Almost every time I see an SV libertarian try to discuss social issues from an apparently disinterested, logical standpoint, they always seem trapped inside of libertarian bubble and unable to expand this viewpoint to consider other possible causes.
1) What's the evidence that technological progress has slowed? Is this nostalgia? Thiel is weighting more heavily "big" engineering projects like military hardware or aerospace above "soft" engineering projects. The Moon landing was a $150 billion project by the government BTW. Is LHC and LIGO not huge achievements? All three were science experiments, not consumer technological progress.
2)"only 3.5% unemployment". Quantitative vs Qualitative fallacy. Majority of new jobs created since 2005 are temp or gig economy jobs.
3) Is it regulation, or is it just diminishing returns in a cycle that is a punctuated equilibrium. Thiel expects steady progress, but between big cycles you have iteration and incrementally. Most of the low hanging fruit has been picked and reaching the next local maxima will require time. But SV libertarians always start out with the premise that government is the problem, and then try to tie their thesis at the end back to that.
4) Thiel criticizes Steven Chu for backing Solyndra. Fine, post-facto due diligence shows it was a bad investment. But the DoE's investment portfolio has better success rates than most VC funds, it's not that Thiel himself has never made any dumb investments. Broadening your portfolio over a large number of companies (some of them starting with a dumb idea) is not necessarily a bad strategy and even companies with unworkable ideas can sometimes pivot to companies that are big hits. Solyndra didn't, but there are numerous examples of others who did. Even PayPal is an example of a pivot, I did technical due dilligence on the original idea, Confinity, in 1998, when it was about peer-to-peer payments between Palm Pilots. Switching to Digital Wallets was also a failure. None of the eWallets that were installable apps on the desktop got traction. It was only when it pivoted to email that it worked.
5) Thiel himself built Palantir on the backs of US taxpayer money. Hypocritical for him to criticize the government and government investment. He also got lucky from a serendipitous meeting between him and Zuckerberg, did he really know then when he gave seed money to Zuck Facebook would be so big? Was FB technological progress?
So in summary:
1) we don't have a way to measure technological progress in a way that permits computing the rate. Lots of flawed proxies, e.g # of patents, etc It's subjective, and your wonderment as a child at changes in technology become disillusioned and nonplussed as an adult.
2) wages are stagnated. Unemployment isn't "low", not when your replace a big chunk of stable middle class jobs with benefits with temp/gig work.
3) public transport is successful all over the world, and Thiel ignores the billions spent on other modes (like airports). e.g. California government has spent $60 billion on SFO/LAX/OAK/SJC/ec
4) no evidence regulations are stopping technological progress, there is evidence that risk aversion from conservatives attacking government R&D for decades has, especially in areas of renewable energy or climate (e.g. ARPA-E program)
The only thing I agree with him on is that our Sci-Fi is predominantly dystopian now. The United Federation of Planets (ironically, post-capitalist according to Picard), a multicultural society of tolerance and freedom from want, has been replaced with cyberpunk misery.
But this is largely a reflection is the fact that 40 years of wage stagnation, and continued attacks on collective action in building a better future, gave way to rugged individualism and survivalism. In Sci-Fi, grand utopias usually aren't built by spontaneous order, but by collective action.