peter thiel

on inequality

in the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. it’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out.

…politics

so you have these two different blind spots on the Left and Right, but I’ve been more interested in their common blind spot, which we’re less likely to discuss as a society: technological deceleration and the question of whether we’re still living in a technologically advancing society at all. 

i think, therefore, that our problems are completely misdiagnosed. the debates are all about macroeconomics, about how much money we should print. i think you can print more money and have inflation, or stop printing money and have deflation. bad inflation involves commodity prices and inputs, and bad deflation involves people’s wages, salaries and house prices.

but the middle-way Goldilocks version, where commodity prices and consumer goods go down and wages go up, seems very farfetched. i don’t see how that sort of outcome can be crafted in a world with no growth. 

…clean tech

there certainly are a lot of areas of technology where, if it were progressing, we would expect a lot of jobs to be created.

the classic example would be clean technology, alternate energy technology. if you were to retool the economy toward more efficient forms of energy, one would realistically expect that to create millions of jobs. the problem with that retooling is that the clean technology just doesn’t work—namely, it doesn’t do more for less. it costs much more, so it isn’t working—at least not yet.

…education

there’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. there’s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn’t pan out. the education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. in many cases that’s just not true.

here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. one fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism. 

bubbles end when people stop believing the false narrative and start thinking for themselves. so many students are not getting the jobs they need to repay their debts, are moving back in with their parents, and the contract both parties signed up for is being revealed as false. 

…governance

we have different kinds of challenges on the government side. one is a little more philosophical in nature: we tend to think the future is indeterminate. but it used to be seen as a much more determinate thing and subject to rational planning.

if it’s fundamentally unknowable, it doesn’t make sense to say anything about it. to put it in mathematical terms, we’ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to statistics.

so, where we once tracked the motions of the heavenly bodies and could send Voyager to Jupiter over a multiyear trajectory, now we tend to think nature is fundamentally driven by the random movements of atoms or the Black-Scholes mathematical model of financial markets—the random walk down Wall Street. you can’t know where things are going; you only know they’re going to be random.

I think some things are true about this statistical view of the future, but it’s extremely toxic for any kind of rational planning. 

[…]

if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to believe philosophically that it’s possible to plan. that’s not the world we’re living in. a letter from Einstein to the White House would get lost in the mail room today. nobody would think that any single person would have that kind of expertise.