Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

opinion exactly, so for the most part, they do. Nate Silver’s election predictions
are remarkably accurate, but even more remarkable is how big a story they
become every four years. We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions
of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary
predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now.
And it’s not just the electoral process—the very character of government has
become indefinite, too. The government used to be able to coordinate complex
solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today,
after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides
insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a
dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that
entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975.
To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific
problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can
make things better just by sending out more checks.
Indefinite Philosophy
You can see the shift to an indefinite attitude not just in politics but in the
political philosophers whose ideas underpin both left and right.
The philosophy of the ancient world was pessimistic: Plato, Aristotle,
Epicurus, and Lucretius all accepted strict limits on human potential. The only
question was how best to cope with our tragic fate. Modern philosophers have
been mostly optimistic. From Herbert Spencer on the right and Hegel in the
center to Marx on the left, the 19th century shared a belief in progress.
(Remember Marx and Engels’s encomium to the technological triumphs of
capitalism from this page.) These thinkers expected material advances to
fundamentally change human life for the better: they were definite optimists.
In the late 20th century, indefinite philosophies came to the fore. The two
dominant political thinkers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, are usually seen as
stark opposites: on the egalitarian left, Rawls was concerned with questions of
fairness and distribution; on the libertarian right, Nozick focused on maximizing
individual freedom. They both believed that people could get along with each
other peacefully, so unlike the ancients, they were optimistic. But unlike Spencer
or Marx, Rawls and Nozick were indefinite optimists: they didn’t have any
specific vision of the future.