I find this argument sophomoric and that it misses the point. You are combining the infrastructure with the thing itself. Maybe emails are sent using a physica

I find this argument sophomoric and that it misses the point. You are combining the infrastructure with the thing itself. Maybe emails are sent using a physical infrastructure. How many atoms would it take to send the same number of physical mails (letters on paper)? Remember to account for the atoms in the transport infrastructure, as you are doing for emails. Theil's comparison is between progress in moving information around versus progress in our ability to create physical structures - to move mass around. More importantly, though, the advent of email has not shown up in productivity statstics. Office worker productivty growth did not change observably after email became ubiquitous. Thiel perhaps believes that a x10 improvement in speed of creating physical structures would show up in productivity figures. I'm doubtful, because I think the stagnation has happened for reasons other than stagnation in our ability to move mass.