Quote from Peter Thiel starting around 39:10 in the video: "Mean wages have been stagnant (not median). It’s not an income an inequality issue. Mean wages went

Quote from Peter Thiel starting around 39:10 in the video: "Mean wages have been stagnant (not median). It’s not an income an inequality issue. Mean wages went up 350% in the US after inflation from 1933 and 1973. [They] went up 22% from 1973 to 2013. Median wages were flat, so it’s become more unequal. Even if you had redistributed everything, it’s gone up only 22%." I feel this is an overly US-centric view of humanities progress. Globalisation produces winners and losers in the short term, and even though manufacturing jobs are being destroyed in the US, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and other low cost developing nations. If you are using the argument that stagnant wages in one part of the world means human civilisation is not progressing technologically, does that argument stand up if you look at global living standards? There was an interesting argument (unfortunately I can't recall where I heard it) that put forward the idea that World War II was like a massive subsidy from the US Air Force to the US manufacturing sector. The US Air Force destroyed many of the industrial cities of America's global manufacturing competitors (mainly Germany and Japan) and other major European nations were destroyed also and were bailed out with the Marshall Plan. All this meant that for decades, the US manufacturing sector had it artificially good because of greatly reduced global competition, as factories and other manufacturing infrastructure had to be totally rebuilt in the other big industrial nations, which took decades. This was great news for US car companies (and other manufacturers) in the decades after the war, who could churn out (relatively) unreliable and fuel inefficient vehicles, which were bought in huge numbers as they were the best available. In the 1970s, the combination of the oil shocks and encroaching competition from Japanese car makers, who innovated with reliable, fuel efficient and affordable vehicles, meant that the good times were over. Tl;dr using US wages from 1933-1973, and 1973-today is the wrong metric to measure human civilisations technological progress, for a variety of reasons.