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Confronting Stagnation: What’s Going Wrong?

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An Era of Stagnation and Universal Institutional Failure - Peter Thiel, Eric Weinstein. On why and how innovation and scientific progress are declining.

A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison, and Tyler Cowern - Tech & Society. Zuckerberg interviews Collison and Cowen on slowing scientific progress and how to accelerate it.

Growth, Progress, Culture - Patrick Collison. Asks if growth, progress, and culture are declining and what we can do about it.

Where is My Flying Car? - J. Storrs Hall. An account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future.

What Intellectual Progress Did I Make in the 2010s - Scott Alexander. Reviews his shift in thinking positively to negatively about progress, including a host of references: “In the 2000s, people debated Kurzweil’s thesis that scientific progress was speeding up superexponentially. By the mid-2010s, the debate shifted to whether progress was actually slowing down. In Promising The Moon, I wrote about my skepticism that technological progress is declining. A group of people including Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen have since worked to strengthen the case that it is; in 2018 I wrote Is Science Slowing Down?, and late last year I conceded the point. Paul Christiano helped me synthesize the Kurzweillian and anti-Kurzweillian perspectives into 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled. In 2017, I synthesized some thoughts that had been bouncing around about rising prices into Considerations On Cost Disease, still one of this blog’s most popular posts. The first would-be-general-answer that made me sit up and take notice was Alex Tabarrok’s book (link goes to my review) The Prices Are Too Damn High – but I explain there why I don’t think it can be the full answer.”

Institutional Failure as Surprise - Samo Burja. A historic account of why institutions fail.

The Case Against Education - Bryan Caplan. Discusses the problems with today’s educational system and gives a few suggestions for alternatives.

Against News - Robin Hanson. On why consuming the news may be overvalued.

Scientism and The Study of Society - Friedrich Hayek. On the risks of “scientisim”.

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