Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Innovation: Slowing Down or Speeding Up? (I Think the Latter)

In the view of Peter Thiel, the signs of an innovation slowdown are everywhere if we dare to look. For the first time in recorded history, travel and transport speeds are slowing—and he notes that even the ever-shrewd Warren Buffett has made a recent $44 billion investment in the American railroad industry, which “will do especially well if transport and energy consumption patterns involve a regression to the past.”

According to Thiel’s measures, increases in agricultural productivity are also slowing, increases in U.S. life expectancy are decelerating, pharmaceutical industry pipelines for blockbuster drugs are looking a bit empty, companies and investors are still looking to “juice” returns with leverage rather than with productivity gains driven by scientific and technological advances—and bold dreams of progress hardly exist outside the IT sector. Though a self-described libertarian, Thiel admits,

The state can successfully push science; there is no sense denying it. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo program remind us of this possibility. Free markets may not fund as much basic research as needed. … Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. … Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong ...