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Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Inside Silicon Valley's anti-college movement
Before flying from his home in Pittsburgh to Stanford's annual gathering of incoming freshmen in late April, Sebastian Tan downloaded what might be the top book on Silicon Valley's required reading list: "Zero to One," Peter Thiel's treatise on building the future. It's "probably the best book I've read, and I've only read a few pages," Tan tells me over FaceTime. Growing up, Tan believed that the ideal path to becoming a successful entrepreneur was through Stanford (where Thiel has undergraduate and law degrees). Lately, however, he's been taken with an ascendant idea in Silicon Valley, proselytized by teenage founders and billionaire tech executives alike: The real future builders skip college. "There's such an opportunity cost of going to college. In the tech world now, things are moving so fast," Tan says. "If you're in school all day, the world just passes you by." That nagging feeling led Tan, some new friends he met at Stanford's Admit Weekend, and another 500-plus of the country's top standardized test takers, to apply for an internship at Palantir, the software and defense tech company cofounded by Thiel. Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship — a paid, semester-long role with a shot at a full-time job at the end — implores 18-year-olds like Tan to "skip the indoctrination" of college and "get the Palantir Degree." CEO Alex Karp, who holds a PhD in neoclassical social theory, has openly derided higher education. "Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect," he said on CNBC in February. (Instead, Karp said, you should read "The Technological Republic," his new cri de coeur on the "role Silicon Valley should play in the advancement and reinvention of a national project.") In April, Tan accepted his Palantir offer and deferred his Stanford enrollment to the fall of 2026. "In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," Tan says of his decision. "You're learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It's just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce." College dropouts have long held a mythical status in Silicon Valley. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg all spent some time enrolled at a university before leaving early, and they've driven countless other aspiring founders to follow suit. Today, a perfect storm of economic, political, and technological forces is driving young people — mostly men, as every non-college techie I interviewed happened to be — to circumvent college entirely. For one, higher education has grown prohibitively expensive: In 2024, the average federal student loan debt was just under $30,000 for those who completed a bachelor's degree, and all-in costs for some four-year degrees have now surpassed half a million dollars. At the same time, artificial intelligence and related vibe coding tools have made it easier to become a founder, prompting venture capitalists from YCombinator to Andreessen Horowitz to declare it "the best time in a decade for college students to start startups." As the Trump administration weighs stripping $3 billion in grants from Harvard and redirecting it to trade schools, the technorati are questioning what higher education is even good for. "I'm not sure that college is preparing people for, like, the jobs they need to have," Zuckerberg said on comedian Theo Von's podcast in April. Then consider the social media-fueled fixation on getting rich young and fast, and college starts to look less like a stepping stone than a detour. The impulse to forgo college completely is the latest expression of Silicon Valley's anti-elitism, shaped as much by Thiel's long-standing disdain for higher education as the Trump administration's attacks on the Ivy League. "Per the Roman dictum 'corruptio optimi pessima' — the corruption of the best is the worst — higher education is the worst institution we have," Thiel quotes Latin, the kind of thing you'd learn at a liberal arts college, in a May press release announcing the latest class of his fellowship that awards college-dropouts-turned-founders $200,000. Never attending college is becoming a thing at big tech companies like Palantir: The company says it has hired non-graduates in the past, too. The phenomenon is also sustained by a swelling stream of founders who bailed on higher education to start companies as early as high school. Whether this generation of techies run a company or write code, they've made a lofty proclamation: Real builders have never sat in lecture halls. In his commencement address to Stanford's graduating class of 2005, Steve Jobs said he had started each morning of the past three decades by looking in the mirror and asking himself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" If the answer was "no" too many days in a row, he'd change course. You ask, why are they teachers, and why are they not just in functioning society? JC Btaiche, founder of Fuse Energy Like many of the young men I spoke with for this piece, JC Btaiche tells me he's "pretty obsessed" with the Apple founder. In high school, he mimicked Jobs's practice every day for almost a year, looking into the mirror by his bed. "Every morning I'd be, like, 'I don't want to go to school,'" he says. "Life is too short. There's strong examples of people who have not gone to college who have done incredibly well." At some point, he stopped showing up to most classes. After graduating from high school, Btaiche decided not to attend college and founded Fuse Energy, a nuclear fusion startup, when he was 19. "You ask, why are they teachers, and why are they not just in functioning society?" He tells me about college professors. "You realize a lot of professors were not — just went to a postdoc, became TAs — not really qualified to be teachers. "For me, it's very important to respect who I'm learning from," he adds. Several people told me they'd rather learn from builders than ivory towered professors. Adam Guild read Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" in high school to reverse-engineer the founder playbook. "If I can study how they became successful, that is a fast track to getting that guidance from people that have done what I want to do," Guild says. "Versus getting a bunch of theory that was taught in an MBA program." Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the tenth grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. The experience emboldened him in 2020 to start Owner, a restaurant marketing platform, which closed a funding round at a $1 billion valuation in May. Guild is blunt on his assessment of colleges: "My belief is that they're more like drop shipping operations, where they stamp their logo on already extremely high potential, high IQ young people, and then take credit for their success in society," he says. The value of a degree is "negligible," Guild tells me. Instead of forking over hundreds of thousands in tuition, he argues that people like him are better off learning from biographies of iconic founders and the internet — or better yet, from an AI trained to be like Steve Jobs — than from professors who've never built anything themselves. "The autodidact is the new alumnus," Surya Midha, cofounder and chief operating officer of AI hiring platform Mercor, wrote in a recent X post. (Midha dropped out of Georgetown after receiving the Thiel Fellowship for his startup.) "College teaches you how to sound interesting at dinner parties and, when the guests leave, how to carry that performance into life." He adds, "A degree feels less like a distinction than a delay." Perhaps this DIY mindset can also be defined by a fixation on one Silicon Valley term: " high agency." Arbaaz Mahmood, who also skipped college, initially wanted to become a physicist but now runs a startup that builds an AI tool for car dealerships. He says school was a numbers game of citations and published papers. "I could just go and argue with my CEO and get things done my way," he remembers of a startup he worked at after leaving higher ed behind. "That obviously changed everything." Being young and getting his way has made Mahmood realize that college is a countersignal. "In the era of the internet, if you have to go to college, it is probably because you're mediocre," he continues. "Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they're going to change the world. That's a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It's just bullshit." You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long. Shawn Schneider, 22, founder of Eldil AI Shawn Schneider — a 22-year-old who dropped out of his Christian high school, briefly attended community college, dropped out again, and earlier this year founded a marketing platform for generative AI — tells me that college is outdated. Skipping it, for him, is as efficient as it is ideological. "It signals DEI," he says. "It signals, basically, woke and compromised institutions. At least in the circles I run in, the sentiment is like they should die." There's another reason Schneider dropped out: "By being a young man and not having the ability to make money, there's a piece missing from your soul," he says, in language that would feel at home on a manosphere podcast. "You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long." (Schneider's startup, Eldil AI, raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding and is generating revenue, he tells me.) Throughout America, falling male enrollment rates suggest that a rising number of men don't see their place in a university classroom. In 2023, college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds was down 1.2 million from its peak in 2011; men accounted for 1 million of those missing students, according to the Pew Research Center. Schneider says that the women from his high school in Idaho were "so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at." He's married with two children, a girl and a boy, which has made him realize that schools should be separated by gender to "make men more manly, and women more feminine." I ask if his AI startup has hired women. "I should be careful here so I don't get sued," he says. "Yeah, right now we're all men because those are the four most qualified people I know. And like, when I say qualified, I mean really qualified." Less convinced of the anti-college movement, of course, are the university professors the cause's adherents rail against. "Very, very few people are truly autodidactic," says David Deming, a Harvard economist who studies how education shapes life outcomes. He compares the self-taught, often AI-driven, approach to copying a friend's homework, then trying to solve the same question on your own during a final exam. "I think a lot of them are fooling themselves," he says. For 18-year-olds learning exclusively on the job, whether at a startup or a public company like Palantir, the education tends to be narrow and vocational, unlike a more expansive college curriculum. Some early-career founders see no value in such a syllabus. "I don't believe in the model of learning that exists in colleges," Mahmood tells me. "In fact, I don't want to learn anything at all. I want to preserve my brain." Harvard economist David Deming cautions that bypassing college for a company shuts doors, adding that what's good for the company sn't always what's best for employees. Deming cautions that bypassing college for a company shuts doors, adding that what's good for the company — which consequently "will have much more control over you," he says — isn't always what's best for employees. While the Zucks and the Jobses have outsized roles in Silicon Valley's cultural imagination, founders who dropped out or never attended college are still a "vanishingly small share of people," Deming says. And college degrees still pay off. Across nearly every occupation, workers with degrees earn more, on average, perhaps because the college degree affords graduates with an adaptable skillset and an "openness to new things," he adds. The percent difference in earnings between college and high school graduates, or the college wage premium, has held at 75 to 80% for the last decade. For an average American, Deming says, the return on an investment in college — including the opportunity cost of attending as well as the sticker price — exceeds the annual returns of investing in the stock market, buying a home, and starting a business. For founders, "The question is, would they do better or worse if they had gone to college?" Deming asks. "They get exposed to new ideas or new people, and they pivot. You know, founders pivot all the time." Palantir's head of talent, Marge York, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 with a degree in political science and a lingering sense that she learned from a "pretty homogenous tilt of some, not all, of my professors," she tells me. Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, according to York. "The success of Western civilization," she argues, "does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now." (Karp echoes this sentiment in his book, writing that top colleges "remain remarkably cloistered and walled off from the world.") Universities like Penn have long held a monopoly on the most formative years of smart students' lives. But Palantir thinks college admissions are missing something. The college application process, it argues, is "absent meritocracy" and "based on subjective and shallow criteria," the fellowship's job description reads. In addition to an SAT or ACT score at or above a 1460 or 33, respectively, the Meritocracy Fellowship requires applicants to provide a personal statement to the questions, Why do you want to work at Palantir? And, what do you consider your three greatest achievements? York thinks this "merit-based" approach gives high school seniors admitted to non-Ivies a better shot at success. (One applicant, she mentions, had started a successful company in addition to excelling academically in high school and had only been admitted to a local state school.) "This question of, 'what possibly more do I need to do to gain access to these places or to be worthy of them?'" York says. "It's opaque what the admission standards are." For all its posturing against elite universities, top colleges seem well-represented in the incoming fellowship class, with some accepted fellows deferring admission from Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth, and Columbia, according to their LinkedIn profiles. A spokesperson for Palantir said in an email that the company "did not systematically ask candidates which colleges they were considering or committed to, nor do we plan to." While fellows won't take finals to clinch the "Palantir Degree," the company is crafting an education of its own. Fellows will follow a company-curated syllabus that will teach them "how to think," with "a great books bent to it," York says, which could include texts like the Federalist Papers or from Plato. The jury's still out on whether Karp's book will be required reading. "I was truly almost moved to tears by it," York tells me. "It's really, I think, for an artist colony, a very appropriately artistic and literary syllabus." Sebastian Tan, the soon-to-be Palantir fellow, still plans to attend Stanford eventually. He's concerned he will "spend another four years of my life learning a lot of technical and theological things, but not really be able to apply them," he says, but he still sees the value in a liberal arts education. Plus, Tan adds, his mom really wants him to go.
Forbes
25-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Gen Z And Millennials: To Escape Unfulfilled Careers, Start Thinking Like Contrarian Entrepreneurs
Everybody has an opinion and if you listen to all of them in making your career or even entrepreneurial decisions, you will have followed the 'wisdom' of the crowd. Which is to say, the average of everyone's thinking. Ultimately that gets you into safe, risk-free careers or startups that have a likelihood of failing. Which you may or may not enjoy. And clearly, people are not enjoying their careers. It's not a good thing that one of the latest Gen Z job satisfaction studies published in December of 2024, showed that Gen Z had the lowest job satisfaction and highest burnout rate among all generations of workers. So, you followed the wisdom of the crowd, took that safe and secure job and look where it got you. Time for you to own your destiny. What do you do next? Two things. Start thinking for yourself and as Steve Jobs would say, 'think different.' This is where carving your own path comes in, and instead of moving with the crowd, you need to be a 'contrarian' and potentially start thinking like an entrepreneur who questions the status quo and moves to change or disrupt things. Especially as it relates to your career or a startup. So, what is contrarian thinking? Contrarian thinking defies 'crowd think' and uses knowledge-based thinking and curiosity to question widely accepted beliefs. You need to challenge prevailing norms. You need a store to sell books. No, you don't. Amazon. You need vehicles to create a taxi company. No, you don't. Uber. Need to build a hotel to rent rooms? No, you don't. Airbnb. So, what do you do? You need to start paying attention to trends and identifying market gaps and untapped opportunities that others may overlook. In other words, you need to move away from crowd thinking. Why? Because historically, most people don't like change, disruption or risk as it upsets the status quo. There is safety in the crowd. Also, boredom, low job satisfaction and the beginnings of an unfulfilled career. Read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One and you will better understand why contrarian thinking is not just a choice but its critical if you want to either carve out an amazing career or create a unique startup. Here are several thoughts on how you can begin to cultivate a more contrarian mindset: Steve Jobs think different quote. B. Schroeder Cultivate thinking differently. First, think for yourself and quit following the crowd. Say 'why ' more often and do your own research. Contrarian people evaluate assumptions in their industry and are not afraid to challenge those existing assumptions. You don't ask yourself 'how much market share can we get'; you ask yourself, how can we build something so innovative, we can capture most of the market. Champion your own creativity. We were all born with childlike curiosity and creativity. Where did it go? It's still there inside of you, just hidden. It's time to wake it up and nurture your creativity like a muscle. How? Adopt a growth, mindset which says you can learn what you need to be successful. Read more. Talk to people you have nothing in common with. Mingle with actual customers and see through their eyes. When you travel, pay attention to what people are doing. Talk to ten experts in their own fields and see what they see. See if you can 'connect some dots' of information to show you what's coming next. Be willing to take risks. Why are people in general so afraid to try new things that could be awesome but might potentially fail? Fear. Well, what are you afraid of? What were you bon to do? The best things in life, whatever they might be, are not coming to you. You need to go meet them. That means, you need to start taking risks. Not foolish risks where failure potential is too high but smaller risks like meeting with people, taking the job in a growing company/industry or field, one with a mission or purpose that aligns with you. Or perhaps test that startup as a side gig to see if it has merit. But you do need to do something you actually care about. Disruption over conforming. If a leader in an industry goes left, you investigate right. If another company says go up, you look down. No one ever got anywhere by just blindly following the herd. Most people are afraid of taking on leaders. But, if you change your point of view, find out what 'secrets' customers have or products or services they are tolerating, you might just be the next Netflix taking on a Blockbuster. It's not about just wanting to disrupt an industry leader; it's about listening to customers and giving them exactly what they need. No one who does something really well, actually knows that they will be a $1.84 trillion company one day. That is Google today. However, in their early days, they almost sold themselves to Yahoo for $1 billion dollars. Good thing they didn't. Steal from experts. Critical thinking requires lots of knowledge and experience. But what if you don't have the experience? Then you go steal it. How? By meeting with experts, whether they are industry, product, service, technical, etc. They have two things you might need. More knowledge and most definitely experience. If you meet with ten experts and gather their knowledge, insights and experiences, you are the one person in the center of that hub who now has all that information. This could save you from making critical mistakes or give you the insight you need to make your own decisions. Avoid competition. Market competition breeds imitation. You don't want that, as everyone just fights for the same market share and ultimately, it's a race to the bottom. Contrarian thinkers and entrepreneurs however, create new business models, products, and services that can potentially disrupt industries. They focus on creativity and innovation over just competing on price, features or scale. As an example, Steve Jobs built Apple around contrarian principles like design-focused products, closed systems (think amazing operating system software), and customer experience over tech specs and features, defying conventional (crowd) wisdom at the time. This approach has redefined entire industries, set Apple apart, and created fanatically loyal customers willing to pay a premium for their products and services. Airbnb is another example. Rather than competing in the saturated hotel industry, Airbnb pioneered a new model of hospitality where everyday people could monetize their extra living space. This uniqueness has fueled their massive growth. And created a whole new sub-industry.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Tech Right Has a Flag. They Just Need to Plant It.
Not since the Apollo program has America been so enthralled by the promise of technology. Elon Musk, President Donald Trump's closest adviser, founded and runs a company most famous for commercial spaceflight and its mission to establish a colony on Mars. NASA intends to put American boots back on the moon for the first time since 1972. Recent developments in artificial intelligence promise to transform how we work and live. A new generation of innovators—the 'tech right'—champion such developments, sketching an almost utopian vision of humanity's future. For all their rough edges, the rise of Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, and the like represents something profoundly promising: long-dormant hope bubbling beneath the surface of our postmodern pessimism. American optimism peaked in the mid-20th century. We stood on top of the world in the wake of World War II. The United States made up over half the planet's economic output, the public was filled with a deep sense of civilizational confidence, and the scientific community was knee-deep in world-changing discoveries. But then we faltered. Much of what we were promised—zero-cost electricity, flying cars, intergalactic settlement—never came to fruition. Many of our well-intentioned military ventures abroad have concluded in unceremonious, if not outright disastrous, withdrawals (Saigon and Kabul come to mind). Such civilizational let-downs taught us this: History happens to man. The best we can do is manage. Modern climate alarmism embodies such pessimism, with its boosters contending that the developed world must learn to live with a lack of abundance. A small but vocal minority of those pessimists even eschews child rearing, saying that to bring a child into a burning world would bring only further despair. We've gone from boasting American genius to waving the white flag. The tech right disdains this white flag. 'History may happen to man,' its members say, 'but so too does man happen to history.' It is no mistake, then, that the prefatory quote to the cofounder of Palantir's new book, The Technological Republic, is attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Of any faction in our modern political order, the tech right most embodies our Faustian impulse: a willingness to cut moral corners for the sake of progress. If climate alarmism inhabits one end of the spectrum—a complete surrender to nature; a sharp condemnation of man's drive for progress—the Faustians inhabit the other: progress above all else; total war against nature. As this movement comes into its own, its leaders are emerging to chart the future of technological development. In turn, they hope to chart America's future. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who is considered the prophet of the tech right, articulated the outlines of this in his 2014 manifesto, Zero to One, which is subtitled: 'Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future.' Zero to One is half-jokingly referred to as the 'Bible' by many technologists and start-up founders. But Thiel, who also co-founded the software giant Palantir, isn't the only member of the tech right to try to engrave his vision in writing: in February, his fellow Palantir co-founder Alex Karp published The Technological Republic, a book that could well be equally as influential as Zero to One. In the book, Karp argues that instruments of hard power—missiles, ships, drones, even nuclear weapons—are necessary for the maintenance of American dominance, and that America's decades of uncontested hegemony lulled us into complacency. Real power rests in force, or at least in the legitimate threat thereof, he argues. But, he writes, while the center of American technological development today—Silicon Valley—is brimming with highly competent people more than willing to volunteer their services to produce addictive social media algorithms, they're reluctant to support anything remotely associated with our military due to moral concerns. This is why Karp co-founded Palantir: To be an unapologetically pro-American company that stewards the brainpower of the Valley toward the interests of national security. This introductory argument sets up Karp's diagnosis of American malaise: We suffer from a crisis of moral relativism. Relying on political philosopher Allan Bloom's observations in his popular book The Closing of the American Mind, he harshly condemns the 'thinly veiled nihilism' that he says pervades the academy and society broadly. His solution is for modern men and women to commit themselves to believing in something, and they must believe in it very much. But what exactly ought they believe in? He leaves this question entirely open, except for passing references to American interests. And it's this moral ambivalence that is symptomatic of the deepest fault in the tech right's project: its inability to articulate a robust moral and political ethic. Indeed, many on the tech right deeply admire the American project, and for good reason. They gaze at generations of Americans past, and at some Americans present, extolling their work ethic, confidence, and capacity to do great things. One need only gaze at the social media activity of many of these tech titans, replete with memes championing past generations of Americans and their virtues. Yes, we ought to revive the best of America. But what is the best of America? How do we rekindle our greatness? What sort of politics and culture enables this? How do we rebuild cultural confidence? The tech right remains mostly silent on these most important questions. They lust for a return of the strong gods, but they know not which gods to invoke. And it is these questions—political questions—that must be answered by proponents of an explicitly political project. Gesturing toward an undefined concept of national interest or progress will not suffice. Karp, to his credit, grasps at this: The construction of a 'technological republic,' he writes, 'will require an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.' But how do we get there? If you read The Technological Republic and nothing else, the answer is some combination of people miraculously committing themselves to (still undefined) moral ideals, Congress allocating more dollars to research and development, and bureaucrats tinkering with military equipment procurement policies. Such answers are partial answers at best. The latter two are fairly achievable policy goals, but incommensurate with the great task at hand. The former objective—the public suddenly becoming virtuous, en masse—borders on the stuff of dreams. Much of the tech right's inability to respond convincingly to these questions can be explained by the difference between the thinking required to accomplish the sort of (truly awesome) work tech innovators have been engaged in throughout their careers—building companies that have made enormous advances in fields as disparate and important as medical technology, communications, and transportion—and the sort of thinking demanded by ambitious political ventures. It is the difference between ends and means. Again and again, Karp stresses the importance of results. The success of past generations of American innovators, especially those who followed in the wake of World War II, was enabled by a 'commitment to advancing outcomes at the expense of theater … [of] setting aside vain theological debates in favor of even marginal and often imperfect progress.' Among Silicon Valley's most valuable contributions—what Karp calls an 'engineering mindset'—has to do with this dogged preference for results over abstract theory. Such talk should receive a warm reception in our present moment, especially as the Trump administration attempts to tackle waste, fraud, and abuse in the belly of the administrative state. Government bureaucracies the world over have become prisoners of process. But whereas in the start-up world, a founder rarely needs to consider the ends of a project beyond profit, in politics, what the 'ends' are remains much more open-ended. The end of political science is eudaimonia, according to Aristotle (in English, roughly translated to 'flourishing')—an end obviously harder to define, much less quantify, than profit or user base goals. (Blaise Pascal put it well when writing of justice and truth: They are 'two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.') In simpler terms, the tech right is best at achieving objective goals. But when one enters the political arena, one must also consider subjective goals: not just, say, building a highly capable and effective military, but also—what should our military power be used for? Where should we deploy our forces and why? Simply because contemporary politics has not lent itself to the serious contemplation and debate of what human flourishing actually looks like does not mean that the project can be abandoned altogether. Faced with this stumbling block, some on the tech right will conflate human flourishing with 'progress,' claiming they have stumbled upon solid ground. But progress presumes some goal worth advancing toward. I do not mean to say here that Karp and his ilk don't understand this problem. They clearly do, insofar as they are advocating for the reassertion of national ambition and a strong sense of national purpose. I mean only to say that they need to spend more time contemplating what future they are truly striving for. How human flourishing ought to be defined and achieved in our time, with an eye to technological development, is a project far too grand to wedge into this essay. But we should recognize that for the tech right's nobler political ambitions to come to fruition—the revitalization of a culture that dreams and does great things, a government effective enough to serve its constituents, and a national security apparatus capable of defending our interests and upholding justice—it must ground its mission in something more substantive. Here are several starting points for how members of the tech right can better define their vision of human flourishing. First, they should promote the cultural and political ethic that has made America great: republicanism. A republic, as understood by the French political philosopher Montesquieu, is a form of government in which the power rests in the people—not in dictators (despotism), nor in monarchs (monarchy). While honor is the animating principle of monarchy and fear is that of despotism, republics are animated by virtue. 'There is no great share of probity necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws, in one, and the prince's arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole,' Montesquieu wrote, 'but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue.' Republicanism, then, champions the ability of people to govern themselves in their personal and political affairs, requiring and nurturing civic virtue among citizens. Virtue not only manifests itself in political matters like voting and participating in town hall meetings, but also in how one interacts with the world. Instead of waiting for the state to act, republican citizens act on their own. 'Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France … in the United States you will be sure to find an association,' wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his early-mid 19th century classic, Democracy in America. Virtue, the bedrock of republicanism, requires a restoration of self government. In our over-managed, excessively bureaucratic society, the question most often asked is not 'How do we make that happen?,' but rather, 'How do we get management on our side?' This is where the tech right's anti-managerial instincts are spot on. We need more people in government and industry thinking about making things happen instead of merely navigating ever more complex red tape. People must not only be made to feel that their actions can bear fruit in the world—they must be empowered such that this is the case. They must be enabled to govern their own lives and learn how to govern others. Republicanism is the political theory the tech right should be grasping onto. Secondly, the tech right should ground its ambitions in a renewed humanism. Many Americans understandably regard technological development with suspicion, fearing that automation will take their jobs; that AI will make us all obsolete. There are particularly thorny ethical questions surrounding increasingly complex forms of genetic engineering and exponentially more advanced varieties of artificial intelligence. Technologists would be misguided to wave away these sincere concerns as nostalgic lamentations. People, especially citizens of a republic, have every right to ask questions like these—indeed, these are the questions that must be asked if we seek to retain any iota of control over our own governance. We must do more than embrace technology: We must submit it to human ends. To do anything less would be to trade helplessness in the face of stagnation for helplessness in the face of growth. Lastly, the tech right ought to take its argument to the American people. One of the key failures of our outgoing progressive elite, made up of exultant technocrats and central planners, is its pronounced lack of faith in the average citizen. The tech right should not repeat that mistake. Efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy and reorient our politics towards making things happen must be brought to the American people—and the electorate must be persuaded of their rightness. How can this be done? Karp and Thiel have started off on the right foot, writing their thoughts down in widely available books. Members of the tech right should go further, supporting popular outlets that publish about these issues, frequenting prominent podcasts and news shows to broadcast their views, and ultimately supporting political candidates who are interested in making their argument to the American people. Their theory of American decline is among the most convincing out there. They are grasping at real solutions. They have the money and means to make an enormous impact. We should salute the tech right for conjuring a renewed hope in humanity's capabilities, because we in our postmodern malaise are in desperate need of such optimism. But we must ground such hope in new 'pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason': a new humanism, one rooted in the principle of self-government—in short, a new republicanism.
Axios
07-04-2025
- Business
- Axios
Silver linings playbook: Market panic edition
Politicians, investors, and CEOs around the world are squarely in panic mode in the wake of Donald Trump's seismic tariff announcement last week. As ever in the markets, however, one person's panic is another person's buying opportunity. So, here are four bright spots, or silver linings 1. It's not the end of the world The two previous major crises of this century — the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic — were both global. The tariff crisis, by contrast, has its epicenter in Washington, and what's bad for the U.S. could end up kicking the rest of the world into a higher gear. The fact that the dollar fell rather than rising on news of the tariffs is a sign the market now expects the rest of the world to outpace the U.S. in growth. How it works: Just as JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference led to unprecedented levels of pan-European fiscal and security coordination, Trump's tariffs are likely to catalyze new deals between and within regions that now trust each other more than they trust Trump. Ahead of Trump's tariff announcement, for instance, the trade ministers of Japan and South Korea released a joint statement with China, saying that "trilateral efforts" between them were "essential to fostering the prosperity" of the global economy. Zoom out: The U.S. — with just 4% of the world's population — accounts for more than 29% of its total consumption, per the World Bank. A U.S. recession, combined with closer ties elsewhere, could help bring those two numbers closer in line with each other and set the groundwork for more broad global prosperity. 2. The end of monopoly rents A lack of competition is fantastic for the monopoly in question, but it's rarely good for an economy as a whole. Much of the run-up in the U.S. stock market has been attributable to the monopolies held by megacap technology companies. Now, for the first time in years, those monopolies are looking assailable. The tariffs, writes Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, represent a "global policy mistake that will reverse U.S. tech dominance" in general, and specifically companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet. Also on Ives' list is Palantir, the company founded by Peter Thiel, whose Silicon Valley bible,"Zero to One" is based around the idea all founders should try to create a monopoly. 3. Stocks are now on sale "For long term clients who can tolerate this volatility, and who can can tolerate possibly a little bit more pain, this is a buying opportunity," Mark Malek, chief investment officer of Siebert Financial, said. Between the lines: For bulls, any dip looks like a buying opportunity. "Mickey Mouse could be in power in the United States, the U.S. is going to have 4% growth by the end of the decade, and it's going to be higher in the next decade," economist Nouriel Roubini told Bloomberg on Friday. "Even Trump, even with the bad policy, cannot screw up technological innovation." 4. Keeping things in perspective Goods only account for about one-third of total U.S. consumption, and imported goods are less than one-fifth of all goods. By the numbers: Any recession caused by the tariffs will likely be a lot shallower than what we saw in 2009 or 2020. While nearly all forecasts for U.S. economic growth in 2025 have been scaled back, most remain positive. Goldman Sachs sees 1% growth this year, for instance, while Nomura expects 0.6% growth. JPMorgan is in the minority of banks that expects GDP to shrink this year. It predicts a growth rate of –0.3% for 2025. That would be a pretty modest recession compared to 2009 (–2.6%) or 2020 (–2.2%).
