For those of you who aren't familiar with the Hoover Institution, their TV segments, Uncommon Knowledge, hosted by Peter Robinson, a former Reagan and Bush '41 speech writer, are some of the most interesting out there in net video. (And it is all commercial free!)
This past year has seen such amazing videos with such public intellectuals as Victor Davis Hanson, Michael Barone, Christopher Hitchens, Silicon valley tycoon T. J. Rodgers, Tom Wolfe, and economists John Taylor and Kenn Judd. And that's just the first few months of this year.
But the most recent guest is none other than Peter Thiel, currently of Clarium Capital. Thiel is a founder of Paypal and a principal investor in Facebook. He's worth a significant chunk of change, despite being just forty. (Forbes listed him as the 377th richest American in the world.) Apparently, the tendency to found new businesses started early in him, while he was still in college. He founded the provocative, The Stanford Review and served as a member of the Federalist Society while at Stanford Law.
Thiel's discussion with Robinson centers on a book that is as old as Thiel, Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber author of the international bestseller, The American Challenge (Le defi americain). In it, Schreiber predicted a world where Europe would lose to American economic might. He was right on that score.
But many of Servan Schreiber's predictions were off, such as the kinds of leisure that we as Americans enjoy today and the kind of world we live in. Robinson quotes more of it in detail so I won't spoil it, but it's definitely worth listening to. Here's hoping the next four parts to be released this week are as interesting.
Thiel asks, why has growth been somewhat less than expected? Why aren't we living in the world envisioned in the '60s? In short, where's our flying cars? And robot slaves?
P.S. My co-worker Dane Stangler recommended a great essay that Thiel wrote called "The Optimistic Thought Experiment" for the Hoover Institution. In it, Thiel gives a sweeping view of history and political philosophy in which he argues that we need not concern ourselves with market bubbles, as "In every possible future, all of today’s bubbles will burst, and their ideological scaffolding will prove to be but lint in the winds of history."
Arguably, the invention of microprocessors and the Internet has done much more to improve the quality of life than flying cars and robot slaves.
So I think we're ahead on that front.
There's very little work that I do that I could get a robot slave to do. Maybe I could save 30 min every day on average. On the other hand, cell phones, computers, and the Internet improve my productivity at least twofold.
Posted by: Andy | December 03, 2008 at 07:53 AM