Source: TikTok
Peter Thiel’s Zero to One (2014), together with his Wall Street Journal essay “Competition Is for Losers,” his 2009 essay on libertarianism, and his 2007 piece “The Straussian Moment,” advances a provocative doctrine: that the goal of enterprise is monopoly, that competition is a trap for the mediocre, that genuine progress means going from “0 to 1” rather than copying what already exists, and that the modern West has fallen into technological stagnation. At the level of firm strategy, much of this is sound and genuinely useful, which is why it has been so influential among founders and investors.
As a social philosophy, however, the doctrine strains against mainstream welfare economics, the antitrust laws, and a growing body of evidence linking market concentration to weaker wages, investment, and business dynamism. Its flagship example, Google, was ruled an illegal monopolist by a United States federal court in 2024. Several supporting claims — that China merely copies the West, that successful founders are quasi-clinical outliers, that fields such as chemistry and geography hold no further secrets — are dated, stigmatising, or simply mistaken.
Read alongside Thiel’s own political writing, the doctrine coheres into a vision of a society run by and for a small, contrarian, technologically empowered elite, insulated from both market competition and democratic accountability. This report sets out what is claimed, separates the defensible from the untenable, weighs the legal, ethical, regulatory, financial, and societal stakes, applies a reality-check against the evidence, and closes with a hypothesis about the kind of order these ideas imply.
Stated fairly and at its strongest, the argument runs as follows.
The foundation is a claim about singularity. Every pivotal moment in business and technology, on this view, happens only once: the next transformative company will not be another social network, search engine, or operating system, and imitating past founders therefore teaches the wrong lesson. From this Thiel draws a striking corollary — that there is “no science to business,” because science begins with the repeatable (with “the number 2”), whereas every great company is one of a kind. The founder’s task is to go from “0 to 1”: to create something genuinely new rather than to copy what already works.
To locate such singular opportunities, he poses a set of contrarian questions. Most famously: what important truth do very few people agree with you on, and what valuable company is nobody building. He treats the difficulty of answering as evidence that genuine, courage-demanding insight is rare and precious.
The centrepiece is the monopoly thesis. Founders should aim not to win competitions but to escape them, building a company so differentiated that it has no close substitute. Capitalism and competition, Thiel insists, are not synonyms but antonyms: the capitalist accumulates profit, while perfect competition drives profit to zero. Competition, in the essay’s formulation, “is for losers.” His paradigm of the benign “creative monopoly” is Google, which he argues has faced no serious search competition since it distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft in the early 2000s and has generated vast cash flows ever since.
He adds a candid observation about corporate rhetoric. Monopolists, he says, conceal their dominance to avoid scrutiny, typically by defining their market as a small slice of some enormous space (Google as merely one competitor among many in “technology”); non-monopolists do the reverse, inventing narrow niches so they can claim to dominate something — the only fusion restaurant of its kind in a single neighbourhood.
Woven through the argument is a psychological claim about competition itself. Thiel presents competition as a trap that narrows focus and captures identity, illustrated by his own path from Stanford to a Wall Street law firm that people fought to enter and then longed to leave — an “escape from Alcatraz” whose only exit was the front door. He suggests that many of the most successful founders exhibit a mild form of Asperger’s, which he frames as an “indictment” of a society that talks conventionally socialised people out of original ideas before they are fully formed. He contrasts them with business-school graduates, whom he caricatures as conviction-free conformists chasing the last wave — junk bonds in 1989, dot-coms in 1999, housing and private equity before 2008 — and roots this herd behaviour in a broader human tendency to imitate, the mimetic theory of his teacher Rene Girard, which he sees driving bubbles and manias.
The second pillar is epistemological: the doctrine of secrets. Thiel divides truths into conventions (what everyone knows), mysteries (what no one can know), and secrets (hard truths that diligence can uncover). He argues that many secrets remain, that fields such as geography and basic chemistry are exhausted, and that information technology, biotechnology, and space are comparatively under-explored — that progress should expand from the “world of bits” into the “world of atoms.” He offers PayPal’s discovery that money could be sent by email as an example of such a secret, and underpins the whole with his thesis of technological stagnation since roughly 1971.
The third pillar distinguishes two modes of progress. Globalisation (going “1 to n”) means copying what already works and is horizontal or extensive; technology (going “0 to 1”) means doing new things and is vertical or intensive. China is his paradigm of globalisation: on his account, its surest path is to copy what has worked in the West. He sketches a history in which 1815 to 1914 combined both modes, the war-torn twentieth century advanced technology while globalisation reversed, and the post-1971 era restarted globalisation while technological progress narrowed to computing.
He closes with a rhetorical reframing. The vocabulary of “developed” and “developing” nations, he argues, is quietly defeatist: to call the West “developed” is to imply that nothing new remains to be done and to accept stagnation. The proper ambition, he concludes, is to “develop the developed world.”
Several of these claims are not merely contestable but collapse on inspection. Presenting them as paradoxical truths lends rhetorical force to what are, on examination, category errors or plain misstatements.
“Capitalism and competition are antonyms.” This is the doctrine’s signature inversion, and it works only by quietly redefining its terms. Capitalism is standardly understood as an economic system built on private ownership and the coordination of production through competitive markets; Thiel narrows it to the bare act of accumulating capital. But rentiers, feudal landlords, and monopoly courtiers accumulate capital too, and no one calls feudalism capitalism. The sleight of hand conflates a firm’s private wish to escape competition with the system’s defining reliance on it. A single company may rationally seek to avoid rivalry; that does not make rivalry the opposite of the system whose prices, quality, and innovation competition exists to discipline. Stated as a general truth about capitalism, the claim is false; stated as advice to a founder, it is simply the ordinary pursuit of pricing power dressed as paradox.
“There is no science to business.” The aphorism that “science starts with the number 2” — with the repeatable — sounds deep but does not survive contact with practice. Every physical object is unique in some respect, yet physics still governs it; uniqueness at one level does not abolish regularity at another. Business is dense with repeatable, testable structure: unit economics, pricing elasticity, operations research, cohort and retention analysis, and the literal experiment of A/B testing. Thiel’s own central claim — that durable market power produces durable cash flow — is an empirical generalisation of exactly the kind he says cannot exist. The insight worth keeping is narrower and less dramatic: that the highest-return opportunities are often non-obvious and hard to reduce to formula. That is a claim about difficulty, not about the impossibility of knowledge.
“Geography and basic chemistry are fully explored.” Offered as examples of fields where no secrets remain, both are simply mischaracterised. Chemistry is among the most active frontiers in science, from catalysis and materials to the battery electrochemistry on which the energy transition depends — a field Thiel elsewhere in the same body of work calls badly under-explored, contradicting himself within a single argument. The claim that a mature field holds no more discoverable truths mistakes the settling of its foundations for the exhaustion of its frontier.
“Successful founders have Asperger’s, which indicts our society.” There is a defensible observation buried here — that social conformity can suppress unconventional ideas — but Thiel routes it through an armchair clinical diagnosis of people he has never assessed, then inflates it into a causal law: that neurotypical adaptation reliably destroys originality, so that innovation requires a quasi-pathological deficit in the faculty of imitation. This is unfalsifiable and self-sealing — any conformist is proof, and any original thinker is proof — and it rests on a stereotype rather than evidence. The reality-check below sets out why clinicians and disability advocates reject the framing outright.
A second category of claims is not incoherent but factually outdated, selectively told, or contradicted by the public record.
Google as the benign monopoly. The financial premise is accurate — the company’s search dominance has produced enormous profits — but the normative framing has been overtaken by law. In August 2024 a United States federal court held that Google is an illegal monopolist in general search and search advertising, and that it maintained that position through exclusionary default-payment agreements; the court found a search share of roughly 89 per cent, rising to about 95 per cent on mobile devices. Presenting Google as the model of a monopoly that harms no one omits that the very conduct sustaining those cash flows has been ruled unlawful, and that European regulators have levied more than eight billion euros in related antitrust penalties across search, mobile, advertising, and platform cases. The example does not merely fail to support the thesis; it now cuts against it.
China simply copies the West. This was a common view a decade ago and is no longer tenable as a general claim. China leads the world in electric vehicles and in the batteries that power them — its national champions hold the top two positions in the global battery market and a majority of installations — and it is at or near the frontier in high-speed rail, solar manufacturing, and 5G telecommunications, and increasingly in artificial intelligence. Chinese firms now complain that foreign rivals copy them. Casting an entire economy as a permanent imitator was always analytically crude; it has also simply been falsified by events.
Technological stagnation began in 1971. The underlying observation has real support: measured productivity growth did slow after about 1970, and serious economists have documented it. But the precise inflection date popular in Thiel-influenced circles is stylised, its causes are contested — oil shocks, measurement difficulties, and demographic and regulatory shifts all feature — and the slogan that we got social media instead of flying cars understates genuine advances in genomics and messenger-RNA medicine, in the collapsing cost of solar power and batteries, and in reusable rockets, several of them in areas Thiel himself champions. The stagnation thesis is a legitimate argument overstated into a settled fact.
PayPal uncovered a clean “secret.” The story that PayPal simply discovered the hidden truth that money could travel by email compresses a messy history into a tidy parable. The founding company first tried to beam encrypted payments between Palm Pilots, a product that failed; the email-payment feature began as a minor add-on before a viral use-case on an auction site, a merger, and heavy growth spending turned it into the core business. The retrofitting of a linear discovery onto a sequence of pivots is a useful caution about founder mythology — including Thiel’s own.
The developed/developing vocabulary is anti-technological. Thiel’s closing move attacks a straw man. The terms “developed” and “developing” are descriptive shorthand for stages of economic convergence, not an assertion that innovation has ceased in wealthy countries; no economist believes that labelling a nation “developed” means it will invent nothing further. The reframing is rhetorically energising, but it earns its point only by misreading ordinary development vocabulary as a declaration of technological surrender.
Beyond their truth or falsity, several of these ideas carry consequences — legal, regulatory, ethical, financial, and societal — that deserve to be weighed on their own terms.
Legal and regulatory. The advice to aim for monopoly and then conceal it sits directly athwart competition law. In the United States, the Sherman Act does not forbid monopoly as such, but it forbids acquiring or maintaining one through exclusionary conduct — precisely the kind of default-payment arrangement that sank Google. Counselling founders to disguise dominance by gerrymandering their market definition is not a neutral rhetorical tip: a firm’s own characterisation of its market power is discoverable in litigation and can bear on intent, and for public companies the omission of material competitive facts implicates securities-disclosure obligations. What is framed as savvy positioning is, in a courtroom, potential evidence.
Financial. At the level of the individual firm or fund, the doctrine is largely sound and explains its influence. Investors reward durable pricing power; a defensible moat, genuine differentiation, and an escape from commoditised price wars are the difference between a business that compounds and one that merely survives. Warren Buffett’s notion of an “economic moat” expresses the same logic. Nothing in this report disputes that seeking durable advantage is rational for those deploying capital.
Ethical and societal. The difficulty is that a strategy which is rational for one actor becomes corrosive when elevated into a social ideal. This is the crux of the analysis, and it deserves its own treatment.
Several of these ideas can be, at the same time, good advice for a founder and bad news for a society. Recognising both halves is essential to assessing them honestly.
Seeking, and hiding, monopoly. For a single company, market power is the reward for risk, and downplaying it avoids scrutiny. Universalised as a norm, the deliberate pursuit and concealment of monopoly is exactly the dynamic that economists link to rising mark-ups, weaker investment, and declining business formation — the conditions of a less dynamic economy that serves incumbents at the expense of entrants and consumers. It also normalises opacity toward the regulators charged with protecting competition. What maximises one firm’s value can, at scale, degrade the market itself.
Treating competition as contemptible. The slogan that competition is for losers is a useful corrective to mindless rivalry, but as a cultural value it disparages the very mechanism that transmits lower prices, higher quality, and faster innovation to the public. A society that came to regard competing as beneath its elite would be one increasingly organised around gatekeeping and rent extraction rather than earning custom in open contest.
The founder-genius mythology. Framing successful founders as quasi-clinical outliers who see what others cannot flatters a narrow elite and, in its harder forms, excuses antisocial conduct as the price of genius. Tied to a diagnostic label, it also stigmatises autistic people, the overwhelming majority of whom encounter employment discrimination rather than venture capital, and it leans on an eponym whose namesake is himself the subject of grave historical controversy, addressed below.
Framing whole peoples as copyists. To cast China — or any developing society — as a permanent imitator lacking creative agency is not only empirically wrong; it encodes a hierarchy in which originality is the property of one part of the world and mere replication the lot of the rest. Whatever its analytical intent, the framing carries a normative sting that a fairer account would avoid.
Escaping politics. In Thiel’s broader writing the same instinct that seeks escape from competition seeks escape from democratic politics. Directing capital toward exit — offshore structures, new jurisdictions, frontier technologies — can be perfectly rational. But an ethos that treats democratic accountability itself as an obstacle to be routed around is, at a societal level, difficult to distinguish from a preference for rule unconstrained by the governed. That is the point at which shrewd strategy shades into something a democratic society has good reason to reject.
These positions are not a random assortment. Read alongside Thiel’s own political and philosophical writing, they cohere into a recognisable worldview.
A contrarian epistemology. At its base is the conviction, absorbed from Rene Girard, that human beings are compulsively imitative — that desire and belief are copied from others, breeding rivalry and herd behaviour. Thiel makes anti-mimetic contrarianism the whole of his method: truth lies wherever the crowd is not, and the task is to resist convergence. It is an intellectually serious stance, but it also licenses a habit of treating disagreement with consensus as evidence of insight in itself.
A pessimistic political theology. In his 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel draws on Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and Girard to argue that Enlightenment optimism has failed and that questions of violence and order can no longer be safely evaded. He engages Schmitt’s friend-and-enemy conception of politics and the Straussian idea of esoteric writing addressed to elites, and closes on the imagery of civilisational decline. The essay is candid that a politics operating outside representative checks appears troubling — and then presses the inquiry anyway.
Scepticism of democracy. Most explicitly, in a 2009 essay Thiel wrote that he no longer regards freedom and democracy as compatible, attributing the tension in part to the twentieth-century expansion of the electorate, and defined the central task as finding an escape from politics in all its forms — through seasteading, cyberspace, and outer space. Whatever its later qualifications, the statement is unusually direct for a figure of his influence.
Elitism and exit. Across these strands runs a consistent picture: a small, capable, contrarian elite of founders and investors who create genuinely new things, set against an imitative mass prone to bubbles and conformity; and, where the constraints of markets or politics press too hard, a preference for exit — new jurisdictions, life extension, the frontier — over voice within existing institutions.
From ideas to influence. These are not merely private musings. Thiel co-founded a major defence-data company, has funded life-extension and seasteading ventures, spoke at a national party convention, and has directed record sums into the campaigns of political proteges, including a former co-author of the book under discussion. The worldview has been backed by capital and translated into political power, which is why its content matters well beyond the seminar room.
Set against the evidence, the doctrine’s empirical claims come apart at several seams, though fairness requires noting where the picture is genuinely contested.
The economics of monopoly. Standard welfare economics holds that monopoly pricing imposes a deadweight loss and transfers value from consumers to producers. On innovation specifically, the picture is not the simple pro-monopoly story: Kenneth Arrow argued that a secure monopolist has weaker incentive to innovate than a firm under competitive pressure, and the modern consensus, associated with Philippe Aghion and co-authors, is an inverted-U in which some competition, not its absence, maximises innovation. Thiel’s move is to generalise a firm-level tactic into a macroeconomic ideal — and there the aggregate evidence runs against him. A widely cited study finds average United States mark-ups rising from about 21 per cent above cost in 1980 to roughly 61 per cent, with average profit rates climbing from one to eight per cent; other work ties rising concentration to weaker investment and lower labour income, and Census research documents a long decline in new-firm formation, whose share of all firms roughly halved over three decades. Honesty requires noting that these findings are contested on measurement grounds — some analysts argue concentration has been broadly flat in many sectors — but the weight of the evidence does not support celebrating monopoly as a social good.
The law. The single most direct rebuttal is that the doctrine’s flagship example is now a legal cautionary tale. A federal court has ruled Google an unlawful monopolist; a remedies decision has followed; and European regulators have imposed billions of euros in fines across multiple cases. The cash flows Thiel admired are, in law, partly the fruits of conduct the courts have condemned.
Autism and the founder stereotype. The claim that founders are marked by “mild Asperger’s” fails on both accuracy and ethics. The diagnosis was retired as a distinct category in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 2013 and folded into autism spectrum disorder; clinicians object to its casual application to un-assessed third parties; and the framing romanticises a condition most of whose bearers face discrimination rather than acclaim. The eponym itself is fraught: peer-reviewed research published in 2018 concluded that Hans Asperger cooperated with the Nazi child-euthanasia programme, a finding endorsed by leading autism researchers, though a 2025 reassessment disputes its extent. The honest conclusion is that the association is a stigmatising over-generalisation resting on a troubled name.
China and innovation. As noted above, the imitation thesis has been overtaken by China’s demonstrated leadership in batteries and electric vehicles and its advance across telecommunications, solar, rail, and artificial intelligence. The reality-check here is simply the current market data.
Stagnation, fairly stated. On this point Thiel is partly vindicated: careful economic history does show a post-1970 slowdown in measured productivity growth, and reasonable scholars share his worry. But the same scholars concede that measurement understates quality improvements, that general-purpose technologies appear in the data only after long lags, and that the causes and precise timing remain debated. The defensible claim is that growth slowed and that ambition in the “world of atoms” is worth reviving — not that progress simply stopped.
Peter Thiel is a genuinely original thinker, and it would be a mistake to dismiss him. His firm-level insights — that commoditised competition destroys returns, that durable differentiation is what separates enduring companies from the rest, that the most valuable opportunities are often the least obvious — are sound, and they explain the lasting influence of Zero to One among founders and investors.
The trouble begins when those insights are promoted from strategy to social philosophy. Monopoly recast as the mark of every successful business, competition recast as contemptible, democracy recast as an obstacle to be escaped, whole nations recast as copyists, and innovation recast as the near-clinical property of a founder elite — taken together, these do not describe a healthy market economy or an open society. They describe an order optimised for a small, unconstrained, technologically empowered elite, insulated from the two forces a liberal society relies on to hold power accountable: competition in the market and democracy in the state. Several of the ideas are, precisely, commercially rational and societally unacceptable at once — most sharply the deliberate pursuit and concealment of monopoly, and the aspiration to escape democratic politics altogether.
The society this worldview implies. What kind of society, then, does the doctrine point toward? The evidence — Thiel’s own essays, his stated scepticism that freedom and democracy can coexist, his Girardian contempt for the imitative many, his interest in exit through seasteading and life extension, and the political capital he has deployed — suggests, as a hypothesis rather than a certainty, a neo-aristocratic or techno-elitist order. In it, sovereignty belongs less to a demos than to a class of founder-innovators; “freedom” is reconceived as their freedom to build and to exit rather than the many’s freedom to govern; progress is measured by the breakthroughs, and the longevity, of that elite rather than by broad-based prosperity or democratic consent; and the egalitarian and majoritarian constraints of the modern state are treated as friction to be engineered away.
It is a vision with real intellectual force and a sincere concern for stagnation at its heart. It is also one whose realisation would require surrendering much of what competitive markets and democratic self-government exist to protect. The most useful response is therefore neither reverence nor dismissal but discrimination: to take the strategic wisdom, and to refuse the social order it is enlisted to justify.
The following public materials were consulted in preparing this analysis. Each entry links to the source.
Primary materials: Thiel writings, talks, and PayPal history
– Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 — https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536
– Peter Thiel & Blake Masters, Zero to One (Crown Business, 2014) — reader-highlight compilation — https://www.goodreads.com/notes/23251016-zero-to-one/77757257-rahul-paul
– Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, 13 April 2009 — https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
– Peter Thiel, “The Straussian Moment” (2007) — Internet Archive — https://archive.org/details/the-straussian-moment
– Blake Masters, CS183 Class 1 notes (”The Challenge of the Future”), 2012 — https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/20400301508/cs183class1
– “Developing the Developed World” — talk transcript, Independent Institute, 27 January 2015 — https://www.independent.org/news/event-transcripts/developing-the-developed-world/
– Northwestern (McCormick) coverage of Thiel’s 8 December 2014 talk — https://mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2014/12/paypal-cofounder-encourages-students-to-seek-secrets-build-monopolies.html
– “Peter Thiel on Entrepreneurship: Three Contrarian Ideas,” Chicago Booth Review, October 2014 — https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/2014/october/peter-thiel-on-entrepreneurship-three-contrarian-ideas-for-going-from-zero-to-one
– Luke Burgis, “Peter Thiel on Rene Girard” — quote compendium — https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/peter-thiel-on-rene-girard
– “Confinity” — Wikipedia (PayPal / Palm Pilot origins) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity
– Commoncog, “PayPal — The Beamers Didn’t Come” — https://commoncog.com/c/cases/paypal-idea-maze/
– Marc Rubinstein, “PayPal, 20 Years On,” Net Interest —
https://www.netinterest.co/p/paypal-20-years-on-105
Antitrust rulings, regulators, and Google financials
– NPR, DOJ v. Google ruling (5 August 2024) — https://www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-5064624/google-justice-department-antitrust-search
– White & Case, analysis of the D.C. federal court ruling — https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/landmark-decision-dc-federal-court-holds-google-maintained-illegal-monopoly
– CNBC, Google antitrust remedies (2025) — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/05/judge-finalize-remedies-in-google-antitrust-case.html
– European Commission, Digital Markets Act decision (2026) — https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1670
– European Commission, adtech decision (2025) — https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/da/ip_25_1992
– Loyens & Loeff, summary of Google EU fines — https://www.loyensloeff.com/insights/news--events/news/european-commission-fines-google-eur-2.95-billion-over-abusive-practices-in-online-advertising-technology/
– Alphabet FY2024 earnings release (SEC / EDGAR) — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425000010/googexhibit991q42024.htm
Economics: competition, mark-ups, dynamism, and innovation
– De Loecker, Eeckhout & Unger, “The Rise of Market Power,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2020) — https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/135/2/561/5714769
– De Loecker & Eeckhout, “The Rise of Market Power” — NBER working paper — https://www.nber.org/papers/w23687
– Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal (Harvard University Press, 2019) — https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674260320
– ITIF critique of Philippon, “The Great Revealing” (2023) — https://itif.org/publications/2023/05/15/the-great-revealing-taking-competition-in-america-and-europe-seriously/
– Aghion, Bloom, Blundell, Griffith & Howitt, “Competition and Innovation: An Inverted-U Relationship” (NBER) — https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9269/w9269.pdf
– Carl Shapiro, “Competition and Innovation: Did Arrow Hit the Bull’s Eye?” — https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/arrow.pdf
– ITIF, “Increased Market Concentration Does Not Equal Less Innovation” (2025) — https://itif.org/publications/2025/01/30/increased-market-concentration-does-not-equal-less-innovation/
– Decker, Haltiwanger, Jarmin & Miranda, “Declining Business Dynamism” (Brookings) — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/declining-business-dynamism-implications-for-productivity/
– US Census Bureau, “Recent Findings on Trends in U.S. Entrepreneurship” — https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2014/08/recent-findings-on-trends-in-u-s-entrepreneurship.html
Technological stagnation debate
– Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016) — https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth
– Robert J. Gordon in IMF Finance & Development (2016) — https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/gordon.htm
– Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (Mercatus Center, 2011) — https://www.mercatus.org/research/books/great-stagnation
Autism, neurodiversity, and Hans Asperger
– Herwig Czech, “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and race hygiene in Nazi-era Vienna,” Molecular Autism (2018) — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6
– EurekAlert summary of the Czech study — https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/804260
– 2025 reassessment of Hans Asperger’s wartime record (PubMed) — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39535265/
– Northwestern (Kellogg), on autism and reduced conformity — https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/04/opinion-crains-autism-jobs
Girard, Strauss, Schmitt — influence and criticism
– The Globe and Mail, on Rene Girard’s influence on Thiel — https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-rene-girard-peter-thiel-jd-vance-politics-mimetic-rivalry/
– UnHerd, “Tech bros don’t get Rene Girard” — https://unherd.com/2025/06/tech-bros-dont-get-rene-girard/
– John Ganz, “Thiel, Schmitt, and Spengler” — https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thiel-schmitt-and-spengler
China innovation (counter to the copyist framing)
– ITIF, “How Innovative Is China in the EV and Battery Industries?” (2024) — https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/29/how-innovative-is-china-in-the-electric-vehicle-and-battery-industries/
– The National Interest, “China’s Battery Advantage” (CATL / BYD) — https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/chinas-battery-advantage-how-local-governments-and-firms-built-a-global-industry
Thiel politics, and the book’s antitrust resonance
– Forbes, on the Vance / Thiel relationship and campaign funding — https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/07/16/jd-vance-and-peter-thiel-what-to-know-about-the-relationship-between-trumps-vp-pick-and-the-billionaire/
– Revolving Door Project, “Oligarchs and the Trump Admin: Peter Thiel” — https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/billionaires-and-the-trump-admin-peter-thiel/
– OneZero, “Competition Is for Losers: How Peter Thiel Helped Facebook Embrace Monopoly” — https://onezero.medium.com/competition-is-for-losers-how-peter-thiel-helped-facebook-embrace-monopoly-9a3dd2be1c20
– Truth on the Market, “Peter Thiel on the Virtues of Monopoly” — https://truthonthemarket.com/2014/09/13/peter-thiel-on-the-virtues-of-monopoly/
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