SIAI benefactor and VC Peter Thiel has an excellent article at National Review about the stagnating progress of science and technology, which he attributes to poorly-grounded political opposition, widespread scientific illiteracy, and overspecialized, insular scientific fields. He warns that this stagnation will undermine the growth that past policies have relied on.
Noteworthy excerpts (bold added by me):
In relation to concerns expressed here about evaluating scientific field soundness:
When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? [!!! -- SB]
Grave indictors:
Looking forward, we see far fewer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline — perhaps because of the intransigence of the FDA, perhaps because of the fecklessness of today’s biological scientists, and perhaps because of the incredible complexity of human biology. In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half. [...]
The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.
Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment. Indeed, if one shares the widely held view that the U.S. government may have understated the true rate of inflation — perhaps by ignoring the runaway inflation in government itself, notably in education and health care (where much higher spending has yielded no improvement in the former and only modest improvement in the latter) — then one may be inclined to take gold prices seriously and conclude that real incomes have fared even worse than the official data indicate. [...]
College graduates did better, and high-school graduates did worse. But both became worse off in the years after 2000, especially when one includes the rapidly escalating costs of college.[...]
The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time.
That anti colonialism is objecting to "the right to control another nation" fails to describe the situation with Vietnam, Rhodesia and South Africa, where anti colonialism was used as justification to interfere with foreigners.
To describe anti colonialism as opposition to the right of one nation to control another is as misleading as describing PC speech controls as courtesy.
Anti imperialism is opposition to the right of one country to control another. Anti colonialism was typically the objection of the metropolitan elite to the colonial elite. Anti colonialism was those whose power and wealth derived from the capital, objecting to those whose power and wealth derived from the colonies
South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, were supposedly not anti colonialist enough and therefore needed to be ruled by adequately anti colonial outsiders (members of the North Vietnamese communist party who spent most of their lives in Moscow) for their own good. Rhodesia was not under attack from Rhodesian blacks.
The Indochinese wars were imperial wars more than they were anticolonialist wars, and the imperialist side (communist) was the anticolonialist side. The same is true of the wars against Rhodesia. Mugabe's powerbase was in London and the UN, not in Rhodesia, his powerbase was the traditional imperial powers.
The most celebrated anti colonial conflicts had imperialists fighting colonialism.
Many "anti colonial" conflicts seem to involve "anti colonialists" with connections to ruling class universities in the metropolitan country, fighting "colonialists" without such connection,Mugabe comes from London School of Economics: Bishop Muzorewa went to a no name US university. And so the world removed Muzorewa and installed Mugabe, murdering as many Rhodesian blacks as necessary to ensure the right "democratic" outcome.
That really does not look much like Rhodesian blacks ruling themselves.
France was fighting a colonial war in Vietnam? Surely the events that followed the French fleeing suggest that this was a war with the Soviet Union, not a war with France's Vietnamese subjects, that the anti colonialist side was also the imperialist side. And if you find those events unconvincing, the events that followed the Americans fleeing should have convinced you.
The war with Algeria was indeed a colonial war, with colonialists and imperialists on the same side, and anti colonialists and Islamists on the other side. Let us recall, however, how and why the French got into what is now Algeria in the first place.
Europe had, for several hundred years, suffered Islamic terrorism. Punitive raids against the terrorists, for example the American Barbary wars, failed to deter them. So the French occupied the lands from which the terrorists attacked the most, and settled those lands with non Muslim settlers.
Algeria was a message to Muslims: Attack Christians, lose your land. Very eleventh century, and as in the eleventh century, it worked.
This successfully ended Islamic terrorism. From 1830 to 1960, the west had no problem with Islamic terrorism. When the French fled Algeria in 1960, Islamic terrorism resumed.
Europeans are considerably worse off for forcing European settlers out of Algeria, just as Jews are considerably worse off for forcing Jewish settlers out of the Gaza strip.
The UK was trying to crush the Indians violently?
The Indian independence movement was as much sponsored by the LSE and other British elite universities as the Rhodesian "independence" movement. Ghandi was a mascot. India continued to stagnate in poverty and communal violence until it finally got leaders from less "anti colonialist" (but suspiciously imperial) sources.
The confluence of piracy and terrorism in contemporary Somalia has led a lot of people to conflate the two, but not every act of violence involving Muslims is terrorism. The motives of the Muslims in the Barbary Wars have little to do with the motives of Salifists.
But if you ... (read more)