Peter Thiel, Back to The Future
- “Because there is no longer a healthy dominant culture, would-be rebels have nothing to resist. So they playact the battles of a previous age.”
- Every aspect of decadence feeds back into others. Legal sclerosis is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem. Poor transportation makes it more expensive to raise a family and so lowers birth rates. Aging brings risk-aversion and arrests creativity.”
- Thiel didn’t mention what low births would do, but I would conjecture that no new people means no innovations, no new opinions.
- If you can get a university president (almost every one of whom is a boomer) to take stagnation seriously, you are likely to hear two talking points: First, we need to spend more money on education and research. Second, progress is harder now than it used to be because the “low-hanging fruit” is all gone and we are up against the limits of nature. Douthat rejects these excuses. He maintains that more of the same is not enough, and stagnation is not a fate imposed by the universe. Choosing agency over boomer complacency, *The Decadent Society* sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?”