A note on the Great Stagnation

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

It’s ironic that The Great Stagnation was coined by a libertarian, since the problem seems to be one of market incentives. In the private sector, we get the innovations that make money easiest. Even more ironic to hear a Peter Thiel place blame on the university, the one institution where those cheap incentives are least present and most easily overcome and where the structures are in place to overcome those cheap incentives. The university is not without structural flaws, and private sector incentives have found a place in it. But non private incentives are also encouraged, and inquisitive minds looking beyond private incentives justifiably seek the university as a home for their research. In any case, the private sector is not well equipped to overcome market incentives and the history of the last half century tells us that it increasingly finds ways to bury itself in those incentives until it can’t dig itself out of its own dysfunctions or the shit it excreted with which it has covered itself and everyone else, whether that’s externalities like pollution or the multiplication of inessential gadgets that pile the waste heaps higher and higher.