from Hacker News

It’s So Over, We’re So Back: Doomer Techno-Optimism (2024)

by Multicomp on 5/21/25, 8:10 PM with 28 comments

• by Animats on 5/21/25, 9:06 PM

  It's an OK, but not great article.

  It doesn't discuss some of the biggest bubbles, those in housing. The US, Japan, and China have all had housing and land price bubbles. They unwound in different ways. In the US it was primarily a credit bubble. Japan had a huge real estate bubble, and it collapsed so hard that the Nikkei index didn't recover for decades.

  China's bubble resulted in large numbers of half-finished buildings. That's because China allows selling yet-to-be-built mortgaged apartments to consumers. In the US, you have to get construction financing at a higher rate, and can only get a mortgage on a completed structure. Banks that do construction financing pay out as work progresses, not all up front.

  Fracking isn't a bubble. Fracking is a cost reduction technology in an existing market. No need to create a market.

  Railways had the "railway mania" period, but track was laid and trains were run. More like a growth spurt than a bubble.

• by WalterGR on 5/21/25, 8:34 PM

  American productivity had basically been flat since 1973

  By all measures I’ve seen, “productivity” has almost doubled, and it’s wage growth that has been flat.

  How does this journal measure productivity?

• by Multicomp on 5/21/25, 8:12 PM

  I enjoyed reading this article, particularly it's review of the new lunar society book. That society reminds me of what excited me when I watched the Windows XP tour for the first time: this is a device intended to be a digital power tool for you to be able to do things you couldn't do before and do them better and faster and easier than before.

  While Windows of today is deceptive and buggy, the value that it has is because it still has pieces of that now discarded design philosophy.

  Zooming out from a particular technology platform, I don't know how to build that new lunar society but boy do I want to live in that world, innovation for its own sake to increase human flourishing so that we can all live the good life in a human focused technologically advanced world.

  In short: building the sci Fi flying cars future.

• by yesbut on 5/21/25, 10:04 PM

  We'd all be better off if we just ignored the Doomer Techno-Optimism prophets and their visions of the future.

  For one, they want to establish "Constitution Free Zones" outside of democratic control of nation states. All to create tax havens and increase their own profits.

  These are scam artists. Reject them and their self-serving "vision of the future". You all are being had because you refuse to read history books.

• by CalChris on 5/21/25, 9:49 PM

  TL, did read. Cowan and Thiel were bummed that Obama was President. Hobart and Mindell are enthusiastic that America has seen the errors of her ways and embraced the new insanity.

  FWIW, Cowan wrote an enthusiastic blurb for Boom.

• by keybored on 5/21/25, 8:33 PM

  > American productivity had basically been flat since 1973 and was under further strain from unproductive spending in government, health care, and education.

  The last graph I saw showed American productivity going up at the same rate all since post-WWII to now.

  Please don’t say that the stagnation refers to worker wages starting to stagnate sometime in the 1970’s.