When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come and see.” So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the oil and the wine.” (Revelation 6:5–6)
I.
Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Without them, the arguments that we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment — would gather far more force. Liberals often assert that science and technology remain essentially healthy; conservatives sometimes counter that these are false utopias; but the two sides of the culture wars silently agree that the accelerating development and application of the natural sciences continues apace.
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Yet during the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and has no end in sight, these great expectations have been supplemented by a desperate necessity. We need high-paying jobs to avoid thinking about how to compete with China and India for low-paying jobs. We need rapid growth to meet the wishful expectations of our retirement plans and our runaway welfare states. We need science and technology to dig us out of our deep economic and financial hole, even though most of us cannot separate science from superstition or technology from magic. In our hearts and minds, we know that desperate optimism will not save us. Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue. So we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that America is on the wrong track (and has been for some time), to wonder whether Progress is not doing as well as advertised, and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse any decline.
The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? 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? For now, let us acknowledge this measurement problem — I will return to it later — but not let it stop our inquiry into modernity before it has even begun.
II.
When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.
The official explanation for the slowdown in travel centers on the high cost of fuel, which points to the much larger failure in energy innovation. Real oil prices today exceed those of the Carter catastrophe of 1979–80. Nixon’s 1974 call for full energy independence by 1980 has given way to Obama’s 2011 call for one-third oil independence by 2020. Even before Fukushima, the nuclear industry and its 1954 promise of “electrical energy too cheap to meter” had long since been defeated by environmentalism and nuclear-proliferation concerns. One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. “Clean tech” has become a euphemism for “energy too expensive to afford,” and in Silicon Valley it has also become an increasingly toxic term for near-certain ways to lose money. Without dramatic breakthroughs, the alternative to more-expensive oil may turn out to be not cleaner and much-more-expensive wind, algae, or solar, but rather less-expensive and dirtier coal.
There is a great deal of meat on the bones of Theil's observations. It is a sobering discussion of the order and limitation of God's creation and it serves as a bleak indictment of the folly of our precious modern beliefs. Shocking as it is, it shouldn't be. After all, it's not as though we have not been warned about the danger of worshipping false idols.
Interesting article. However you have raised an important question and then failed to answer it:
'We have seen that even the simple question of whether a technology slowdown has occurred is far from straightforward. The critical question of why such a slowdown seems to have occurred is harder still, and we do not have the space to tackle it fully here.'
He didn't fail to answer it, as referenced in the last sentence of that quote. However, I can sum up our problem in one word: Regulation. We are regulating ourselves to death, and that is affecting our ability to make advances in all sorts of scientific fields.
Agreed, chrisboltssr. And it goes back to Thiel's point about specialization. The people making regulations are (almost exclusively) lawyer/politicians who know only the basics (if that) of that which they are regulating.
@ Chrisboltssr. I respectfully disagree, though your response on behalf of the author is easily discernable from the body of the essay but does not excuse its ambiguity with reference to the examples that are cited. The author has evaded giving a fully advanced argument by his own admission, and then moves on to asking and answering the ‘related’ question of ‘what can now be done’. I find this unsatisfactory for my own edification and I suggest it does a disservice to advancing the author’s thesis. To wit, Robert Moses and his almost single-handed rebuilding of New York and the rapid construction of Brasilia are both problematical as ‘visions of the future’, and to quote Robert Hughes, ‘[N]othing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future’. Does the modernist agenda of the ideal city create an ideal society? This is regulation of another order. Is the author advocating a technocratic solution to both the physical and social problems that beset the US? If so, China would be an excellent exemplar as its leadership cadre has been drawn from the ranks of the engineering profession.
I agree with many of his points and applaud his raising of important questions but do not like the dim sum approach to supporting his argument.
Over the weekend I received an email with a link to an interesting article. It's strange though that the email was addressed to me from my own email address. It was sent to the Hammer, from the Hammer. Hmmmm... Well when I opened the link I immediately thought of you. Now I'm starting to believe that you like me, you really like me…
Just the other day I was thinking to myself, “My work here is done”, and then you do something like this to pull me back in.
Thank you. I love you too. ;-)
PS. I was told to play nice. “They” think that I should be setting a better example than you and considering our difference in age, it only makes sense that I do. So you're not going to hear me call you a swamp monster anymore even though you referred to yourself as one.
Dan 12:4
But you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.
The great technological revolution in the past 100 years wasn't the harnesing of efficient energy sources with exception of nuclear as weapon and engine. The revolution occured in the vast spread of electronic information sources. The engineering definition of information is the dissimination of new and meaningful content not repetition of old. The challenge is weeding out content that is harvestable.
Very interesting article. I've long been of the opinion that technological progress in general has been disappointingly slow since the 1970s, though there have been some exceptions, most notably IT -- and even there the progress has been more quantitative than qualitative. Certainly the vast increase in computer capacity has had important beneficial effects in some other fields, but generally these have not been truly revolutionary. We still seem to be far from such things as real AI.
As for the reasons for this poor progress, chrisboltssr may have a point. But I don't think overregulation is the sole cause.
In the mid-20th century people like Robert Heinlein thought that science and technology progressed exponentially. In my view a logistic curve is a better fit. Any new technology takes time to take off, then it develops rapidly for a while, but as its potential is exhausted the progress slows down and begins to lokk like a gradual approach to an asymptote. It may happen that by that time a new technology may come along in the same field, resulting in a new burst of progress that gives the impression of exponential progress, and that seems to have been common in the 19th and 20th centuries (at least before the 1970s), but there's no law of nature that says it has to happen that way.
And in fact that seems not to be happening so much nowadays. Overregulation may be one reason for that, but I also suspect that in many fields we've plucked the low-hanging fruit by now and additional progress may be much harder to come by. For instance, in modern physics, the conditions needed to produce the phenomena being studied are getting harder and harder to achieve, making them less relevant to technology, and in any case there don't seem to have been many discoveries of practical interest in physics recently.
So, all in all, I suspect that, even without overregulation, we need to prepare for a future of relatively slow progress, at least for a while. (If we actually do develop something that deserves to be called artificial intelligence, the situation may change radically, but I don't expect that to happen soon.)
Reading between the lines, my take is that the author may not have a problem with the size of our government, but may have a problem with the functions of our government. We can't go back to the moon and beyond when all the revenue is going to fund extended retirement and an increased general dependency on Uncle Sam. In other words, we're getting no return on our "investment" of tax dollars.
It's agreeable that government is capable of tackling a particular problem when the problem has already been identified and when we all agree that a solution is worthwhile. However, government does a very poor job of identifying problems or solutions and allocating resources efficiently (see Solyndra). The TEA Party, and conservatives in general, understand that the only growth this government begets is government growth. The Left uses a variant of the same argument when they clamor for more government spending: roads & bridges, bullet trains, dyches on dams, education, policemen, etc. Trillions of dollars later, this argument no no longer sells with the informed.
Due to K-12 education and the media's leftward biases, most people no longer understand what really leads to a higher standard of living: productivity gains derived from science, technology, and the exploitation of both in companies run by entrepreneurs. They don't understand the baleful effects of the following: regulators, lawyers, and environmentalism. Our society should be encouraging more of the former and less of the latter. How many people would even want their sons or daughters to major in engineering as opposed to law?
These woe-is-us essays appear whenever the economy sputters. But even Thiel is forced to admit that technological progress continues, just not as fast as he would like. Or as fast as his arbitrary measuring stick demands.
For instance, Thiel worries that life expectancy isn't growing as quickly as it used to. Of course, it gets harder to push life expectancy further and further because the "easy work" of eliminating the common infectious diseases of childhood is mostly done. Now we're into the tough stuff, the work on older-age diseases such as cancer.
Thiel can't avoid the ongoing revolution in information technology, though he tries mightily to underplay it. He finally handwaves that progress in this technology may not really be progress because somebody worries it may not really be progress.
All in all, Thiel presents an unimpressive case, which would look even less convincing if the economy wasn't so slow.
You'd have a point, were it not for the fact that Mr. Thiel puts his money where his mouth is. You see, Mr. Thiel has started a fund to convince kids to not go to school and become entrepreneurs. He also have been having these views well before the economy slowed down. Trying to discount his point of view because of the times shows that you have presented an unimpressive counterargument to the case he has laid out, which to many observers is actually very persuasive. The causes and solutions may differ, but the facts are incontrovertible.
"You'd have a point, were it not for the fact that Mr. Thiel puts his money where his mouth is. You see, Mr. Thiel has started a fund to convince kids to not go to school and become entrepreneurs."
Okay, but how does that make Thiel's case in this article any more impressive? In fact, most of Thiel's examples show slower rates of progress - usually because the easier stuff has already been done, as in life expectancy or food production - but hardly a halt in progress, much less a reversal.
In the one area where Thiel has most expertise, information technology, he has to admit that there hasn't even been a slowdown in technological progress. His case remains unimpressive and would be even less convincing in a healthier economy.
"In fact, most of Thiel's examples show slower rates of progress - usually because the easier stuff has already been done, as in life expectancy or food production - but hardly a halt in progress, much less a reversal."
He actually gave a good example in the beginning; travelling by plane at 2,000 mph. When was the last time a plane traveled that fast? Slowing of progress IS a reversal of progress. No one knows if all the easy stuff has been done because at one point the easy stuff was hard. For example, the building of Manhattan Bridge took over 11 years to complete. The same designer built Golden Gate Bridge in four years. You first have to do something hard and make it very redundant before it can become easy. However, it is possible for that reverse itself. Now, with myriads of regulation, a bridge can take 11 years to complete *even though* we have technologically advanced far beyond anything that the framers of the Manhattan Bridge can imagine. Now why is that?
Also, you give an example of an industry that is one of the least regulated, information technology. You'll notice that industries that are not tightly regulated are the ones where innovation and ideas thrive. What about the auto industry, where companies are being pushed to do more with less, or in pharmaceuticals, where drugs are put on hold for approval, or in healthcare, where costs for physician services are still skyrocketing? You keep saying that it would be less convincing in a healthier economy, but the fact of the matter is is that our economy is not healthy precisely because of the reasons he describes. If Obama did not push for Obamacare, Dodd-Frank or declare war on the energy sector where do you think we would be now? You eat your cake and have it, too. Yes, I stated it that way because that would technically be the correct way to say it.
Try to get someone to start a business.. They'll take all your money, perform little to no work and then threaten to sue you when it's gone because they thought they deserved more.
It's completely unsurprising that a country full of selfish, greedy and lazy people would be falling on hard times.
Still, I'm not sure I wholly agree. You can go back to the glorious sixties and I'll stick with today's medical technology! (Sometimes we romance the past, but still a good point to bring up!)
Mr. Thiel's article strikes a very responsive chord with me. I have spent a 50 year career, primarily in national laboratories and universities, doing research in the applied science and engineering of metals and alloys for use in the fields of energy conversion, transmission, and storage. I have seen the technologies of nuclear fission and fusion rise and fall in the favor of the public,from potential savior to pariah. I have seen the decline or demise of the once great American industrial laboratories,such as United States Steel (now extinct), General Motors, General Electric, Bell Laboratories and others which were world leaders in my field, the physics of metals, and other sciences related to energy and manufacturing. This has largely occured as our country has made a transition from a nation of manufacturing to a nation of financial services and similar pursuits. It took a long time for our nation to transmute from one primarily devoted to agriculture into the industrial power that was once known as the Arsenal of Democracy and which met the challenge of being the first to take men to the moon and returning them safely. History shows that the time required to fall from preeminence in such fields is generally much shorter than the time to build up the competence required to become a world leader in engineering and technology, whether it is the technology of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, or the Atomic Age. I am not optimistic about our future, and cannot find fault with the analysis presented in this article. I fail to see how the recent triumphs of information technology, well deserving of admiration, are sufficient to compensate for our loss of preeminent competence in other aspects of manufacturing and so-called "heavy industry". Furthermore, our national achievement in the field of robotics will only make the plight of unskilled laborers more acute than ever.
