silicon Valley venture capitalist investing in "Web 2.0". He would know if Silicon Valley is being ignored or could use a little more attention. Of that I am certain.
It's ok to question his background and credentials on science, however the formula he uses - basically substituting science by economical growth is consistent with what I know about Sollow growth model, which tends to no growth unless an external variable called technical progress is introduced.
I am also worried by the growing disregard of science, but IMHO it is less worrysome that the actual slowing down in technical progress.
I wouldn't call web 2.0 startup, social networks and the likes "progress". We are just focusing more about ourselves instead of exploiting our environment more.
We think we are doing things, but we're not actually building new physical stuff - only barely improving.
Agreed. What if someone with Theil's resources "brute forced" some area of therapeutic development, like Gates did with vaccines? I say brute forced because the natural tendency of investment has never tended toward vaccines. It has tended toward small molecules with large target patient populations that can pay high drug prices. But through sheer force of philanthropic will, Gates allowed something to happen that might not have happened otherwise, by virtue of economics (choose whatever theory you like).
Yes- that's the interesting point : when you get so much money, you can invest it in interests worthy to you, with an overhead equal to what you will tolerate and will normally be less that what a bureaucracy will tolerate - so it's more efficient than a similar sized government projects. The Gates example is perfect.
We, the human race, have capital and more than before. We could be investing it in science. But we don't do it as much as we did previously.
This worries me, because all the evidence seems to point to a cultural explanation. I don't know how to call it - so far the best way I've found to express it is "a reduction in the will to live", a reduction of hope in the future.
The alternative explanation would be that accumulating the capital in fewer persons leads for some reason to a deceleration of investment, a notion I can't find any explanation for, since the richest would have more and more surplus as they venture away from the needs of everyday's life and therefore more and more reasons to invest it in technical progress instead of spending it on the necessities of life.
There is this idea of ostentious consumption and Veblen goods, but it seemed to me that with the decreasing marginal interest (who needs a 12th Ferrari?), investment and therefore progress would be the tendancy.
It's not. So I'm worried. Maybe there is a decreasing marginal interest in the will to live, that impacts investment and progress ? This could be supported by the decreasing birth rates in most countries and they get away from basic survival.
Paypal and Palantir are both good examples of new technologies that Thiel started that _did_ solve important problems that previously had no good solutions.
He's backed plenty of Web 2.0 nonsense that didn't solve important problems (and just backed lots of new companies in general), but Paypal and Palantir are actually counterexamples of that.
The National Review is a conservative publication. It's unfortunate that an interesting hypothesis -- our society is no longer innovating and advancing as much as it used to -- is backed up by obviously conservative partisan points that are loosely based in fact at best, or otherwise complete fabrications. I was actually tempted to flag this post but instead, I think it will be more productive to respond.
The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation that may not provide any benefits in the short-term. There is a line of thinking that any spending on government projects is wasteful and inefficient, and for established technologies, that's true. I wouldn't want to have a government search engine instead of Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/et al all pushing themselves to get better and better. But do they exist without ARPANET? Does SpaceX exist without NASA? I doubt it.
Also, for government spending on technology projects, the ROI is not based on the single project's performance but any ancillary benefits as well. Even if you think spending billions of dollars just to put a man on the moon is a waste, I doubt you can argue with the other technological innovation that spawned as a result (often by the private sector), such as LEDs, artifical limbs[0].
And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous. This graph -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IncomeInequality7.svg -- represents exactly what Thiel is talking about, except notice how two of the lines didn't plateau but increased quite dramatically. Did Thiel's wages only increase 0.7% per year? Again, I doubt it.
My opinion is that the dramatic tax cuts starting in the 1980s have fed this income inequality, because the current design of our private sector is pretty much optimized to concentrate wealth. As a software engineer, if you've delivered a project that brought them thousands or millions of additional profits with little to no impact on your paycheck, there ya go. For our profession we're wisening up to not tolerating this (such as Patrick McKenzie's blog posts[1]), but other people aren't so lucky.
For some sobering data points, look at these two graphs showing average Fortune 500 CEO pay from 1989 to now, and the value of the S&P 500 from 1989 to now -- http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-pay-20-year-historic...https://www.google.com/finance/historical?cid=626307&sta.... The S&P 500 is up about 550% during this time, and so is CEO compensation. So our executives have had their paychecks increase exactly as much as the value of their companies, and the typical worker gets their annual 2.7% raise that barely beats inflation and gets fucked. Stagnant wages have nothing to do with the "end of the future," they have to do with executives getting paid in stock, thus need to optimize quarterly profits, thus have a direct incentive to pay their employees as little as possible because that would decrease profits, and thus their stock price. Henry Ford paid his employees well above the market rate at the time because he wanted them to be able to buy his cars -- that brand of capitalist is pretty much endangered now, and now a CEO sharing $3 million with his employees is considered big news[2].
Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations? You think all the oil companies are just twiddling its thumbs, assuming at some point we'll stop wanting to run on our cars by burning prehistoric goo and they'll just shut down the business and go golfing? No, they're making sure as many politicians as it can will protect its interests, and that means pretty much blocking any government investment in renewable energy whenever possible. Do you think Mitt Romney is against Obama's new car MPG efficiency standards because of "onerous regulations," or that it will lead to less profits for his Republican friends at Haliburton?[5]
Obama's much maligned "stimulus" -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[3] -- allocated $27 billion towards renewable energy. While Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity smugly bring up Solyndra every time they can, they don't mention how the US increased the total amount of renewable energy production more in 2009-2011 than it did from 2002-2008[4]. Makes me wonder how much farther we'd be if we still lived in the days where we lauded the government for for making major technological bets that paid off with things like nuclear power, space travel, and the internet, instead of calling it "out of control government spending" in order to justify more tax cuts.
Sorry to go all Rachel Maddow on you. For what it's worth, I'm not a communist or a socialist. I believe strongly in the free market and private enterprise. In the technology sector, we see countless examples of free market principles and competition giving us faster software, smarter phones, and cheaper computers.
But I've always seen this as complementary to innovation funded by government. If VCs as we know them today existed in the 1960s, can you imagine one of them scratching his chin and saying, "So you want to put a man on the moon. How are you going to make money? Actually, don't worry about that, I'm sure it'll be awesome, here's billions of dollars."
I tried to write a TL;DR here trying to sum up my points in this wall of text, but the TL;DR itself ended up being -- yep, too long -- so I'm just going to go with this:
TL;DR: There's a lot of misinformation in Thiel's article that ended up reading to me as mostly conservative partisan bullshit, and I already get enough exposure to Fox News every time I visit my wife's parents.
> The National Review is a conservative publication.
This is a circumstantial attack. I am a liberal. The person who referred me to this article is a well-respected liberal-leaning science professor at a major research university; I do not read the National Review. Still, I found the article compelling and balanced until somewhere around section 6. In my personal view, it's thoughtful and thought-provoking, and I honestly don't understand why you would flag it beyond that you don't agree with its author's political views or with the venue in which it was published.
> The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation that may not provide any benefits in the short-term.
If I'm reading the last section of the article right, Thiel seems to recognize this (although it's not standard conservative doctrine), but he also seems to think that politicians and the public are no longer interested in science and takes a cheap shot at "today's aged hippies" instead of suggesting a solution.
> And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous.
"Mean incomes outperformed median incomes (inflation-adjusted in both cases), and there was a trend towards greater inequality." You're right that he doesn't engage it, and that's part of what makes the last sections of the piece less compelling, but given that this is the first point he uses to demonstrate post-1973 economic stagnation, he's hardly trying to sweep it under the rug.
> Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations?
This is not the reason progress has stagnated (if one believes Thiel's main argument). Corporate donations cannot affect funding for universities and research institutes, since those funding decisions are (rightly) in the hands of scientists at NSF/NIH/DARPA and not politicians. Additionally, it's hard to imagine that the kind of large-scale corruption necessary to halt economic growth could go undetected for decades.
The two main questions raised by this article are whether there's a science slowdown, and, if so, why it's happening. These aren't partisan questions (or if they are, the stock conservative answer is definitely not Thiel's), and they made me think, hence my posting this here. The last section seems to be tacked on to appeal to National Review readers, and I'd prefer to ignore it.
Just a remark: It 's often in american politics that public spending is referred to as "government spending", as if the government is just another corporate entity.
[The National Review is a conservative publication.] [Sorry to go all Rachel Maddow on you.] [While Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity smugly bring up Solyndra every time they can]
Don't let other people frame your questions. Does a college studnt only argue: thesis,antithesis, synthesis? Viz your 5 footnotes? These are (reverse) partisan talking points and wikipedia entries edited by PR firms.
[My opinion is that the dramatic tax cuts starting in the 1980s have fed this income inequality], [because the current design of our private sector is pretty much optimized to concentrate wealth.]
Look at some Data. Where is the wealth, in terms of richest counties in the USA? Washington DC suburbs.
Four of the five wealthiest counties in the nation are in the D.C. suburbs, according to the latest rankings from Forbes Magazine. [The other is los alamos, NM]
Plot that data with time, government spending, US debt, and US deficits for the past 12 years. How is you're R2? How can it be that the gov't is going into debt but wealth is accruing to lobbyists? Talk about concentration of wealth? Gov;t is the largest concentrator of wealt - they spend 30pc of GDP. And How does monopoly sound? Hollywood is built on government sanctioned monopoly. The #1 high-paid lobbyist (in teems of $$ salary) is Chris Dodd, ex-democratic senator of CT, and head of the MPAA.
[The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation ] [Also, for government spending on technology projects, the ROI is not based on the single project's performance but any ancillary benefits as well.]
Again, review some research on the actual $$ spent on this.
Its tiny. Government spending is about 30% of GDP. Avast majority (60-70%) is spent on wealth-transfer (basically welfare and social security). Actual government spending on technology is a fraction of the ~10% of govt spending that is non-wealth-transfer and non military. The actual amount of $$ even to run the government (ie, laws and such) is shockingly small and in the big picture reasonably efficient). Honestly, NASA is not the problem. That's like people who think it makes sense to take away coffee at work to save money. Businesses don't fail because of runaway coffee consumption by employees. They fail on the big picture stuff. Like product market fit and negative gross margins. Etc.
[And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous.] [Stagnant wages have nothing to do with the "end of the future," they have to do with executives getting paid in stock] [The S&P 500 is up about 550% during this time, and so is CEO compensation. So our executives have had their paychecks increase exactly as much as the value of their companies, and the typical worker gets their annual 2.7% raise that barely beats inflation and gets fucked.]
Ironically, the reason BigCo ceos get paid like fat cats in stock is due to silicon valley. This is a vestigial out-growth of the last bubble. Its also due to a variety of other factors, but you're not explaining them or shedding light on the mechanics here with your attributions. Look at % comp in equity prior to 1990 and plot that against your chart of CxO pay. It has nothing to do with libertarians, thiel, and Rachel Maddow. Remember that Clinton (Democrat) repealed Glass-Stegal. Which turnesd the banks into "too big to fail". The other conspirators in Ceo/equity etc pay? Wall Street post '98. [Clinton also signed off on the consolidation of the oil companies in the 1990s (chevron, etc), empowering more of your bogeymen.]
[You think all the oil companies are just twiddling its thumbs, assuming at some point we'll stop wanting to run on our cars by burning prehistoric goo and they'll just shut down the business and go golfing?] [Do you think Mitt Romney is against Obama's new car MPG efficiency standards because of "onerous regulations," or that it will lead to less profits for his Republican friends at Haliburton?]
This is also just off point. If you read history, you'll understand why we use petrol. Its physics: energy to mass for mobility. Same reason nuclear is in subs and carriers.
Churchill selected diesel oil in 1910 for the british navy. Nothing has replaced petrol, because "so-called-green" energy has bad math when you do power to weight and infrastructure transportability. The amount of environmental damage it would take implement most green energy solutions also is like a 10-20% better at X calculation (say, net carbon consumed/emitted), but excludes the wholesale infrastructure damage to the environment to integrate the alt power sources.
If the physics made sense at any cost, Nasa or Mil would be using it. They both use Nuclear, for example. [The middle east is a mess because UK went to Iraq and Iran in WW1 to protect their Oil Supply for the Navy of the British Empire. The US went into Saudi for the Same reasons. The USSR into the baltic/stans etc.]
[Obama's much maligned "stimulus" -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[3] -- allocated $27 billion towards renewable energy.] [Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations]?
These are just talking points and have nothing to do with innovation.
[Makes me wonder how much farther we'd be if we still lived in the days where we lauded the government for for making major technological bets that paid off with things like nuclear power, space travel, and the internet, instead of calling it "out of control government spending"]
If you think about it, Nuclear power and space travel are a direct result of War and defense budgets. Not the type of government spending you think of as altruistic R&D. The manhattan project was the sin-qua-non of nuclear. The ICBM that of space travel. Same thing Darpa-net to Internet. Same thing GPS. Same thing Titanium (skin of SR71 spy plane). Carbon Composites, etc. It goes without saying that Rachel Maddow and Obama do not favor "a pro-war for pro-technology" public policy thought process, do they?/
[If VCs as we know them today existed in the 1960s, can you imagine one of them scratching his chin and saying, "So you want to put a man on the moon. How are you going to make money? Actually, don't worry about that, I'm sure it'll be awesome, here's billions of dollars]
VCs existed in silicon valley starting in the 1940-1960's.
They venture backed companies throughout the 60's and 70's, including Intel, apple, etc. They helped found companies that would have otherwise never existed. When they were tiny. And the reason for the space program was military in Origin. It was never a business proposition, and in the same way all military is spent from "public pools of money" not private pools of money targeted for investment.
So, I think without debating the policy A vs B of left and right, it makes sense to take a closer look at history. Even the NYT had this to say about the internet. It makes for interesting reading and it is more in the spirit of what HN is usually talking about:
Like many of the bedrock technologies that have come to define the digital age, the Internet was created by — and continues to be shaped by — decentralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor with the entire world. Yes, government financing supported much of the early research, and private corporations enhanced and commercialized the platforms. But the institutions responsible for the technology itself were neither governments nor private start-ups. They were much closer to the loose, collaborative organizations of academic research. They were networks of peers.
tl;dr summary: We're all screwed and the hippie progressives and tea partiers can't save us because they aren't being really innovative and getting to the heart of the problem.
So first off- I agree. Second, this post is way too long, pisses off the left, and doesn't provide solutions that I had the attention for.
So, I'll provide some. Put money into education and infrastructure, and teach our kids to be innovative, then get our debt fixed in a way that doesn't cause massive change and disable business. That isn't the Libertarian stance, but it is a the moderate stance, which no party supports these days.
I agree in principle. But I think the assumption that pumping more money into fields like education will generate a substantive improvement has failed. The problem with our education systems is cultural, not fiscal. School does not teach children how to think and argue, it teaches them how to pass tests and coast.
This article is a good example of the many many things that could be done other than pumping in more money to improve ed.
Any sufficiently deluded rhetoric is indistinguishable from trolling.
The "progressive left" has no such blinders. Nor does the "right," in my experience, or most other people. But you could easily reverse this and say that to Peter Thiel, technological progress automatically leads to progress in quality of life for everyone. Or, more disturbingly, that social justice is an irrelevant invention of identity politics. No: those are in actual conflict. The trick of identity politics is to subsume and trivialize real social problems, and it's Thiel who has fallen for it. This is essay is just weird.
Thiel sees economic growth being appropriated to justify misguided and counterproductive social policies. That's not even wrong, it's just mundane to the point that it's disingenuous to say that anybody doesn't see that.
Is this guy going to stockpile real nuclear waste under his house until a better solution is invented? No, he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules. A ten year old's fantasy, described by a man who can afford to ignore the practical consequences of his ideal future.
This is antithetical to the hacker ethic. Good hackers look at big social and technological problems and think "how do we hack that into something better" instead of whining about how nobody else accepts their top-down solution.
Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; how to build infrastructure without becoming Robert Moses; techniques for balancing competing basic needs in a large population; p=np; obesity epidemics; vaccination against destructive ideological memes like this one.