HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: PayPal Founder Talks Technology.
Thiel argued that innovation in fields such as agriculture and transportation has become dangerously slow, leading to economic stagnation around the world.
“I think that we’ve seen progress in the virtual world, but not in the world of stuff,” Thiel said. “The U.S. has produced a ton of innovation in computers and finance over the past 30 years, but we have to ask if that implicitly twisted innovation in other areas.”
Thiel attributed this lack of innovation to structural defects in politics and education today.
Read the whole thing. My next Popular Mechanics column addresses a related theme.
UPDATE: Farmer-reader Bart Hall objects strenuously:
No innovation in agriculture? In my three decades as a farmer and agronomist the changes have been utterly remarkable and nearly all for the better. Take just a few examples … thirty years ago most agricultural pesticides persisted many years in the soil and required something like 3 or 4 pounds of the active material per acre. New pesticides are often effective at rates of an ounce per acre or less and are non-persistent. A number of new insecticides aren’t even poisons at all but hormones which disrupt the target pest’s life cycle.
Precision-guidance systems have led to a 6% increase in vegetable yields, simply by eliminating space previously wasted when growers worked just a bit wide to avoid overlaps. Other guidance systems allow close mechanical cultivation of vegetable rows, mostly eliminating the need for herbicides. Many new vegetable varieties have much more disease resistance, producing better yields with fewer pesticides. The Japanese developped greenhouse coverings which exclude the specific wavelengths of light needed by mildews to infect the crop.
Breeders produced high-Vitamin-A rice to reduce blindness in the developping world. They’re working on incorporating oral vaccines into specially-colored bananas; no refrigeration necessary. We’re now able to evaluate grassland health and productivity from space. New, tastier, and more nutritious varieties of fruit are being developped regularly around the world — remember the old pineapples? New machinery for no-stoop harvest of salad mixes at an affordable price.
The list could go on for a long time, but this ought to be enough to illustrate Thiel’s egregious ignorance of agriculture. Unfortunately I could do the same for at least three other important domains of “stuff” — minerals, energy, and forestry. What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of “stuff” except helping people pay for it.
Note: My forthcoming column says nothing about farms.