Peter Thiel, the high tech entrepreneur who founded PayPal and the angel investor of Facebook, has the cover article this week in National Review (not yet online), "The End of the Future." Science and technology are not living up to their billing, he writes. Suffocating government regulations and ideological blinders are slowing progress. Moreover, we are not at the beginning of this decline, but about forty years into it. Real economic progress, which follows scientific and technology gains, has not recovered from the oil crisis of the 70s. While the computer may have advanced society, continuing failure in the energy realm has pulled us back.

"Even before Fukushima, the nuclear industry and its 1954 promise of 'electrical energy too cheap to meter' had long since been defeated by environmentalism and nuclear-proliferation concerns."

It is hard to put ones mind around the many complex fields of science, let alone to evaluate them, Thiel says. But, "Indeed," he asks, "how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic stem cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?"

Thiel has harsh words for cultural decay, "from the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment." But at the root is a decline in science and technology. On the other hand, he wonders "whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long."