Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation

as an obsessive observer of his over the past decade, I've been concerned... It could be a product of his increased concern over public media coverage in general (he keeps his really interesting views just to himself, as Nick Cammarata mentions on Twitter), and this trend may have only intensified recently, as he has been strangely quiet

Thanks, I just found this better stat: "The “FAAMG” basket accounts for 18% of the total S&P 500 value"

I highly recommend the website https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ and in particular their excellent newsletter. Surely, it would be an oversimplification to reduce everything to one cause but how much the setup of the original gold standard of the bank of England in the late 1770s spurred on the industrial revolution and how the centralization of gold and the final abolishing of the gold standard and ensuing financial tinkering led to malinvestments and threw wrenches into the engine of capitalism, wealth generation and ever increasing living standards has IMHO not yet sufficiently been investigated (Prof. Saifedean Ammous work here being one laudable exception). In an interview from 2019 Peter Thiel mentions that Paypal would have never succeeded had the Patriot Act existed at the time. Banking regulations would have never allowed Paypal off the ground. Just a few years between Paypal and that monstrocity: We would not have Tesla. We wouldnt have SpaceX. There wouldn't be any Boring company or any Neuralink. The opportunity cost of all of that is unfathomable.

"The easiest way to see this, and this is always my challenge—people don’t agree with this—is challenge you to name me one science fiction film that Hollywood produced in the last 25 years in which technology is portrayed in a positive light, in which it’s not dystopian, it doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t destroy the world, it doesn’t not work, etc., etc."

Interstellar?

There's a distinction here between law and regulation.

Even hard core libertarians don't think there should be no laws. That's a straw man. They tend to believe governments should vigorously enforce contracts, trademarks, punish fraud and provide other tools that make commerce easy. In other words that they give people the tools to keep each other honest, but don't try to directly mandate every detail of every product.

The word law tends to mean these general, timeless rules that often date back a long way. They don't create ossification or stagnation (Thiel's primary concern) because they don't advantage any particular way of doing things, just enforce fair dealing and honesty.

The word regulation tends to be used to mean rather modern and very sector-specific rules, which frequently ossify existing practice and prevent people trying anything new. Often they are nakedly about doing exactly that - taxi medallions are one such form of regulation.

The people who support such regulations invariably claim they're about safety or preventing some sort of harm. The evidence for this is highly mixed. It often relies on an absurd, cartoon-character view of companies in which they'll happily kill all their customers to make a quick buck with no concern for long term consequences whatsoever, if the noble and morally pure government employee doesn't step in to stop them.

But there are plenty of cases where regulations seem to have created more harm than good, and vastly more where it's ambiguous. Do we really need governments to regulate the taxi industry, for example? Arguably not. It seems Uber is widely judged as being a better taxi regulator than the government, as it can use far faster and more plentiful feedback vs the paper or faxed complaint forms governments typically provide.

Libertarians often make arguments of this form - that the alternative to government regulations is not some anarchist wild west in which people go mad murdering each other with explosive contraptions. The alternative is private sector regulation of various kinds, in which logos and trademarks are used to establish meaning behind a mark and consumers gravitate to products that have those marks, as they're understood to be a sign of quality and safety. The advantage being that if that organisation succumbs to various kinds of dysfunction, like capture, or stagnation, then another can come along and outcompete it. Whereas with government regulators that can't happen - you can get endless decades or even centuries of unfixable dysfunction.