still round the corner there may wait
a new road or a secret gate,
and though we pass them by today,
tomorrow we may come this way
and take the hidden paths that run
towards the Moon or to the Sun.
…more from Thiel in NO DEATH, NO TAXES
- on Leo Strauss: this is always a problem with élites, they’re always skewed in an optimistic direction, it may be true to an even greater extent at present. if you were born in 1950, and you were in the top-tenth percentile economically, everything got better for twenty years automatically. then, after the late sixties, you went to a good grad school, and you got a good job on Wall Street in the late seventies, and then you hit the boom. Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty-one years. most people who are sixty-one years old in the U.S.? not their story at all.
- The American Challenge by the French writer J. J. Servan-Schreiber, which was published in 1967 and became a global best-seller: Servan-Schreiber argued that the dynamic forces of technology and education in the U.S. were leaving the rest of the world behind, and foresaw, by 2000, a post-industrial utopia in America. Time and space would no longer be barriers to communication, income inequality would shrink, and computers would set people free: “There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation… . All this within a single generation”
- on losing: show me a good loser and i’ll show you a loser
- from The Education of a Libertarian: the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
- “The Diversity Myth“
“it seems like we’ve not been thinking about the right issues for a long time, I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’
that’s where I’m weirdly hopeful, in spite of the fact that a lot of things aren’t going perfectly these days. there is a very cathartic crisis that’s gone on, and it’s not clear where it’s going to go. but at least everyone knows things are rotten.
we’re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.”
we should seek to be really good monopolists. instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it.
…the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.
think about the traits that creative people possess. creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.
” peter thiel.properly understood, political correctness is our greatest political problem. we always have this question of how to build a society in which important problems can be thought through and tackled.
it’s a mistake to simply fixate on the problem of political correctness in its narrow incarnation of campus speech codes; it’s a much more pervasive problem. for instance, part of what fuels the education bubble is that we’re not allowed to articulate certain truths about the inequality of abilities.
many of our destructive bubbles are linked to political correctness, and that’s why Strauss is so important today.
”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.
