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401 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 11 Apr \ on: Peter Thiel: To unshackle ourselves economically, start by attacking real estate econ
Peter absolutely cooks the mainstream zeitgeist and I love it.
I wouldn’t even go that far. Even iPhones distract you from the fact you’re in a hundred-year-old subway in London or New York, or the fact the environment hasn’t changed. I wouldn’t say there’s a fully intentional conspiracy, but the particular, narrow forms of technological progress that we’ve had in the last 50 years have made us oblivious to these things.
One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.
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250 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 11 Apr freebie
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PT: Well, certainly, the virtual world is the part of technology that has progressed the most. I keep thinking that you could do a lot more in these other areas. If I, again, come back to real estate, this seems the furthest from technological innovation. Admittedly, there are new building designs, you can build 100-story buildings that you could not build 20, 30 years ago. But if too much of the economy is anchored on things that are hard to improve or change, progress slows. So if the economy in the UK, and I’ll make these numbers up, is 50% real estate and 10% computers, then even if the 10% that is computers is somehow getting better and better, if 50% that is real estate is very stuck, that is going to be at best a slowly improving economy. If the most important thing isn’t changing, that creates all kinds of weird side effects and incentives.
JG: So the hyper-progressivism, the hyper-accelerationism that we are told that we have, by politicians and others, by Blair, for example…
PT: It does not show up in the per capita GDP numbers, it does not show up in incomes rising faster than rents. I just think the rebuttal is simply on the real estate side. And then we are told that people don’t want to live in houses anymore, they don’t want to have families, they’re super conscientious, they’d rather eat insects and not have children. At some point, it’s a parody of progressivism.
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