First, what Thiel is trying to do (which neither of us will know for sure) is irrelevant to the question of what other approaches we might adopt for answering v

First, what Thiel is trying to do (which neither of us will know for sure) is irrelevant to the question of what other approaches we might adopt for answering variations on the question, "How has the pace of technological development changed, if at all, over time?" Second, how those those gains are distributed is likewise irrelevant to that particular question. Not that they're irrelevant to other questions, or that they're unimportant, or uninteresting, or that this is the only question we can ask. The careful reader will notice that neither Thiel nor I really commented on the otherwise important and interesting question of how gains are distributed. That's just something you threw in. Third, it's not "my graph." I linked to a Wikipedia article written by other people and which contains no fewer than four graphs at the time of this writing, and none of them were created by me.