Round 1 was here:
Utopia: Cheaper energy sources. AI. Robotics, Space program. Nanotechnology, Cures for all diseases. New cities.
We've had progress around tech, around this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits, but not atoms.
The iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old & unchanging our environment is.
We attend schools and sit in classrooms that are pretty much like parents & grandparents. We live in houses not unlike theirs and drive in cars not unlike theirs.
- Biotech
- Energy
- Cleantech
- Transportation
- Food
- Nanotech
- Education
- Healthcare
- Construction
- Gov't
Acceleration in:
- Tech
IT innovation hasn't been isn't enough to save the country, not even enough to save California.
Google & Amazon companies are worth perhaps 2-3x as much as all technology companies in the US combined created since the year 2000.
Computer Rust Belt - Cisco, Dell, HP, etc
Savings rate of minus 6%. If you include government deficit spending, people think the future will take care of itself.
One bubble after another where people have been promised that the future will be fantastic
Some say low hanging fruit has been picked.
Peter Thiel says it's something in the culture that's made us less ambitious, more risk-averse, scared to take ambitious swings
This is good. It means it can be changed.
in Western Europe, even a smaller minority that thinks they will be better off than their parents.
"The Complacent Class": amazon.com/dp/B01JGMCCCQ/…
This doesn't show up the data. 3.5% unemployment
UBI is self-congratulatory & pre-mature.
It's a trick to divert attention from the fact that we haven't been innovating enough.
When really it's up to us."
Instead of tech being the way out, and people being what creates tech
amazon.com/More-Less-Surp…
The only way you can get those kinds of returns, is if you have extraordinary compound exponential growth in science & tech in the developed world
PT responds -- if the 5% doesn't return b/c not enough innovation, it's not the 5% you should worry about.
It's the 95% you should worry about, b/c it won't return either w/o innovations in science & tech.
Parliament democracies are built on an expanding pie that they can continue subdividing. Once the pie's no longer expanding, then everything turns zero-sum. (1930s was a bad decade for growth...)
We are too focused on hitting # s for the quarter, or winning that next election, to focus on 20 year issues.
US is better than China in every dimension except for this-- thinking long-term.
Thus, suspicion is always when there's speech that is completely forbidden & Q's that aren't allowed to be asked, normally you should assume that those things are simply true.
Silicon Valley 1997: Think different
Silicon Valley. 2018: Think the same
Marginal tax rates at 40/50%, relative to 10% in other countries.
The focus on whether rich are paying their fair share is to miss the bigger point of whether US can compete globally.
One is for ideas never to be questioned. And then the other one is for them to be questioned too quickly, distorted and, and mischaracterized.
Heterodox ideas are questioned too aggressively
The distraction machine has been driven by identity politics. It's subscale. We don't think of the country as a whole, we think of just subgroups within the country, and I think there's something insane, self-contradictory about identity politics
Until the left is able to move beyond identity politics, it's not going to be able to focus on the scale that we need to be focusing on for this country.
American exceptionalism is religious in its way of resisting inquiry and distracting us from our problems. Too much scale.
It leads us to being exceptionally unaware, overweight, inefficient.
The solution to exceptionalism is to settle for greatness.
The nation state contains violence in both sense of the word "contain" -- it limits the channels but it's also part of its very being.
To the extent you're trying to copy Silicon Valley, you're ready putting yourself in some in a weird derivative position. You know, you don't want to be the Harvard of North Dakota.
The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere.
These were incredibly robust monopoly businesses in the 1980s and 1990s. And if you worked at a newspaper, you it's like, you were working at a utility company had this, you know, cushy, fairly secured position, because you were a local monopoly.
You normally don't like to say, you know, I'm working at a monopoly company, and that's why we're doing so well. But that's what it was.
This intolerance has taken on some bizarre forms. One magazine praised me as a gay innovator only to later say I'm not a gay man b/c I don't agree with their politics. If you don't conform, you're not diverse, regardless of your personal background.
We are glad that there is online retail, but we don't appreciate Bezos
Online retail came into being b/c Progress. Bezos is just some annoying guy who captured credit & profits
When was the last time a politician gave a speech in which he or she portrayed a future that looks really different from the present. MLK "I have a dream of painting" Reagan, "Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall". Ppl don't believe in the future anymore
And I think we need to flip this around into an indictment of our broader society:
What is it about our society where the rest of us are talked out of our most interesting ideas before they're even fully formed?
Once you think of a monopoly is simply an absence of competition, you might start noticing a few yourself, what's a patent, if not a monopoly backed by the government?
Value substance more than status. Consider your projects: Are you doing it for the prestige? What do you truly believe about the world?
Go long substance, short status.
1—China is very far behind us, there’s no need to worry about it
2—China is so far ahead off there’s no way we can catch up
Denial is extreme optimism, acceptance is extreme pessimism—extreme optimism & extreme pessimism converge to doing nothing.
1—education. $300 B student debt in 2000. $1.7 T today. Can't default on it
2—housing. main way middle class accumulates $ is through real estate. bad urban zoning laws make that hard
"If you're the only law professor at a top law school to endorse Trump, I think there would be like a 50% chance you would've gotten nominated to the Supreme Court or something like that. And yet no one does...Something's up"
I now think the answer is roughly that most big corporate institutions are just political, slow, & bad at innovating."
...SV is completely deranged"
1- Islamic Sharia Law
2- Chinese Communist AI (eye of Sauron watching you at all times & places)
3- Green movement
"This is why green stuff has so much traction in Europe. If these are the only 3 options...I'll go w/ Greta"
An alternative is something more like greatness, where it's a comparative function and we would ask how are we stacking up?
The Overton window is so uncomfortably narrow that I would be long ideas more than at any other point in the last 50 yrs"
1- Information Age, not industrial age.
2- Global competition Q.
3- Economies are very deeply connected. We weren't deeply connected to the USSR.
2020 isn't like 1989 or 1951, 2020 is like 2020 which is much less helpful but more accurate.
We should always come back to the Q of individual agency instead of grand narratives
There's always room for history, there's always room for new ideas,& these things are never definitively decided 1 way or the other
U.S. airline carriers:
2012 revenue: $195.6 B
2012 profit margin: 0.2%
Market cap: $112.4 B
2012 revenue: $50.2 B
2012 profit margin: 21.0%
Market cap: $393.8 B
Monopolies pretend they’re in high competition to avoid regulation
Competitive businesses pretend they’re unique to attract capital, differentiate, etc
Startups do something similar: They try to differentiate by throwing in buzz words (“We’re a mobile sharing social app”)
They might, instead, call themselves an “advertising market” (search advertising is only a small fraction of global advertising)
Amazon started as an online bookstore
eBay first focused on the Beanie Baby market
Facebook first went after Harvard students
If the market you’re going after is enormous, it likely means there’s tons of competition, and it’s hard to differentiate
Google was the last search engine
Facebook might be the last major social networking site
Ask “Why will my company be the leading company 30 years from now?”
In business, it’s the opposite: The losers compete
“Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through. Instead, go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one’s taking."
- It costs $1.3 billion to develop a new drug
- You can’t fly supersonic jets because of noise levels
- You aren’t allowed to build nuclear power plants
e.g. Google is investing in self-driving cars & other projects, but it still has billions that can be applied somewhere instead of just sitting in storage
Millennials are becoming indentured servants with the amount of students debt they owe – even if you declare personal bankruptcy, you still have to pay off the student debt
They’re so focused on convincing alumni to continue donating money that they’re forced to keep the “everything is great in the research department” narrative going, even when untrue.
It’s now ~$1.7 trillion
In 2005, student debt became non-dischargable in bankruptcy
If you don’t pay off your student loans by the time you’re 65, the government will garner your social security wages.
If you’re $100k in debt right out of college, you’ll likely be severely demotivated & pushed into high-paying, uncreative professions that are “less good at moving our whole society forward.
When we can’t talk about things, we can’t solve them"
But I’d be uncomfortable starting with social programs [like UBI] without the growth first to support it.
I’m more scared of the world where nothing happens than too much. The stagnation world goes straight to apocalypse
1- "What?! we're gonna cure cancer in next 5 yrs!"
Counter: Been saying that for 50 yrs
2- Not enough $
Counter: You've been getting more $ every yr.
3- It's an impossible problem.
Counter: Prove it!
Runaway tuition costs are runaway indulgences.
Priestly class had tenure like professor class.
Theory of salvation -- go to Yale or go to jail
Reverence is dogmatic, as in, without inquiry
Reformation couldn't come from within.
movement of people: immigration
movement of goods: trade
movement of money: banking & capital markets
movement of ideas: internet
Atheists project rationality & internally feel empty of thought
The medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect & the moderns believe in the power of the will, but the weakness of the intellect
All the others can be sort of turned into something positive.
e.g. Greed is good Gordon Gekko.
Envy is is the one we still don't talk about.