Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Individual and Collective Incentives ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One thing that I'm very curious about is how this discipline seems to have arisen, where almost everyone representing the institutions tell some version of this universal story. Which, I'll be honest. To my way of thinking, can be instantly invalidated by anyone who chooses to do so. It's just that the cost of invalidating it is quite high. You know, Paul Krugman wrote this column called A Protectionist Moment, where he said, "Let's be honest. The financial elite's case, for ever free-er trade, has always been something of a scam.".

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And so you had people who were participating in this who seem to have known all along that there's no way of justifying this on paper, but yet were willing and able to participate with seemingly very few consequences to their careers. It didn't give opportunities to people who were heterodox and saying, "Hey, aside from a few bright spots, more or less, we've actually entered a period of relative stagnation." How did this happen?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think the individual incentives were very different from the collective incentive. The collective incentives, in which we have an honest conversation and level set things and get back to a better place. I think the individual incentives were often, you pretend that it's working great for you. The 20,000 people a year who move to Los Angeles to become movie stars, about 20 of them make it. And so you could say, "Well, it's been really hard. Nobody wants to hire me. This is a terrible city." Or you could say, "You know, this has been wonderful, and that all the doors are being opened to me." And the second one is more fictional. But that's sort of the thing you're supposed to say if you're succeeding. And I think there's a way this is how we've been talking about globalization, a weird sort of a glib globalization. It's working great for me, and I'd like to have more people, more talented people come to the US. I'm not scared of competing with them. And on and on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or academia. If you're a professor in academia, so the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I think there is sort of like this individual incentive where if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it.