[ExI] IMPORTANT!! Francis Fukuyama interviews Peter Thiel

[Stefano Vaj]

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187

>From the March/April 2012 issue: A Conversation with Peter Thiel Francis
Fukuyama talks with the renowned entrepreneur.

Francis Fukuyama: I’d like to begin by asking you about a point you made
about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about
America. What did you mean by that?

Peter Thiel: On the surface, one of the debates we have is that people on
the Left, especially the Occupy Wall Street movement, focus on income and
wealth inequality issues—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. It’s evident
that both forms of inequality have escalated at a very high rate. Probably
from 1973 to today, they have gone up faster than they did in the 19th
century. The rapid rise in inequality has been an issue that the Right has
not been willing to engage. It tends either to say it’s not true or that it
doesn’t matter. That’s a very strange blind spot. Obviously if you
extrapolate an exponential function it can go a lot further. We’re now at
an extreme comparable to 1913 or 1928; on a worldwide basis we’ve probably
surpassed the 1913 highs and are closer to 1789 levels.

In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through
communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. It’s a
disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if
there’s a fourth way out. On the Right, the Tea Party argument has been
about government corruption—not ethical violations necessarily, but
inefficiency, that government can’t do anything right and wastes money. I
believe that is true, and that this problem has gotten dramatically worse.
There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used
to. Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built under
FDR’s Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. They’re
currently building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into
the bridge, and it will take at least six years to complete.

Francis Fukuyama: And it will require countless environmental permits,
litigation, and so on.

Peter Thiel: Yes. There’s an overall sense that in many different domains
the government is working incredibly inefficiently and poorly. On the
foreign policy side you can flag the wars in the Middle East, which have
cost a lot more than we thought they should have. You can point to
quasi-governmental things like spending on health care and education, where
costs are spinning out of control. There’s some degree to which government
is doing the same for more, or doing less for the same. There’s a very big
blind spot on the Left about government waste and inefficiency.

In some ways these two debates, though they seem very different, ought to
be seen as two sides of the same coin. The question is, should rich people
keep their money or should the government take it? The anti-rich argument
is, “Yes, because they already have too much.” The anti-government argument
is, “No, because the government would just waste it.”

I think if you widen the aperture a bit on the economic level, though I
identify with the libertarian Right, I do think it is incumbent on us to
rethink the history of the past forty years. In particular, the Reagan
history of the 1980s needs to be rethought thoroughly. One perspective is
that the libertarian, small-government view is not a timeless truth but was
a contingent response to the increasing failure of government, which was
manifesting itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The response was that
resources should be kept in the private sector. Then economic theories,
like Laffer’s supply-side economics, provided political support for that
response, even if they weren’t entirely accurate. We can say that the
economic theories didn’t work as advertised, but for Obama to try to undo
Reagan-era policies, he would have to deal with the political realities
those theories were confronting. We cannot simply say things went wrong
with credit creation in the 1980s; we also have to deal with government
malfunction in the 1970s.

So you have these two different blind spots on the Left and Right, but I’ve
been more interested in their common blind spot, which we’re less likely to
discuss as a society: technological deceleration and the question of
whether we’re still living in a technologically advancing society at all. I
believe that the late 1960s was not only a time when government stopped
working well and various aspects of our social contract began to fray, but
also when scientific and technological progress began to advance much more
slowly. Of course, the computer age, with the internet and web 2.0
developments of the past 15 years, is an exception. Perhaps so is finance,
which has seen a lot of innovation over the same period (too much
innovation, some would argue).

There has been a tremendous slowdown everywhere else, however. Look at
transportation, for example: Literally, we haven’t been moving any faster.
The energy shock has broadened to a commodity crisis. In many other areas
the present has not lived up to the lofty expectations we had. I think the
advanced economies of the world fundamentally grow through technological
progress, and as their rate of progress slows, they will have less growth.
This creates incredible pressures on our political systems. I think the
political system at its core works when it crafts compromises in which most
people benefit most of the time. When there’s no growth, politics becomes a
zero-sum game in which there’s a loser for every winner. Most of the losers
will come to suspect that the winners are involved in some kind of racket.
So I think there’s a close link between technological deceleration and
increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.

I think, therefore, that our problems are completely misdiagnosed. The
debates are all about macroeconomics, about how much money we should print.
I think you can print more money and have inflation, or stop printing money
and have deflation. Bad inflation involves commodity prices and inputs, and
bad deflation involves people’s wages, salaries and house prices. But the
middle-way Goldilocks version, where commodity prices and consumer goods go
down and wages go up, seems very farfetched. I don’t see how that sort of
outcome can be crafted in a world with no growth.

Francis Fukuyama: I understand you’re part of the inspiration behind Tyler
Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation. Apart from being a former colleague of
mine, he’s on the editorial board of The American Interest.

Peter Thiel: He did very graciously dedicate the book to me, and it’s an
incredibly powerful articulation of this theme on many different levels. I
think the question of technological dynamism isn’t often examined, but when
you look into it you see many problems, from transportation failures to the
space program and the Concorde decommissioning to how the energy failure
allows oil price shocks to undo the price improvements of the previous
century. Think of the famous 1980 Paul Ehrlich-Julian Simon wager about
resource scarcity. Simon may have won the bet a decade later, but since
1993, on a rolling decade basis, Ehrlich has been winning famously. This is
something that has not registered with the political class at all.

Francis Fukuyama: That’s an early sign that we may be moving into a
zero-sum world.

You made your fortune initially in Silicon Valley. Your assertions may
raise a lot of eyebrows, because skeptics would say, “What about the whole
boom of the 1980s?” There’s that famous Robert Solow quote from 1987, “You
can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”1
Econometricians finally began detecting that productivity jump in a more
significant way in the 1990s. I would think that rather than arguing in
general that there has been a technological slowdown, the more socially
important argument is that the distributional impact of all the
cutting-edge technological changes that have occurred over the past
generation go overwhelmingly to the smart and well-educated. If you had
great math skills during the agrarian economy of the 19th century, there
weren’t many jobs where you could exploit that and get really rich. Now you
can go to Wall Street or become a software programmer. So there’s something
about the progress we’ve had that has overlain the increasing inequality
you’ve pointed to.

Peter Thiel: I don’t entirely agree with that description. My claim is not
that there has been no technological progress, just deceleration. If we
look at technological progress during most of the 19th and 20th centuries,
it brought significant disruption. If you built horse buggies for a living,
you would be out of work when the Ford Motor Company came along. In effect,
over time labor was freed up to do more productive things. And on the
whole, people got to be better off. I think the larger trend is just that
there has been stagnation. There are debates about how to precisely measure
these statistics, but the ones I’ve looked at suggest that median wages
since 1973 have been mostly flat. Mean wages have gone up maybe 20–25
percent, which is the greater inequality, an anemic 0.6–0.7 per year. And
if you confiscated the wealth of all the billionaires in the United States,
the amount would pay for the deficits for only six months. There has been
this increase in inequality, but it’s a secondary truth. The primary truth
is this truth of stagnation.

As for why inequality has gone up, you could point to the technology, as
you just have. You could also point to financialization of the economy, but
I would say globalization has played a much greater role because it has
been the much greater trend. Even though there have been a lot of bumps in
the road, your “End of History” strikes me as very much true today.
Globalization has been incredibly powerful, far more so than people could
have realistically expected in 1970. The question is, what is there about
globalization that creates a winner-take-all world? There certainly has
been a labor arbitrage with China that has been bad for the middle class,
as well as for white-collar workers, in the past decade or two.

Consider, too, that in 1960 we spoke of the First World and the Third
World; today we speak of the developed world and the developing world, the
part that is looking to copy the West. The developed world is where we
expect nothing more to happen. The earlier dichotomy was fairly
pro-technology and in some ways more agnostic on the prospects for
globalization. The present dichotomy is extremely bullish on globalization
and implicitly pessimistic about technology. Of course, we can point to the
great fortunes that have been made in the tech industry, but of the great
fortunes that have been made in the world over the past twenty or thirty
years, most have not been made in technology. Look at the Russian
oligarchs. Maybe one out of a hundred billionaires has a tech-related
fortune. The others are a political thing linked somehow to globalization.
So that’s why I think it’s important to quantify these things correctly. We
tend to focus a lot on the optimistic tech narrative that notes a lot of
progress, but I think the more important question is why it hasn’t been
happening.

There certainly are a lot of areas of technology where, if it were
progressing, we would expect a lot of jobs to be created. The classic
example would be clean technology, alternate energy technology. If you were
to retool the economy toward more efficient forms of energy, one would
realistically expect that to create millions of jobs. The problem with that
retooling is that the clean technology just doesn’t work—namely, it doesn’t
do more for less. It costs much more, so it isn’t working—at least not yet.


Francis Fukuyama: Thinking again about inequality, the problem isn’t that
people are lazy. It’s not that working-class people don’t have a work
ethic. In a sense they’re victimized by the advances of technology and
globalization and so forth. The classic response to that is to urge the
state to protect them. Take Karl Polanyi’s view that these forces can’t be
defeated or pushed back, but that there must be some form of guided social
adjustment, because society on its own adjusts much less quickly than
underlying technology and trade patterns change. But then, if you say we’re
stuck because the government can’t do anything, there isn’t a solution. Or
at least there isn’t the classic solution: more redistribution and active
labor market policies like they have in Scandinavia, which arrange for
worker retraining.

In terms of clean tech, I think the classic infant-industry argument might
apply here. It’s true that it isn’t competitive with fossil fuel technology
right now, but we’re walking very rapidly down a cost curve, especially in
solar tech. Governments have provided a certain amount of help in
commercializing technologies. Certainly the Chinese have been doing this
big time, which is why they’ve undermined our alternative energy
industries. Where do you stand on that kind of intervention?

Peter Thiel: We have different kinds of challenges on the government side.
One is a little more philosophical in nature: We tend to think the future
is indeterminate. But it used to be seen as a much more determinate thing
and subject to rational planning. If it’s fundamentally unknowable, it
doesn’t make sense to say anything about it. To put it in mathematical
terms, we’ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to
statistics. So, where we once tracked the motions of the heavenly bodies
and could send Voyager to Jupiter over a multiyear trajectory, now we tend
to think nature is fundamentally driven by the random movements of atoms or
the Black-Scholes mathematical model of financial markets—the random walk
down Wall Street. You can’t know where things are going; you only know
they’re going to be random. I think some things are true about this
statistical view of the future, but it’s extremely toxic for any kind of
rational planning. It’s probably linked in part to the failure of state
communist central planning, though I would argue that there is something to
be said for some planning over no planning. We should debate whether it
should be decentralized or centralized, but what the United States has
today is an extremely big government, a quasi-socialist government, but
without a five-year plan, with no plan whatsoever.

If you were to telescope this now down to a single issue like clean energy,
the unplanned statistical view of the future is that we don’t know what
energy technology will work, so we’ll experiment with different things and
see what takes off. The planned view says that two are most likely to be
dominant, and so the government has a role to play in coordinating
resources and making sure they work. So if it’s nuclear power, it has to
free up space at Yucca Mountain, deal with zoning rules and get plants
built, and it’s a complicated project at the regulatory level. The same is
true of solar or wind power. If government wants high-speed rail, it must
overcome local zoning rules. My guess is that at best we can push on just a
handful of these major things, but that sort of determinate push requires a
view of the future that is very specific, and that’s not now the kind of
view people have.

The Solyndra bankruptcy is a detailed example of this. It strikes me that
the Obama Administration’s response should have been, “Well, Solyndra
failed, but here are two or three companies we awarded loan guarantees that
are working great.” They didn’t give that response. There’s a bad
explanation and a worse explanation for that. The bad explanation is that
none of these companies are working. The worse explanation—the one I
believe is true—is that no one at a senior level in the Administration even
thinks about the question of technology. It’s assumed to be a statistical,
probabilistic thing that’s best figured out by portfolio allocations of
capital to different researchers, and not a worthwhile subject to think
about. This is a radically different position than, say, that of John F.
Kennedy, who could talk about the nuts and bolts of the Apollo space
program and all the details of what was needed to make it happen. So it’s a
much different way of thinking about the future.

If there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started,
people have to believe philosophically that it’s possible to plan. That’s
not the world we’re living in. A letter from Einstein to the White House
would get lost in the mail room today. Nobody would think that any single
person would have that kind of expertise.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, clearly, Silicon Valley was in many ways the
product of a government industrial policy, DARPA. So much of the early
technology, the creation of the internet itself, the early semiconductor
industry, were really spinoffs from investments in military technology that
were obviously pushed very strongly by the government.

Peter Thiel: My libertarian views are qualified because I do think things
worked better in the 1950s and 60s, but it’s an interesting question as to
what went wrong with DARPA. It’s not like it has been defunded, so why has
DARPA been doing so much less for the economy than it did forty or fifty
years ago? Parts of it have become politicized. You can’t just write checks
to the thirty smartest scientists in the United States. Instead there are
bureaucratic processes, and I think the politicization of science—where a
lot of scientists have to write grant applications, be subject to peer
review, and have to get all these people to buy in—all this has been toxic,
because the skills that make a great scientist and the skills that make a
great politician are radically different. There are very few people who are
both great scientists and great politicians. So a conservative account of
what happened with science in the 20th century is that we had a
decentralized, non-governmental approach all the way through the 1930s and
early 1940s. At that point, the government could accelerate and push things
tremendously, but only at the price of politicizing it over a series of
decades. Today we have a hundred times more scientists than we did in 1920,
but their productivity per capita is less that it used to be.

Francis Fukuyama: You certainly can’t explain the survival of the shuttle
program except in political terms.

Peter Thiel: It was an extraordinary program. It cost more and did less and
was probably less safe than the original Apollo program. In 2011, when it
finally ended, there was a sense of the space age being over. Not quite,
but it’s very far off from what we had decades ago. You could argue that we
had more or better-targeted funding in the 1950s and 1960s, but the other
place where the regulatory situation is radically different is that
technology is much more heavily regulated than it used to be. It’s much
harder to get a new drug through the FDA process. It takes a billion
dollars. I don’t even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved
today.

One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much
greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything
involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world.
The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from
experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So
computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is
that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did
well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were
stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear,
petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students
at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket
scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to
build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy
and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology. That’s very
different from the 1950s and 1960s. There’s a powerful libertarian argument
that government used to be far less intrusive, but found targeted ways to
advance science and technology.

Francis Fukuyama: Let’s talk about the social impact of these changes.
Those stagnating median wages basically translate into a guy who had been
working in the auto industry or the steel industry at $15 or $20 an hour
but is now a very downwardly mobile checker at Walmart. So does the
government have a role in protecting that kind of individual? If, as you
say, we’re up to 1789 levels of inequality, this could be a socially
explosive situation—perhaps not now, but down the road. The classic
response of many capitalists is that you have to save capitalism from its
own excesses by some form of redistribution or protecting the people hurt
by it.

Peter Thiel: I think most government welfare spending does not actually go
to poor people. I don’t have a problem with the amount of money going to
poor people, and perhaps we could do somewhat more. There are some very
out-of-the-box solutions we could explore, such as a more protectionist
trade policy, which would effectively raise taxes through tariffs and
protect a range of domestic jobs. Even though that’s an inefficient move
from a certain economic perspective, perhaps it’s a better way to raise
taxes than a variety of other means. The argument has been that hampering
free trade distorts markets, but every tax distorts markets, so you need to
make a relative argument, not an absolute one.

The reality is that most government entitlements are middle-class in
nature: social security, Medicare, a lot of the education pieces. One type
of reform would be to means-test all entitlement spending, but you then run
into these difficult political problems. My larger view is that all these
fixes are simply provisional. The overarching challenge is that all the
questions about how much the government should insulate people from what’s
going on depend on how far we are from equilibrium. Take, for instance,
competition with Japan in the 1970s, when people were being paid half as
much and it was disruptive to the car industry. Was there something we
could have done? Perhaps, but China has four times as many people and wages
at one-tenth of the U.S. level. The disequilibrium goes much further.

On the one hand, we should streamline the welfare state to help those who
are actually poor, as opposed to the middle class. But at the same time we
need to do more to make people aware of the need to compete globally. One
area where government has really failed is that its use of resources have
encouraged people not to even think about the worldwide stuff. The U.S.
government in 1965 made the American people much more aware of global
competition and global trade than they are today. The economy has shifted
from manufacturing to non-tradeable services. If you’re a lawyer, yes,
there’s some complicated way in which you’re subject to international
pressure, but you’ve basically chosen a career path that doesn’t force you
to compete globally. The same is true of a nurse, a yoga instructor, a
professor or a chef. So this skewing toward non-tradable service-sector
jobs has led to a political class that is weirdly immune to globalization
and mostly oblivious to it.

Francis Fukuyama: I agree with you that we’ve bought this line from the
economists for the past thirty that globalization is inevitably going to be
good without thinking through these points you raise.

I’d like to shift now to the question of biotech and biology. I know you’ve
been an investor in companies researching issues like longevity, a personal
interest of yours. This is one of those areas, I think, where there’s
conflict between an individual’s interest in living forever versus the
social good of population turnover. Steve Jobs said this in his 2005
Stanford commencement speech, that we should welcome death, because without
it people wouldn’t see much change. It’s like Max Planck’s old saying,
“Science progresses one funeral at a time.” Pick your discipline, and I
think that’s largely true. And actually, it seems like a lot of our fiscal
woes are due to the fact that people live too long now. We used to have
population pyramids; now they look more like Greek vases, with a big mass
of older people resting on a decelerating rate of population growth. So
isn’t the cumulative impact of advancing biomedical research into longevity
going to be to worsen every single one of the social problems you point to?

Peter Thiel: I don’t agree with the Steve Jobs commencement speech. I’m
deeply skeptical about any sort of rationalization of death. It’s tricky to
make the ethics too consequentialist, because even if it were true that
longevity is bankrupting the welfare state or the healthcare system, we
can’t unlearn the things we’ve learned. The goal of longevity research is
for people to live longer and healthier lives. If it succeeds, the key
thing is just to raise the retirement age. Retirement in many cases at age
65 is absurd given present life expectancy, which has been going up two and
a half years each decade. In 1840, 46 years was the maximum life expectancy
(among Swedish women); today it’s 86 years (among Japanese women). And
every day that you survive, your life expectancy goes up something like
five or six hours. So the policy calibration should be to have an automatic
increase of the retirement age by three months per year.

The secondary, more scientific question is whether the claims are correct
that these technologies are producing longer, healthy lives; perhaps
they’re producing longer, unhealthy lives. I think the truth involves some
of both. The average seventy-year-old is healthier, but at the margins
there are longer periods of suffering, such as with Alzheimer’s. About a
third of people age 85 have either Alzheimer’s or some incipient dementia.
If we can’t cure some of these late-stage ailments, there’s a prospect of a
very long period of debility before death. I think the jury is still out.

To take a step back, the entire longevity research program is the
culmination of the Western scientific project. It was part of Francis
Bacon’s New Atlantis, and has been a recurrent thread through much of the
past 400 years of science. I don’t think we can abandon it or carve it out
without abandoning technological progress altogether. It’s too closely
linked to it.

Francis Fukuyama: One of the concerns is with innovation. Part of what
produces innovation is generational turnover. You see this in academia all
the time. The people with the best ideas are younger professors. When you
get to be my age, you more or less stopped thinking 25 years ago. If you
live another 25 years, you’ll probably have the same dumb ideas you do
today. In a sense, there’s a remorseless evolutionary logic to the fact
that one generation has to grow up in different circumstances, adjust to
that and see the world differently.

Peter Thiel: One of the critical areas of research today is neurobiology.
The trickiest organ to deal with is the brain system. We can imagine
replacing other organs as they wear out with artificial ones, but you
wouldn’t want to have your brain replaced. So the longevity project must
look at brain functioning and find ways to improve it over time. I think
significant drug advances in neurobiology have happened over the past 15
years, and there’s good reason to believe we’ll see more progress in the
next few decades.

Even if mathematicians peak in their twenties, as you suggest, a
writer-philosopher has a long shelf-life, so you’ve picked a good career
path for the age of longevity. I still think the correct answer is to
figure out ways to acknowledge the fact, to address tenure and other
systems that privilege the old over the young.

Francis Fukuyama: Look at California, for instance, where we spend much
more on Medicare and pensions for the old than on K-12 education.

Peter Thiel: It’s a political problem, I agree, because old people vote and
young people do not or cannot. On the other hand, if you look at the
venture capital industry, it tends to allocate a lot of capital to younger
people who start companies. The university is a strangely problematic case
where it’s hard for young researchers to get funding. I think the public
sector is more broken than the private sector.

Francis Fukuyama: As a last topic, let’s turn to your thoughts on
education. You’ve made the case that many people overinvest in higher
education. So you offered fellowships to allow people to drop out and start
companies. Beyond that, what’s the agenda in terms of reforming the system?
More privatization? There was a recent piece about people connected to the
Obama Administration lobbying for less regulation of for-profit education.
It seems like that’s become a pretty politicized area. What’s the next step
in fixing this overinvestment problem?

Peter Thiel: Again, I look at this through my overarching view of forty
years of technological stagnation, and an attendant unawareness of it
because a series of bubbles have distracted us. There’s an education
bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a wide public
buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to
future expectations that are unrealistic. Education is similar to the tech
bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that
didn’t pan out. The education bubble is predicated on the idea that the
education provided is incredibly valuable. In many cases that’s just not
true. Here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation
by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress.
One fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate
degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it’s an avoidance
mechanism.

The bias I had five years ago was that my foundation should start a new
university and just do everything better. I looked into it in great detail,
examining all the new universities that have been started throughout the
world in the past ten years, and found that very little has worked. It has
been a huge misallocation of capital, and donor intent got lost on all
sorts of levels. I started out wondering how you could allocate money for
the improvement of education and concluded that there was no way to do it.

This relates to the problem I mentioned earlier with taking a statistical,
unplanned approach to the future: A student doesn’t know what to do, so he
learns stuff. When I taught at Stanford Law School last year, I asked
students what they planned to do with their lives. Most were headed to big
law firms but didn’t expect to become partners and didn’t know the next
step after that. They didn’t have long-term plans about what they wanted to
achieve in their lives. I think the educational system has become a major
factor stopping people from thinking about the future. It’s far from
equilibrium. There is something like $1 trillion in student debt. A cynical
view is that that represents $1 trillion worth of lies told about the value
of higher education. There are incredible incentives to exaggerate its
value, and the counter-narrative has been shaky but is coming to the fore.
Bubbles end when people stop believing the false narrative and start
thinking for themselves. So many students are not getting the jobs they
need to repay their debts, are moving back in with their parents, and the
contract both parties signed up for is being revealed as false.

I don’t know exactly what will replace it. I suspect the for-profit schools
are like the subprime brokers. I’m not in favor of them and wouldn’t even
describe them as private-sector entities, since they’re so enmeshed in the
system of state educational subsidies. If you had a strong government that
worked, it would be fighting to break these bubbles. One of the reasons I’m
a libertarian is that our government does not act in a counter-cyclical
way. When bubbles are at their peak, it actually reinforces them—makes them
worse. Today, the courageous thing for the government to do would be to
aggressively tilt against the prevailing psychology, to encourage the
pursuit of non-college vocational careers rather than adding fuel to the
fire, as it has been doing.


Francis Fukuyama: One last question. The New Yorker profile of you
mentioned that you’ve been reading Leo Strauss. Why?

Peter Thiel: I’ve been interested in Strauss for a long time. I think
Strauss was a very important and profound thinker. His essay “Persecution
and the Art of Writing” shows how in all societies certain ideas are not
allowed to be discussed. Properly understood, political correctness is our
greatest political problem. We always have this question of how to build a
society in which important problems can be thought through and tackled.
It’s a mistake to simply fixate on the problem of political correctness in
its narrow incarnation of campus speech codes; it’s a much more pervasive
problem. For instance, part of what fuels the education bubble is that
we’re not allowed to articulate certain truths about the inequality of
abilities. Many of our destructive bubbles are linked to political
correctness, and that’s why Strauss is so important today.

Francis Fukuyama: Excellent. Thank you very much.


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<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/technoprogressive/

<*> Your email settings:
   Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/technoprogressive/join
   (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
   technoprogressive-digest at yahoogroups.com
   technoprogressive-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
   technoprogressive-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
   http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/




-- 
Stefano Vaj
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