Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, managing partner at VC firm Founders Fund, and manager of Clarium Capital, is the author of a dense, academic article in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review on apocalypse and prospects for globalization. He ultimately espouses a case for optimism, arguing that the various China, technology, and hedge fund bubbles along the way are facets of a long term “Great Boom,” and critically, that there is no meaningful alternative future to this boom that does not involve us all foraging for berries.
For macro investors, it would be an abdication not to wrestle with the central question of our age: How should the risk of a comprehensive collapse of the world economic and political system factor into one ’s decisions?…What must happen for there to be no secular apocalypse — for what one might call the “optimistic” version of the future to unfold? …Any investor who ignores the apocalyptic dimension of the modern world also will underestimate the strangeness of a twenty-first century in which there is no secular apocalypse.
Consider my mind blown. Shouldn’t this guy be running several companies and worrying about quarterly numbers? I am suitably impressed that he has found enough free time to drop academic globalization theory-bombs on an unsuspecting populace.
CC JRNL 