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Mildly paranoid rant follows:

The 1970s was when the Club Of Rome, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb and all the Malthusian overpopulation scare mongering went absolutely bonkers and the elites bought into it completely. Rich people have been fascinated with reducing the world's population growth ever since. There is no "good" future anymore among "serious" prognosticators. It's wall-to-wall eco-doom. This has led to a almost pathological derision of any new ideas in energy, food production, and transport as they just contribute more to our success as a species and more overpopulation.

The developing world, namely India and China didn't get the memo and now they've quickly caught up and there is a lot of angst coming out of the west about how they can't control the carbon emissions of the BRICs and slow down their economies. The BRICs say that the west is responsible for the majority of the carbon emissions when their economies were developing so they should pay the economic burden.

I really think revolutionary technology is poised to come out of China. They've caught up and now they are going to surpass us with the development of new nuclear reactors, alternative energy and their massive rollout of high speed rail across the country. They might even surprise us with something we weren't even expecting. Broad Corp's ultra-fast skyscraper building techniques seem like a sign of things to come.

I don't think this is particularly nutty, but I don't see it as a root cause.

LTG pointed out some real problems. If we were in the 50s-60s can-do mindset we'd have reacted with "well let's roll up our sleeves and fix it then!" But that wasn't the reaction at all. The reaction was doom and gloom and futility with a hefty helping of thinly veiled racism and classism. Gotta stop those poor and brown people from overrunning the country club!

I think LTG was an example of something that hit at just the right time to capture a dominant zeitgeist that was already shifting toward conservatism and pessimism. It was a lightning rod.

Wait, wait... eco-doom-mongering and population control abortion-mongering represent "conservatism"?

Yes, but of a different sort than you find on the right.

Another thing since 1970 is that there have been no liberals on the mainstream political landscape, just various species of "left" reactionaries and "right" reactionaries.

> but I have yet to see an explanation that truly seems to work

The 70's was when energy started getting expensive again. And we did nothing to deal with the problem, not even now.

The 50's and the 60's (and the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's...) were marked by huge growth in govenments worldwide. Something that we simply never experienced before. It's quite possible that we reached an inflection point by the 70's, and it become almost impossible to inovate.

This guy[1] has some interesting theories about the way administration evolved at the XX century. A world dominated by corporations is a new thing, and it may be true that the natural evolution of a society dominated by them leads to a period of stagnation like we have now.

All of the above explanations have data backing them (but less backing for the third), and people on the net eager to push that data to anybody that asks. Any of them alone could explain a worldwide stagnation of a few decades (or longer for the first). All of them seem to be happening, but causation on a system as complex as humanity is hard to stablish. Maybe we need to technological revolution on system analisys...

[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

EDIT: Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard. And we have a lot of work we need to make on tooling before we see fast widespread development again.

> Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard.

Well, harder. See my post at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338417

in this thread where I try to explain the sense in which harder is, with the traditional management hierarchy, too hard.

That's similar to what I was calling corporate evolution. It's nice to see more people reaching the same conclusion, as that's the second one I'm less confident that is relevant.

The one I'm less confident is that development is too hard. And I mean it in the literal sense, in that we need to create entire new thinking paradigms, and invest endless billions on tools so that we can get in another easily explited plateau. I'm not the only one expressing it on the thread, by the way.

And now that I've had time to think about it, there's another possibility - that development is too easy... The basic science developed up to the 60's left us in a place where we can create tons of wealth even with no basic improvement, and it's possible that we aren't invest on the basics just because it does not offer the hightest ROI. Once we exploit enough possibilities that further improvement gets hard again, we may revert into investing in basic science and basic development.

Again, for the issue of growing the economy and standard of living through more exploitation of what's on the shelves of the research libraries and the well trained workers in that material, I believe that the bottleneck is, really, with the non-technical suits, the guys with, maybe, a Harvard English or history major, maybe a law school degree, maybe an MBA, but with no real technical qualifications. So, these guys won't bet their careers on technical material they don't understand. Before 1940, the suits could understand enough about, say, radio and cars.

So, do all the pure/applied research you want, those suits won't let, or at least won't help, the results see the light of day.

We did a lot of pure research because (A) that is what the academic world most respects and, thus, for their careers, most researchers wanted to pursue, (B) US research, including workers with pasts in pure research, were a super big help in winning WWII and doing well in the Cold War, (C) the US DoD really liked and respected both pure and applied research, (D) Congress was eager to fund research as part of helping US national security. Part of the rationale for Congress funding pure research was that (A) the leading researchers told Congress that that was the research to fund and (B) the pure researchers were the profs who trained the worker bees for the more applied research -- so Congress was still happy.

What we fund now via NSF and NIH is not too shabby. If someone actually has some good work background and a really good proposal, then likely they can get funded.

But, with some exceptions, take some research results and a proposal for a product to Silicon Valley or the suits in a large company will, get either silence or laughs. Again, the suits want next to nothing to do with research results.

Or, journals will give a serious review of a submitted research paper, but the suits won't get past the title page.

1970 is about the end of the Apollo programme, and I presume the end of the massive government spending on science and engineering that went with it.

You're right, a libertarian view of this is way off the mark.

Correlation is not causation. You are cherry picking one metric and using it to flout your point of view.

Oh I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. Hold on for just five years while I perform a study to find the correlation, then after that we can argue about the causation until we both die.

And now you're committing the fallacy of argument from emotional intimidation by using sarcasm.

There are times when your sarcasm would acutally be a valid point and not sarcasm, but this is not one.

The cold war having gone by the tipping point was also a very large factor. This tied into the moonrace, and the spin off innovations from that.

As a side note, It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science, because that is not the point of it. It is a signal of intent, throwing the baton far into the future and hoping to reach it and somehow making it, with innumerable side benefits. What we've lost is the entire will for moonshots, and no one in society is engaged in anything like it.

Sometimes I'm an ultra libertarian too, but I suspect the reason Thiel wouldn't follow this reasoning is purely on the basis of who was doing the spending in that era.

> It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science...

Sometimes I actually blame Skepticism.

I'm not talking about skepticism mind you, but Skepticism-- the capital-S variety that became so popular in science starting in the 1970s as a reaction against things like the new age and the resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Rather than an attempt to keep the candle of science burning, I've started seeing Skeptics as another manifestation of the general turn toward superstition that occurred on or around this time. Theirs is the superstition of the known-- the belief that that which is not presently understood cannot possibly exist. Skepticism also usually fellow-travels with the kind of deep conservatism you're talking about. Head over to Skeptic boards and you'll see that the general opinion is anti-manned-space-flight for exactly the reasons you state-- it's not the most science for the buck, etc. It also usually fellow-travels with eco-doomerism for the simple reason that no comprehensive solutions to our current energy problems are known therefore they cannot possibly exist. (That which is not known can't possibly exist, remember?) Skepticism raised a generation of scientists whose first instinct is to tear things down and narrow the range of possibility.

My personal big overarching theory on the dark age of the 70s is that there was a broad shift toward conservatism and fundamentalism across the entire spectrum of human thought: right and left, scientific and mystical, etc. As for why I'm not sure, but I suspect that fear was a big part of it. Lovecraft said it best:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

That's exactly what I think happened: we fled from the deadly light into a whole grab bag of comforting, pessimistic, conservative absolutisms. Apocalyptic fiction is so popular for the same reason-- people find it comforting in a weird way. If we're all doomed then at least we know what the outcome will be... unlike more optimistic visions of the future that end with black voids like "the singularity," human genetic metamorphosis, alien contact, the birth of AI or other post-human intelligence, etc. I think there's a part of us that finds the unknown more terrifying than death and that secretly hopes that WWIII or ecological collapse will save us from the great unknown outcome of progress and exploration.

If I had to stick a marker in the ground, I'd place it at the moment everyone saw that earth rise shot:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/946xvariable_...

See any gods in there? See anything that cares about us? Nope. All I see is a tiny grain of sand in an endless black void of nothingness. We are basically dust mites living on that grain of sand. This photo basically proves that we know very little about where we are, where we come from, and where we are going. People looked at that picture and said it was beautiful and inspiring, but secretly somewhere deep inside I wonder if the reaction wasn't metaphysical horror...

Stare at it for a while... you'll see it.

Blaming skepticism is an interesting point and makes me wonder. What about the publishing culture? Does it map more closely to incrementalism, or is it just that the surface area of the problem space has grown too vast for the human mind to generally see the bigger picture?

Should empiricism be changed to allow fuzziness and uncertainty within the process? Scientific truth seems like a problem space similar to those amenable to metaheuristics. We don't know the form of the optimal / most true model. I'm not positing this for physics. Mainly systems biology and big data fields.

I certainly do think the publishing culture has become broken.

There is no doubt in my mind that if Einstein appeared in this environment he'd have been labelled a crackpot and it would have taken fifty years or more before anyone even began to take him seriously.

The fact we now have a global network of entities competing for funding from relatively narrow sources means that those that deviate rapidly get weeded out. There is at least the perception that prior to about 1990 different institutions could be quite divergent with their views on particular ideas, violently disagree, but both still pursue research in their unique directions. The world seems far more homogeneous today.

>See any gods in there?

I see billions.

>See any gods in there? See anything that cares about us? Nope. All I see is a tiny grain of sand in an endless black void of nothingness. We are basically dust mites living on that grain of sand. This photo basically proves that we know very little about where we are, where we come from, and where we are going. People looked at that picture and said it was beautiful and inspiring, but secretly somewhere deep inside I wonder if the reaction wasn't metaphysical horror...

>Stare at it for a while... you'll see it.

I'm just not seeing it. Instead, this one favorite song starts playing in my mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p5OyLFQLCc). I see a species many of whom ignorantly believe that the world is only a few thousand years old, and yet who have not the slightest idea how young they truly are, and how far they have to grow up. I see sad, pessimistic depressives who grew up in darkness for so long that only the tiniest minority have any idea what light actually is or looks like.

And yet they struggle for every day and every tiniest gain! And each step of struggle, each plateau where a man falls tired, becomes the starting point where his successor begins and climbs yet higher! Every man climbs and climbs and will keep climbing until climbing through the heavens themselves!

These creatures contemplate their history and see it as either a line or a circle, but only the tiniest few have yet grasped that the path their race walks on is a spiral: turning endlessly around to recapitulate what came before, but always greater than ever before! They fight and build endlessly even though they have no coherent idea why or wherefore!

Think of where the human race comes from and consider everything they've accomplished, and think of all they will soon do. Think of the utterly insignificant timescale of it all, from the astrophysical and geological perspectives, and thus think of the unbelievable speed with which these people think and move!

Dust mites? Fear the empty black? Never! These are the finest, bravest, and wisest beings yet produced in this universe, who are forced to turn to their boundless imagination to find works exceeding their own!

(Yes, I know what the above sounds like. I still endorse it. On a good day.)

I guess the photo you linked to might have some kind of emotional impact on some people, but it doesn't actually tell us anything we didn't know 500 years ago.

The end of the cold war also meant the end of battling propagandas between east and west. Maybe what we're feeling is a result of no one telling us stories any more, and not a result of any real change.

* It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science, because that is not the point of it. It is a signal of intent, throwing the baton far into the future and hoping to reach it and somehow making it, with innumerable side benefits. What we've lost is the entire will for moonshots, and no one in society is engaged in anything like it.*

Disagree completely. I am firmly in the camp against manned space travel however I am also firmly in the camp of "moonshots" when it comes to things that have value for their stated purpose.

See the problem with manned spacetravel is that, at it's core it is not an immediately valuable end. It will always be only a means to some other end. It's not like "science" in that it is a repeatable process that covers many domains - if you are doing manned spaceflight then the goal is basically "lets drive around." Given the scale of problems we have on terra, manned spaceflight is actually pretty silly - hence why it took a pissing contest WAR to get us to go drive around on the moon.

From the person Thiel's debating soon: http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl...

You can find a video of a talk online too.

Here's another idea I have no evidence for. Maybe it is a compounding problem, maybe it is the problem, maybe it's total nonsense.

Perhaps we are seeing the affect of an increase in difficulty of pushing the boundaries of basic science, and the difficulties of interpreting that new basic science, and thus of applying it to anything that will enhance our lives, our economies, so on.

How many people could really get to grips with Newtonian physics? I'd hazard a guess that a reasonable percentage of the world's population, given boundless resources for education, lots of time, etc, would be able to get their heads around it.

Now, how many people in the world, under the same circumstances, are capable of understanding QFT, to the point of doing something with it in the applied space? I think the percentage just dropped drastically.

>How many people could really get to grips with Newtonian physics? I'd hazard a guess that a reasonable percentage of the world's population, given boundless resources for education, lots of time, etc, would be able to get their heads around it. > >Now, how many people in the world, under the same circumstances, are capable of understanding QFT, to the point of doing something with it in the applied space? I think the percentage just dropped drastically.

You know what? I don't think so. I think that the borderline for raw intelligence necessary to understand modern physics and mathematics hasn't actually gotten much higher, but we academics like maintaining our sense of belonging to an intellectual elite so strongly that we've simply neglected to work on improving how we teach the deeper material. After all, if a student fails to understand, it's because he's stupid, inferior, and destined to change majors into Journalism, so we don't have to try.

See my post at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338417

in this thread.

I believe we are largely in agreement, and I suggest what happened near 1970 and propose an answer to the question since 1970 and to what Thiel is complaining about.

Mentioned it as a comment; reposting here because it fits into what you mention: I am wondering how much of an impact modern money policies have had on this "perceived" (???) deceleration, i.e. through a growing government bureaucracy that is siphoning off productivity by deluding the overall purchasing power of the population, gold as money standard and all of that...? Secondly, what about demographics – is an aging population with a smaller amount of young people more risk averse and prone to regulating everything to death?

I blame it on the Baby Boom coming of age.