> The National Review is a conservative publication. This is a circumstantial attack. I am a liberal. The person who referred me to this article is a well-resp

> The National Review is a conservative publication. This is a circumstantial attack. I am a liberal. The person who referred me to this article is a well-respected liberal-leaning science professor at a major research university; I do not read the National Review. Still, I found the article compelling and balanced until somewhere around section 6. In my personal view, it's thoughtful and thought-provoking, and I honestly don't understand why you would flag it beyond that you don't agree with its author's political views or with the venue in which it was published. > The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation that may not provide any benefits in the short-term. If I'm reading the last section of the article right, Thiel seems to recognize this (although it's not standard conservative doctrine), but he also seems to think that politicians and the public are no longer interested in science and takes a cheap shot at "today's aged hippies" instead of suggesting a solution. > And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous. "Mean incomes outperformed median incomes (inflation-adjusted in both cases), and there was a trend towards greater inequality." You're right that he doesn't engage it, and that's part of what makes the last sections of the piece less compelling, but given that this is the first point he uses to demonstrate post-1973 economic stagnation, he's hardly trying to sweep it under the rug. > Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations? This is not the reason progress has stagnated (if one believes Thiel's main argument). Corporate donations cannot affect funding for universities and research institutes, since those funding decisions are (rightly) in the hands of scientists at NSF/NIH/DARPA and not politicians. Additionally, it's hard to imagine that the kind of large-scale corruption necessary to halt economic growth could go undetected for decades. The two main questions raised by this article are whether there's a science slowdown, and, if so, why it's happening. These aren't partisan questions (or if they are, the stock conservative answer is definitely not Thiel's), and they made me think, hence my posting this here. The last section seems to be tacked on to appeal to National Review readers, and I'd prefer to ignore it.