I’m largely sympathetic to this viewpoint, and the evidence seems clear-cut. Nevertheless, what I think people like Theil are alluding to, along with J. Storrs Hall in Where is my flying car, is that we could have had so much more progress (including flying cars, nuclear fusion, and supersonic transportation) if it weren’t for some combination of regulations, communism, wokeness and “ergophobia” or environmental romanticism, etc. I’m broadly sympathetic to this view too.
Seems to me that at some level, it’s true that we’ve had a lot of progress on a lot of important metrics, but also not as much progress as we really could have had in the world of atoms.
P.S, writing this from Sweden, where we’re now seeing record high electricity costs (as much of the rest of Europe). What if we had invested more aggressively in nuclear power during the last 20 years rather than having started to shut down our plants?
I’m largely sympathetic to this viewpoint, and the evidence seems clear-cut. Nevertheless, what I think people like Theil are alluding to, along with J. Storrs Hall in Where is my flying car, is that we could have had so much more progress (including flying cars, nuclear fusion, and supersonic transportation) if it weren’t for some combination of regulations, communism, wokeness and “ergophobia” or environmental romanticism, etc. I’m broadly sympathetic to this view too.
Seems to me that at some level, it’s true that we’ve had a lot of progress on a lot of important metrics, but also not as much progress as we really could have had in the world of atoms.
P.S, writing this from Sweden, where we’re now seeing record high electricity costs (as much of the rest of Europe). What if we had invested more aggressively in nuclear power during the last 20 years rather than having started to shut down our plants?