

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel predicts bleak future for innovation - timgluz
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/04/16/billionaire-investor-predicts-bleak-future-for-innovation/

======
tgflynn
I doubt regulation plays more than a marginal role here.

The truth is that capitalism is not good at creating new technologies, only at
increasing adoption of technologies that have already been developed.

Innovation on big problems is hard by definition. It takes decades and there
is a very high risk of failure. The original ideas may not work out, an
alternative technology may be developed which ends up dominating the market or
increasingly the way may be blocked by patents.

Why would an investor support such an undertaking, especially when very good
returns can be obtained in well established areas like social networking (at
least if you spread around your investments) and finance ?

The only exceptions to this general picture are those very rare companies with
practical monopoly power which have been able to fund developments of this
nature. Examples are Google and pre-deregulation AT&T. But such behemoths
represent only a small fraction of the total economy and though some
monopolies might be good for technology development it seems unlikely that
increasing their role in the economy would be of general benefit. The result
is that the vast majority of new technologies over the past 60 years have been
spearheaded by government research (semiconductors, the internet, etc.). Even
self-driving cars were made possible by government driven efforts.

Overall I think society vastly underfunds research and development compared to
what would be optimal for mid to long-term enhancement of human well-being and
this is primarily due to a broken socio-economic system.

~~~
wslh
Do you have any recommendation about essays on this subject? innovation vs
capitalism.

------
rtpg
So we get the same spiel about how regulatory pressure is killing innovation,
which is basically what all these types of guys have been saying for a while.

I'll try to ask this question without being inflammatory, but has there been a
lot of case study or research about the effect of regulation on startups? I
can think of the Uber thing, but apart from that I can't really think of
things where regulation was the only thing that stood between a startup and
success (survivor bias I know).

His example is , of course, alternative energy. He says that regulation
prevents investment, but isn't it more the fact that connecting something to
the grid is complicated, building something that could create any amount of
power is expensive, and that the problem is more or less fundamentally hard
the issue? I mean doesn't Tesla show that when you throw enough money at the
problem, you're still able to tackle the infrastructure problem?

