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Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
A timely investigation of the causes of technological and scientific stagnation, and a radical blueprint for accelerating innovation.
From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation. Median wage growth has slowed, inequality and income concentration are on the rise, and scientific research has become increasingly expensive and incremental.
Why are we unable to replicate the rate of progress of past decades? What can we do to reinvigorate innovation?
In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to the problem. In a series of case studies tracking some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to fracking and Bitcoin—they reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. They conclude that financial bubbles, while often maligned as destructive and destabilizing forces, have in fact been the engine of past breakthroughs and will drive future advances. In other Bubbles aren’t all bad.
Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom identifies the root causes of the Great Stagnation and provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation. By decreasing collective risk aversion, overfunding experimental processes, and organizing high-agency individuals around a transcendent mission, bubbles are the key to realizing a future that is radically different from the present. Boom offers a definite and optimistic vision of our future—and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.
From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation. Median wage growth has slowed, inequality and income concentration are on the rise, and scientific research has become increasingly expensive and incremental.
Why are we unable to replicate the rate of progress of past decades? What can we do to reinvigorate innovation?
In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to the problem. In a series of case studies tracking some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to fracking and Bitcoin—they reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. They conclude that financial bubbles, while often maligned as destructive and destabilizing forces, have in fact been the engine of past breakthroughs and will drive future advances. In other Bubbles aren’t all bad.
Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom identifies the root causes of the Great Stagnation and provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation. By decreasing collective risk aversion, overfunding experimental processes, and organizing high-agency individuals around a transcendent mission, bubbles are the key to realizing a future that is radically different from the present. Boom offers a definite and optimistic vision of our future—and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.
377 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 19, 2024
288 people are currently reading
2000 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
December 2, 2024
I was super excited for this as I've been a subscriber to the diff (Byrne Hobart's newsletter) for a while. Hobart and Huber produce an excellent synthesis of a wide variety of the Silicon Valley and techno-optimist canon. Unfortunately, the writing is excessively wordy and does not read well in book form. Perhaps a reader less familiar with these ideas would have a better time.
One thing worth underlining: it's worth following up on the citations. As always, one is well served going to the primary sources and coming to one's own conclusions.
One thing worth underlining: it's worth following up on the citations. As always, one is well served going to the primary sources and coming to one's own conclusions.
February 2, 2025
Far less revealing than it pretends to be ;/
The only really valuable content here is:
- the mental model of the innovation bubble (with its 2 types)
- sparse references from innovation cases (why the bubble model captures them best/well)
- some final (near-)afterthought on quasi-religious approach to innovation or (too-)naive faith in singularity & similar phenomenons
The rest is a rushed and simplified chronicle of major tech innovations in the last 70 years or so. Nothing truly new, those stories have been told so many times already, that pretty much everyone is fed up with them already. And to be honest, the "bubble theory" doesn't really reveal any hidden wisdom in them :(
"Boom" got me bored pretty quickly, and regardless of how hard I tried to get really engaged, I couldn't help it. I consider it mostly a waste of both time & money. I've made very few notes (2? 3?), and it was not worth the book's price. I can't recommend it at all ;/
The only really valuable content here is:
- the mental model of the innovation bubble (with its 2 types)
- sparse references from innovation cases (why the bubble model captures them best/well)
- some final (near-)afterthought on quasi-religious approach to innovation or (too-)naive faith in singularity & similar phenomenons
The rest is a rushed and simplified chronicle of major tech innovations in the last 70 years or so. Nothing truly new, those stories have been told so many times already, that pretty much everyone is fed up with them already. And to be honest, the "bubble theory" doesn't really reveal any hidden wisdom in them :(
"Boom" got me bored pretty quickly, and regardless of how hard I tried to get really engaged, I couldn't help it. I consider it mostly a waste of both time & money. I've made very few notes (2? 3?), and it was not worth the book's price. I can't recommend it at all ;/
January 4, 2025
One might not agree with the author’s extreme techno-optimism that only technological advances can save the mankind, but there are important ideas in the book: 1) how real technological advances have been made, 2) the higher view, outside the daily concerns, of several important technologies.
One thing I realized when reading this book is major technologies' first use cases may look simple or trivial, for example, calculator for microchips, chat app for generative AI, but the reason they are revolutionary is because they somehow make human-level abstraction possible or cheaper: microchips are revolutionary because they make the compute cheap, generative AI (or whatever current AI trend is) makes the intelligence cheap. Compute and intelligence are the foundation for human society and civilization. That's why these technologies have or will permeate everywhere in our life, hence revolutionary.
One thing I realized when reading this book is major technologies' first use cases may look simple or trivial, for example, calculator for microchips, chat app for generative AI, but the reason they are revolutionary is because they somehow make human-level abstraction possible or cheaper: microchips are revolutionary because they make the compute cheap, generative AI (or whatever current AI trend is) makes the intelligence cheap. Compute and intelligence are the foundation for human society and civilization. That's why these technologies have or will permeate everywhere in our life, hence revolutionary.
March 29, 2025
This book may change how you think about at least one thing: book reviews. I realized there are 3 different scales I'm usually evaluating. The trouble is that the realization came because this book has quite different grades on these scales. So what you see is an average: (2 + 3 + 4)/3 = 3 ⭐️. Those scales are:
1. How well does the book support its thesis? ~2/5.
2. How well-written is the book? Maybe 3/5.
3. How entertaining is it? Quite subjective, maybe a bit over 4/5.
I've recently stumbled across the basic epistemological concepts of coherence theory and correspondence theory. In my unsophisticated understanding, let's say coherence theory(ies) states the truth of a statement is a consequence of being coherent with a propositional system. OTOH, correspondence theory would say nuh-uh, the truth of a statement depends on it actually describing reality. Well, what does this does this have to do with bubbles?
The book is divided into 3 parts: Stagnation, Acceleration, and Escape. The issue is that these parts are incongruent. The reason is that they go from trying to be coherent, correspondent, and then coherent again, with little in the way of a comprehensive thesis defense.
Part I: Stagnation
The first part sells the book to a progress-studies-esque audience. The critique of academia and science funding is par for the course. Scientific stagnation is described mostly in terms of correspondence, where observations about the state of science feed into a model for how it's stagnant. For the first 40 pages, I was very content. Statistics abounded, historical observations were plenty.
The cultural critique, on the other hand, got a bit... odd. As a Diff reader, the discussion of cultural changes was surprisingly... postmodern? At least, it cited a lot of postmodern thinkers. It's likely I'm too unsophisticated to fully grasp the concepts Jameson and Lyotard and Virilio and Baudrillard wrote about. But herein lies a recurring problem with Boom: it outsources too much. More on this later.
Philosophy and literary criticism in a book like this are fun. But after a few pages and many doses of squishy concepts being thrown at you, you realize that this book wants to make an argument for a coherent worldview, despite it starting with a correspondent one. There's whiplash.
By the end of Part I, you're not sure what kind of book this is going to be. And perhaps the authors didn't, either. They had a thesis: bubbles are kind of underrated, but only the kind that gets people to build cool stuff, not the kind that gets people to bet on vacuous vapid stuff. And there are mechanisms, which had been published on The Diff before: bubbles parallelize innovation and enable projects that, without the mutual reliance of many enthusiastic participants, would not happen. Great! Hopefully Part II gives a lot of meat for this argument. Right?
Part II: Acceleration
The second part is about half of Boom, and consists of a few well-known case studies. This was the most entertaining part of the book for me. We're back to a correspondent model of belief, for the most part. We get glimpses of the published and publicized beliefs of key players in the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, fracking ventures, and so on. Lovely, back on track.
Acceleration is also where I noticed I had mixed feelings about this book. It is very fun to read footnotes about energy prospectors asking around about fire temples and worship in the Middle East because they were a likely sign of natural gas reserves. At the same time, the thesis did not feel central to most individual stories told. Part of the reason is the chapter on corporate R&D, which had many stories in quick succession. But at the same time, it felt like the authors wanted to tell and (justifiably) elevate a cool technological development story over defending their points that these were only possible as bubbles.
The bright side of this format is that H&H did highlight unique dynamics within each case study. There was Moore's paper becoming target and prediction, there were tax level expectations driving long-term basic research funding. The Bitcoin case study is the most prototypical example, with "bubble" dynamics encoded in the protocol. Unfortunately, cases like fracking fell somewhat flat; interesting story, but not much support for the main argument that it had to be a "bubble."
Matter of fact, what is a bubble? If anything that coordinates behavior because of shared belief is a bubble, we're leaving the common understanding of the word behind and losing the unenlightened public along the way. And that's more or less how the authors seem to define the phenomenon. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program were extraordinary because they could concentrate so much talent and so many resources to pursue specific objectives. At the same time, that allocation of resources and talent went largely top-down in both cases. Aren't bubbles supposed to be emergent? The core concept of the book is wobblier than one would like. This is addressed in Chapter 10, with 5 key traits shared by the projects covered. That level of clarity would have been very helpful while reading the cases!
Besides the big-picture fuzziness of the thesis, there were some details I could nitpick. Eckert & Mauchly were done dirty, as usual - von Neumann got all the credit for the architecture he (masterfully) described in a widely-circulated report. Xerox was awarded 5 pages as part of the chapter on corporate R&D, but in that case the bubble was... a company wanted future profits, failed to capitalize on its investment, and Microsoft and Apple benefited? The "bubble" is again squishy. At least, it wasn't clear how "project X succeeded because of bubble dynamics A, B, & C."
Bitcoin
A quick aside: The chapter on Bitcoin seems like a missed opportunity. The authors intentionally did not cover crypto in general, but the case study suffers because of it. It's a long-odds bet that Bitcoin will ever reach widespread adoption as a means of transacting simply because of transaction costs - see Eswar Prasad's The Future of Money for relevant commentary.
The argument I wish I had seen is that Bitcoin's dynamics could bring attention to crypto, and thus make the broader ecosystem spawn useful solutions. A bubble-like dynamic would have been necessary to get people interested at all, and once that interest reaches a tipping point, the technology is instantiated more effectively by converts. By omitting crypto outside of Bitcoin, the case becomes a lot weaker. Does Bitcoin in a vacuum parallelize innovation? It seems like so only if it's useful on its own within its unitarian ecosystem. What future would Bitcoin alone bring closer? After each round of price increases and crashes, the number of legal transactions in Bitcoin is still ~0% of transaction volume. That does not look very exponential to me, especially when double-digits of American adults actually have bought some.
And developing countries with unstable currencies aren't mentioned either, because they don't seem to represent The Future™️. The result is that we get a cool story about how Bitcoin has bubble dynamics embedded in its protocol, but no support for a strong argument for how that might be a good thing.
In the version of the story where Bitcoin's bubble dynamics are necessary to spark interest in/draw attention to cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies - which is very plausible version! - there is a solid argument for bubbles = good. But the chance was missed by restricting the chapter to just Bitcoin.
Part III: Escape
For Part III, H&H are solidly back in coherence-land. Religious fervor and spiritual drives are all the rage.There's a world model here somewhere, buried within sentences like "the price-discovery process of a speculative bubble can be described in terms of the gnostic heresy of immanentizing the eschaton." (Okay, that's in a footnote (329, p. 234), they proceed to explain the terms, and it's probably the worst case of this. But still!)
Chapter 9 is full of the "metaphysical depths of technological progress" (p. 251). It's a hard one to get through. Once you do, Chapter 10 is better. Besides finally laying out what they mean with "bubble," H&H has an amusing take on the greater pursuits of our age. My final complaint about substance is the zig-zagging between religiosity itself as a driver and a "religious devotion" to a project. Did the spiritual framing benefit the thesis much? It decreased clarity, so it should be worth the tradeoff. I don't think it was.
Borrowed ideas, put together hastily
Have you ever had to complete a project at work or school, and thought you could save time by reusing a bunch of old work you or colleagues did? My experiences with this approach aren't optimal, especially when reusing code or text (instead of, say, a spreadsheet). I often feel I end up spending more time putting things together, tighetning gaps and smoothing over rough edges, than I would if I had just worked through the core problem from scratch. If I don't spend that time, the result is a messy ensemble that lacks cohesion.
Boom is like this, except with higher production and entertainment value. It outsources too much, meaning: there are too many citations for its own good. Too many sections rely on a patchwork of ideas from different philosophers and writers which succeed only at showing how well-read the authors are. I already knew this! It's part of why I love reading The Diff. But these hasty patchworks don't work as well as simple first-principles writing would have. I understand attribution is important, but the authors could have alluded more and quoted less. It would have done wonders for clarity and cohesion!
Parting thoughts
Byrne's framework for the utility of bubbles has been elucidating to me, particularly as I got my first job in an organization that depended on dynamics as described. There were 10 things we needed to work so that our 1 thing had any chance of succeeding, but that fragility limited the willingness of the other 9 would-be participants. A bubble would have been extremely helpful!
As the rating at the start of this review indicated, the book is entertaining for a generally curious person. I did enjoy reading about Girard's ideas, however superficially they may have been treated. It's a fun volume with an identity crisis. It's not great literature, but it imparts a useful way of thinking.
1. How well does the book support its thesis? ~2/5.
2. How well-written is the book? Maybe 3/5.
3. How entertaining is it? Quite subjective, maybe a bit over 4/5.
I've recently stumbled across the basic epistemological concepts of coherence theory and correspondence theory. In my unsophisticated understanding, let's say coherence theory(ies) states the truth of a statement is a consequence of being coherent with a propositional system. OTOH, correspondence theory would say nuh-uh, the truth of a statement depends on it actually describing reality. Well, what does this does this have to do with bubbles?
The book is divided into 3 parts: Stagnation, Acceleration, and Escape. The issue is that these parts are incongruent. The reason is that they go from trying to be coherent, correspondent, and then coherent again, with little in the way of a comprehensive thesis defense.
Part I: Stagnation
The first part sells the book to a progress-studies-esque audience. The critique of academia and science funding is par for the course. Scientific stagnation is described mostly in terms of correspondence, where observations about the state of science feed into a model for how it's stagnant. For the first 40 pages, I was very content. Statistics abounded, historical observations were plenty.
The cultural critique, on the other hand, got a bit... odd. As a Diff reader, the discussion of cultural changes was surprisingly... postmodern? At least, it cited a lot of postmodern thinkers. It's likely I'm too unsophisticated to fully grasp the concepts Jameson and Lyotard and Virilio and Baudrillard wrote about. But herein lies a recurring problem with Boom: it outsources too much. More on this later.
Philosophy and literary criticism in a book like this are fun. But after a few pages and many doses of squishy concepts being thrown at you, you realize that this book wants to make an argument for a coherent worldview, despite it starting with a correspondent one. There's whiplash.
By the end of Part I, you're not sure what kind of book this is going to be. And perhaps the authors didn't, either. They had a thesis: bubbles are kind of underrated, but only the kind that gets people to build cool stuff, not the kind that gets people to bet on vacuous vapid stuff. And there are mechanisms, which had been published on The Diff before: bubbles parallelize innovation and enable projects that, without the mutual reliance of many enthusiastic participants, would not happen. Great! Hopefully Part II gives a lot of meat for this argument. Right?
Part II: Acceleration
The second part is about half of Boom, and consists of a few well-known case studies. This was the most entertaining part of the book for me. We're back to a correspondent model of belief, for the most part. We get glimpses of the published and publicized beliefs of key players in the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, fracking ventures, and so on. Lovely, back on track.
Acceleration is also where I noticed I had mixed feelings about this book. It is very fun to read footnotes about energy prospectors asking around about fire temples and worship in the Middle East because they were a likely sign of natural gas reserves. At the same time, the thesis did not feel central to most individual stories told. Part of the reason is the chapter on corporate R&D, which had many stories in quick succession. But at the same time, it felt like the authors wanted to tell and (justifiably) elevate a cool technological development story over defending their points that these were only possible as bubbles.
The bright side of this format is that H&H did highlight unique dynamics within each case study. There was Moore's paper becoming target and prediction, there were tax level expectations driving long-term basic research funding. The Bitcoin case study is the most prototypical example, with "bubble" dynamics encoded in the protocol. Unfortunately, cases like fracking fell somewhat flat; interesting story, but not much support for the main argument that it had to be a "bubble."
Matter of fact, what is a bubble? If anything that coordinates behavior because of shared belief is a bubble, we're leaving the common understanding of the word behind and losing the unenlightened public along the way. And that's more or less how the authors seem to define the phenomenon. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program were extraordinary because they could concentrate so much talent and so many resources to pursue specific objectives. At the same time, that allocation of resources and talent went largely top-down in both cases. Aren't bubbles supposed to be emergent? The core concept of the book is wobblier than one would like. This is addressed in Chapter 10, with 5 key traits shared by the projects covered. That level of clarity would have been very helpful while reading the cases!
Besides the big-picture fuzziness of the thesis, there were some details I could nitpick. Eckert & Mauchly were done dirty, as usual - von Neumann got all the credit for the architecture he (masterfully) described in a widely-circulated report. Xerox was awarded 5 pages as part of the chapter on corporate R&D, but in that case the bubble was... a company wanted future profits, failed to capitalize on its investment, and Microsoft and Apple benefited? The "bubble" is again squishy. At least, it wasn't clear how "project X succeeded because of bubble dynamics A, B, & C."
Bitcoin
A quick aside: The chapter on Bitcoin seems like a missed opportunity. The authors intentionally did not cover crypto in general, but the case study suffers because of it. It's a long-odds bet that Bitcoin will ever reach widespread adoption as a means of transacting simply because of transaction costs - see Eswar Prasad's The Future of Money for relevant commentary.
The argument I wish I had seen is that Bitcoin's dynamics could bring attention to crypto, and thus make the broader ecosystem spawn useful solutions. A bubble-like dynamic would have been necessary to get people interested at all, and once that interest reaches a tipping point, the technology is instantiated more effectively by converts. By omitting crypto outside of Bitcoin, the case becomes a lot weaker. Does Bitcoin in a vacuum parallelize innovation? It seems like so only if it's useful on its own within its unitarian ecosystem. What future would Bitcoin alone bring closer? After each round of price increases and crashes, the number of legal transactions in Bitcoin is still ~0% of transaction volume. That does not look very exponential to me, especially when double-digits of American adults actually have bought some.
And developing countries with unstable currencies aren't mentioned either, because they don't seem to represent The Future™️. The result is that we get a cool story about how Bitcoin has bubble dynamics embedded in its protocol, but no support for a strong argument for how that might be a good thing.
In the version of the story where Bitcoin's bubble dynamics are necessary to spark interest in/draw attention to cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies - which is very plausible version! - there is a solid argument for bubbles = good. But the chance was missed by restricting the chapter to just Bitcoin.
Part III: Escape
For Part III, H&H are solidly back in coherence-land. Religious fervor and spiritual drives are all the rage.There's a world model here somewhere, buried within sentences like "the price-discovery process of a speculative bubble can be described in terms of the gnostic heresy of immanentizing the eschaton." (Okay, that's in a footnote (329, p. 234), they proceed to explain the terms, and it's probably the worst case of this. But still!)
Chapter 9 is full of the "metaphysical depths of technological progress" (p. 251). It's a hard one to get through. Once you do, Chapter 10 is better. Besides finally laying out what they mean with "bubble," H&H has an amusing take on the greater pursuits of our age. My final complaint about substance is the zig-zagging between religiosity itself as a driver and a "religious devotion" to a project. Did the spiritual framing benefit the thesis much? It decreased clarity, so it should be worth the tradeoff. I don't think it was.
Borrowed ideas, put together hastily
Have you ever had to complete a project at work or school, and thought you could save time by reusing a bunch of old work you or colleagues did? My experiences with this approach aren't optimal, especially when reusing code or text (instead of, say, a spreadsheet). I often feel I end up spending more time putting things together, tighetning gaps and smoothing over rough edges, than I would if I had just worked through the core problem from scratch. If I don't spend that time, the result is a messy ensemble that lacks cohesion.
Boom is like this, except with higher production and entertainment value. It outsources too much, meaning: there are too many citations for its own good. Too many sections rely on a patchwork of ideas from different philosophers and writers which succeed only at showing how well-read the authors are. I already knew this! It's part of why I love reading The Diff. But these hasty patchworks don't work as well as simple first-principles writing would have. I understand attribution is important, but the authors could have alluded more and quoted less. It would have done wonders for clarity and cohesion!
Parting thoughts
Byrne's framework for the utility of bubbles has been elucidating to me, particularly as I got my first job in an organization that depended on dynamics as described. There were 10 things we needed to work so that our 1 thing had any chance of succeeding, but that fragility limited the willingness of the other 9 would-be participants. A bubble would have been extremely helpful!
As the rating at the start of this review indicated, the book is entertaining for a generally curious person. I did enjoy reading about Girard's ideas, however superficially they may have been treated. It's a fun volume with an identity crisis. It's not great literature, but it imparts a useful way of thinking.
March 19, 2025
Like some other readers I was excited by this book as a subscriber to Hobart's newsletter The Diff, but sadly it doesn't hold up.
An interesting read telling the story of several developments of transformative technologies with a focus on how "excessive" investment turned out to work well. While there are some useful insights in this book, particularly how parallelism is needed for the development of many technologies, I believe the core thesis of "everything is a bubble" doesn't really hold up / isn't a useful lens to view progress through. Hobart tricks himself through vague truisms like "things sometimes behave cyclically", into believing that he has uncovered a deeper truth than he really has. Moore's law is not usefully described as a bubble.
The final chapter devolves into a techno religious fervor about reversing western decline that doesn't achieve the inspirational message I think it tries to achieve, although here too is a true and good insight into how small teams sometimes outcompete large firms by strong visions and fanatical devotion.
I would give a 2.5 star review, but feel slightly more comfortable rounding down.
An interesting read telling the story of several developments of transformative technologies with a focus on how "excessive" investment turned out to work well. While there are some useful insights in this book, particularly how parallelism is needed for the development of many technologies, I believe the core thesis of "everything is a bubble" doesn't really hold up / isn't a useful lens to view progress through. Hobart tricks himself through vague truisms like "things sometimes behave cyclically", into believing that he has uncovered a deeper truth than he really has. Moore's law is not usefully described as a bubble.
The final chapter devolves into a techno religious fervor about reversing western decline that doesn't achieve the inspirational message I think it tries to achieve, although here too is a true and good insight into how small teams sometimes outcompete large firms by strong visions and fanatical devotion.
I would give a 2.5 star review, but feel slightly more comfortable rounding down.
March 15, 2025
Very confusing book. At times it felt like as a freshman’s first philosophy essay. Or a long post to please Peter Thiel and call his attention. Then some well documented historic events. A big rationalization of many ideas to make their point. And then the end with these quasi religious arguments. Overall I found it scary because it encompasses the ideologies behind radical, technolibertarian, destructive forces that we see today, under a pseudo-philosophical narrative. I find it important to understand how they think and where are the flaws to counterattack.
November 26, 2024
The last two chapters on the philosophical aspects of technology worship are great, and the material provides vivid conceptual clarity on bubble dynamics. However, overall, the book could have been much shorter.
December 9, 2024
This book covers a number of different topics:
1. The discussion of scientific stagnation and slowdown of technological progress. This is discussed in more depth and quality in other books.
2. The discussion of many "booms". These are discussed in more detail and quality in other books.
3. The argument that booms are what drives technology forward, pulling society as a whole out of various stagnant equilibria. Booms motivate and coordinate individuals to take risky actions that they would not otherwise and are that are not justified, individually, from a risk-reward standpoint. I agree that some booms do result in changes of thinking, investments in infrastructure that can be subsequently reused, and spillover technologies but these outcomes are obvious and previously discussed. I was not convinced that this book moves the thinking here forward, nor was I convinced that booms have societal benefits nor are necessary to move past stagnation.
4. Some discussion about the religiosity of moving technology forward. I found this topic absolutely bizarre and am uncertain why it was included. Given my confusion at the inclusion of this section it makes me entertain the possibility that I fully and completely misunderstood this book. For me, the result of this section was merely to call into deeper question the preceding portions of the book.
1. The discussion of scientific stagnation and slowdown of technological progress. This is discussed in more depth and quality in other books.
2. The discussion of many "booms". These are discussed in more detail and quality in other books.
3. The argument that booms are what drives technology forward, pulling society as a whole out of various stagnant equilibria. Booms motivate and coordinate individuals to take risky actions that they would not otherwise and are that are not justified, individually, from a risk-reward standpoint. I agree that some booms do result in changes of thinking, investments in infrastructure that can be subsequently reused, and spillover technologies but these outcomes are obvious and previously discussed. I was not convinced that this book moves the thinking here forward, nor was I convinced that booms have societal benefits nor are necessary to move past stagnation.
4. Some discussion about the religiosity of moving technology forward. I found this topic absolutely bizarre and am uncertain why it was included. Given my confusion at the inclusion of this section it makes me entertain the possibility that I fully and completely misunderstood this book. For me, the result of this section was merely to call into deeper question the preceding portions of the book.
February 2, 2025
Could’ve been a bit shorter but it’s a great insight into the history of progress and the philosophical/spiritual mechanisms that create innovation. I’m not sure if I share the full techno-optimist mindset of the authors but i couldn’t shut up about this book for the past few weeks I was reading it. The last two chapters were especially great.
January 4, 2025
Must reread
March 23, 2025
Brilliant book about techno-optimism and the vital roles that bubbles play. Awesome stories and details regarding the Apollo programme. Bit too much babble about god and religion near the end for me. Still a great book though. Onto Karp next probably.
June 29, 2025
Spiritual successor to Zero to One. One of the most important books written in the last decade, and the best I’ve seen distilling the essence of a “bubble” and why they are critical for growth.
April 3, 2025
“What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature’s intrinsic superabundance. There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits. Scarcity isn’t a built-in feature of our world; the universe produces more energy and offers more matter than we could ever desire to capture, convert, and consume.”
December 29, 2025
Hobart and Huber have captured the essence of innovation and bottled it in Boom. Few of the ideas are originally theirs, but the polymathic synthesis of disparate subjects like mathematics, philosophy, science, history, economics, and more is striking. What emerges is not merely a book about bubbles in the conventional sense, but a sweeping intellectual project that seeks to diagnose why civilization's engine of progress has sputtered and how we might reignite it.
The Stagnation Thesis:
The authors posit that before the 1970s, technological innovation was moving at a blistering pace. This much was certainly true... The Manhattan Project split the atom. The Apollo program put men on the moon. Bell Labs rewired the foundations of communication. Transformative technologies emerged with almost routine frequency. Then something shifted. Innovation migrated from atoms to bits; from the tangible world of physical breakthroughs to the ethereal realm of software and digital abstraction. We got Twitter instead of flying cars, social media instead of supersonic transport. Why?
The stagnation diagnosis echoes Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, which Hobart and Huber explicitly build upon. Cowen famously argued that America had consumed its "low-hanging fruit", i.e. the easy gains from free land, mass education, and the revolutionary technologies of the industrial era, and that median wages had stagnated since 1973 as a result. But where Cowen offered diagnosis, Hobart and Huber propose a cure: the intentional cultivation of bubbles.
Bubbles as Innovation Accelerators:
This is where the book becomes genuinely provocative. The authors argue that what we retrospectively label bubbles, those periods of irrational exuberance and speculative mania, are not merely destructive episodes of market pathology. They are, in fact, the engine of civilization's greatest achievements. The Manhattan Project exhibited bubble-like dynamics: vast funding, poor accountability, unified vision, and a transcendent mission that attracted high-agency individuals willing to take extraordinary risks. So too did Apollo, Moore's Law, the golden age of corporate R&D at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, the fracking revolution, and Bitcoin.
The book reverse-engineers these breakthroughs to identify common characteristics: a definite, optimistic vision of the future; the overfunding of experimental processes; decreased collective risk aversion; and the organization of exceptional individuals around something that transcends mere profit. Even failed bubbles, the authors contend, can leave useful wreckage: witness the fiber optic infrastructure built during the dot-com boom, which now undergirds our entire digital civilization.
A Cathedral of Borrowed Ideas:
What distinguishes Boom is its promiscuous intellectualism; the way it draws from seemingly unrelated traditions to construct its argument. René Girard's mimetic theory receives extensive treatment. Girard's insight, that human desire is fundamentally imitative, that we want what others want because they want it, explains the contagion dynamics that drive speculative manias. In earlier papers, Hobart and Huber applied Girardian mimesis to financial bubbles from the 1840s railway mania to the ICO boom, arguing that Bitcoin's rise spawned "one of the purest mimetic bubbles" as thousands of altcoins attempted to copy Nakamoto's invention without replicating its "immaculate conception."
But Girard also provides something much deeper: his theory of the scapegoat mechanism and the role of sacrifice in discharging accumulated social tensions. The authors suggest that markets collectivize contagious mimetic desires and suppress their violent discharge, achieving "a quasi-sacred status in our desacralized culture."
The concept of hyperstition, which was coined by philosopher Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, threads through the book's theoretical framework. Hyperstitions are ideas that, by their very existence, function causally to bring about their own reality. They are self-fulfilling prophecies elevated to cosmological principle. Bitcoin itself began as a hyperstitional narrative about decentralized currency; through belief and adoption, it became a tangible financial system. The bubble, in Hobart and Huber's telling, is itself a hyperstitional engine, manufacturing the future it prophesies through the sheer intensity of collective belief.
The authors also invoke Baudrillard's concept of simulation and hyperreality, though more obliquely. Where Baudrillard diagnosed a world saturated with simulacra -or copies without originals, signs that refer only to other signs- the bubble represents a different kind of reality manipulation: the deliberate construction of futures that pull themselves into existence. The map, as Baudrillard would have it, precedes the territory. In bubble dynamics, the vision precedes and creates the reality.
Martin Heidegger and Didier Sornette appear in the index alongside more expected figures. The book relates "bubble time" to the Greek temporal concepts of kairos and chronos, or qualitative versus quantitative time, and the right moment versus mere duration.
Thymos and the Promethean Spirit:
Perhaps the most compelling thread is the book's recovery of "thymos", or the ancient Greek concept of spiritedness that Plato identified as one of the three parts of the soul, alongside reason and appetite. Thymos represents courage, ambition, and the desire for honor and recognition. It is the fire in the belly, the drive for excellence and preeminence that compels humans to reach beyond themselves.
Francis Fukuyama famously explored thymos in The End of History and the Last Man, coining the terms "megalothymia" (the desire to be recognized as superior) and "isothymia" (the desire to be recognized as equal). Hobart and Huber deploy thymos as the missing ingredient in our stagnant age. Participants in successful bubbles, they argue, exhibit what one reviewer called "a thymotic quest for power and glory." Some genuinely feel driven by a transcendent mission; others seek wealth; but all are animated by that spirited energy that refuses to accept the present as final.
The authors argue that bubbles "channel our thymotic energies, ambitious visions, irrational exuberance, and economic desires toward the realization of a future that is radically different from the present." This is the Promethean energy needed to end stagnation, not cautious incrementalism but audacious theft of fire from the gods.
The Religious Undertones:
Boom gets "kinda weird at the end," as one reviewer put it, with explicit religious allegory. The first manned space mission was Project Adam. The lunar mission: Apollo. The first atomic explosion: Trinity. Bitcoin's first transaction: the genesis block. The authors trace eschatological and messianic patterns through technological breakthroughs, suggesting that religious fervor, or that something structurally equivalent to it, is actually necessary for civilizational achievement.
Boom is not merely an economic argument but something closer to a manifesto for techno-optimist faith in the spirit of Marc Andreesen. The book closes with reflections on the "techno-scientific sublime" as invoking "a spiritual or religious experience of transcendence." Technology, in this telling, is not the enemy of meaning but potentially its vessel.
Conclusion:
Boom is an exhilarating and frustrating book. On one hand a dazzling display of intellectual cross-pollination that illuminates more than it proves. It synthesizes Tyler Cowen's stagnation thesis, Girard's mimetic theory, Nick Land's hyperstition, Platonic psychology, and a dozen other threads into something genuinely novel: a theory of bubbles as the activation energy required for civilizational leaps.
Whether its prescription is wise, that we should deliberately cultivate speculative manias as engines of progress, remains debatable. But as a diagnosis of why we no longer do great things, and as a meditation on the spiritual and psychological conditions that once made them possible, Boom is essential reading. As Thiel writes in his endorsement: "Everyone knows bubbles can disguise madness as wisdom; read this book for the alternative history of our age."
The alternative history, it turns out, is one where the madness was the point all along.
The Stagnation Thesis:
The authors posit that before the 1970s, technological innovation was moving at a blistering pace. This much was certainly true... The Manhattan Project split the atom. The Apollo program put men on the moon. Bell Labs rewired the foundations of communication. Transformative technologies emerged with almost routine frequency. Then something shifted. Innovation migrated from atoms to bits; from the tangible world of physical breakthroughs to the ethereal realm of software and digital abstraction. We got Twitter instead of flying cars, social media instead of supersonic transport. Why?
The stagnation diagnosis echoes Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, which Hobart and Huber explicitly build upon. Cowen famously argued that America had consumed its "low-hanging fruit", i.e. the easy gains from free land, mass education, and the revolutionary technologies of the industrial era, and that median wages had stagnated since 1973 as a result. But where Cowen offered diagnosis, Hobart and Huber propose a cure: the intentional cultivation of bubbles.
Bubbles as Innovation Accelerators:
This is where the book becomes genuinely provocative. The authors argue that what we retrospectively label bubbles, those periods of irrational exuberance and speculative mania, are not merely destructive episodes of market pathology. They are, in fact, the engine of civilization's greatest achievements. The Manhattan Project exhibited bubble-like dynamics: vast funding, poor accountability, unified vision, and a transcendent mission that attracted high-agency individuals willing to take extraordinary risks. So too did Apollo, Moore's Law, the golden age of corporate R&D at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, the fracking revolution, and Bitcoin.
The book reverse-engineers these breakthroughs to identify common characteristics: a definite, optimistic vision of the future; the overfunding of experimental processes; decreased collective risk aversion; and the organization of exceptional individuals around something that transcends mere profit. Even failed bubbles, the authors contend, can leave useful wreckage: witness the fiber optic infrastructure built during the dot-com boom, which now undergirds our entire digital civilization.
A Cathedral of Borrowed Ideas:
What distinguishes Boom is its promiscuous intellectualism; the way it draws from seemingly unrelated traditions to construct its argument. René Girard's mimetic theory receives extensive treatment. Girard's insight, that human desire is fundamentally imitative, that we want what others want because they want it, explains the contagion dynamics that drive speculative manias. In earlier papers, Hobart and Huber applied Girardian mimesis to financial bubbles from the 1840s railway mania to the ICO boom, arguing that Bitcoin's rise spawned "one of the purest mimetic bubbles" as thousands of altcoins attempted to copy Nakamoto's invention without replicating its "immaculate conception."
But Girard also provides something much deeper: his theory of the scapegoat mechanism and the role of sacrifice in discharging accumulated social tensions. The authors suggest that markets collectivize contagious mimetic desires and suppress their violent discharge, achieving "a quasi-sacred status in our desacralized culture."
The concept of hyperstition, which was coined by philosopher Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, threads through the book's theoretical framework. Hyperstitions are ideas that, by their very existence, function causally to bring about their own reality. They are self-fulfilling prophecies elevated to cosmological principle. Bitcoin itself began as a hyperstitional narrative about decentralized currency; through belief and adoption, it became a tangible financial system. The bubble, in Hobart and Huber's telling, is itself a hyperstitional engine, manufacturing the future it prophesies through the sheer intensity of collective belief.
The authors also invoke Baudrillard's concept of simulation and hyperreality, though more obliquely. Where Baudrillard diagnosed a world saturated with simulacra -or copies without originals, signs that refer only to other signs- the bubble represents a different kind of reality manipulation: the deliberate construction of futures that pull themselves into existence. The map, as Baudrillard would have it, precedes the territory. In bubble dynamics, the vision precedes and creates the reality.
Martin Heidegger and Didier Sornette appear in the index alongside more expected figures. The book relates "bubble time" to the Greek temporal concepts of kairos and chronos, or qualitative versus quantitative time, and the right moment versus mere duration.
Thymos and the Promethean Spirit:
Perhaps the most compelling thread is the book's recovery of "thymos", or the ancient Greek concept of spiritedness that Plato identified as one of the three parts of the soul, alongside reason and appetite. Thymos represents courage, ambition, and the desire for honor and recognition. It is the fire in the belly, the drive for excellence and preeminence that compels humans to reach beyond themselves.
Francis Fukuyama famously explored thymos in The End of History and the Last Man, coining the terms "megalothymia" (the desire to be recognized as superior) and "isothymia" (the desire to be recognized as equal). Hobart and Huber deploy thymos as the missing ingredient in our stagnant age. Participants in successful bubbles, they argue, exhibit what one reviewer called "a thymotic quest for power and glory." Some genuinely feel driven by a transcendent mission; others seek wealth; but all are animated by that spirited energy that refuses to accept the present as final.
The authors argue that bubbles "channel our thymotic energies, ambitious visions, irrational exuberance, and economic desires toward the realization of a future that is radically different from the present." This is the Promethean energy needed to end stagnation, not cautious incrementalism but audacious theft of fire from the gods.
The Religious Undertones:
Boom gets "kinda weird at the end," as one reviewer put it, with explicit religious allegory. The first manned space mission was Project Adam. The lunar mission: Apollo. The first atomic explosion: Trinity. Bitcoin's first transaction: the genesis block. The authors trace eschatological and messianic patterns through technological breakthroughs, suggesting that religious fervor, or that something structurally equivalent to it, is actually necessary for civilizational achievement.
Boom is not merely an economic argument but something closer to a manifesto for techno-optimist faith in the spirit of Marc Andreesen. The book closes with reflections on the "techno-scientific sublime" as invoking "a spiritual or religious experience of transcendence." Technology, in this telling, is not the enemy of meaning but potentially its vessel.
Conclusion:
Boom is an exhilarating and frustrating book. On one hand a dazzling display of intellectual cross-pollination that illuminates more than it proves. It synthesizes Tyler Cowen's stagnation thesis, Girard's mimetic theory, Nick Land's hyperstition, Platonic psychology, and a dozen other threads into something genuinely novel: a theory of bubbles as the activation energy required for civilizational leaps.
Whether its prescription is wise, that we should deliberately cultivate speculative manias as engines of progress, remains debatable. But as a diagnosis of why we no longer do great things, and as a meditation on the spiritual and psychological conditions that once made them possible, Boom is essential reading. As Thiel writes in his endorsement: "Everyone knows bubbles can disguise madness as wisdom; read this book for the alternative history of our age."
The alternative history, it turns out, is one where the madness was the point all along.
May 10, 2025
Boom is an important book written for those working in or thinking seriously about the future of technology. It is not just a lucid economic or historical text, but a full-throated, almost spiritual defense of ambition in the face of stagnation. While many contemporary narratives focus on collapse, sustainability, or managing decline, Boom offers a rare and bracing counterpoint: our greatest achievements come from speculative excess, from what the authors call “positive bubbles,” when belief outpaces reason and society rallies around an uncertain but promising future.
Rather than treating bubbles as irrational episodes of mania, the book presents a compelling argument that many of the most consequential breakthroughs in science, engineering, and economics have emerged from periods of intense overinvestment. These bubbles are not destructive mistakes, but high-energy moments of collective risk-taking that build the infrastructure, talent, and cultural momentum necessary for transformation. Progress, the authors argue, is not linear or measured. It comes in surges. It comes from belief.
Each chapter of Boom highlights a different case study in positive speculation. The Manhattan Project is introduced as a paradigm of focused ambition, an example of what becomes possible when human capital, political will, and scientific purpose are aligned. The Apollo Program follows with equal force, not only as a technological feat, but as a cultural achievement, a moment when space exploration became a secular religion that united a nation. The chapter on fracking shows how overlooked technologies can reshape global energy markets when belief and capital converge. Bitcoin is explored through the lens of faith and ideology, tracing how a fringe cryptographic idea evolved into a financial movement. Finally, Moore’s Law serves as the through-line, the longest-running bubble of them all, in which the expectation of exponential growth became a prophecy that the tech industry collectively chose to fulfill.
What sets Boom apart is not just the history, but the philosophical framework that runs beneath it. The authors argue that speculative fervor is not just a financial condition, but a cultural one. These bubbles function like religious awakenings. They require faith, sacrifice, and a vision of something greater than the present. The book draws an implicit parallel to David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, where optimism and problem-solving are treated as moral responsibilities, and it quietly echoes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where the rocket becomes a symbol of human longing to transcend. Pynchon’s rocket, like the technologies in Boom, is not just a machine, but a vessel for meaning. It carries with it the hopes and fears of an era.
The final chapters offer a sharp and timely critique of the dominant worldview shaped by scarcity and sustainability. Boom challenges the neo-Malthusian belief that we live in a world of fixed resources, where the best we can hope for is to limit human impact. Instead, it argues that scarcity is often manufactured, and that the real constraint is human imagination and will. Nature is not a static equilibrium to be preserved, but a dynamic source of energy and possibility to be unlocked. The idea that stability is the ideal state is, in the authors’ view, a misunderstanding of how progress happens. Stability is not peace. It is decay.
The book closes with one of the strongest philosophical statements in recent nonfiction. It serves as a manifesto for technologists, builders, and believers in human potential:
“What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature’s intrinsic superabundance.
There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits.
Scarcity isn’t a built-in feature of our world; the universe produces more energy and offers more matter than we could ever desire to capture, convert, and consume.
Against the dominant neo-Malthusian moral philosophy of scarcity, which assumes a static equilibrium state of nature that must be protected from humans’ exploitative tendencies and corrupting influences, we need to recognize that equilibrium is not, in fact, an ideal or achievable state but a segue to stasis, decline, and death.”
Boom is a call to action. It is a reminder that we build the future not through restraint, but through courage. It is a warning against passivity and a defense of belief. For anyone working in technology, investing in progress, or simply wondering why the world feels stuck, this book is not optional. It is essential.
Rather than treating bubbles as irrational episodes of mania, the book presents a compelling argument that many of the most consequential breakthroughs in science, engineering, and economics have emerged from periods of intense overinvestment. These bubbles are not destructive mistakes, but high-energy moments of collective risk-taking that build the infrastructure, talent, and cultural momentum necessary for transformation. Progress, the authors argue, is not linear or measured. It comes in surges. It comes from belief.
Each chapter of Boom highlights a different case study in positive speculation. The Manhattan Project is introduced as a paradigm of focused ambition, an example of what becomes possible when human capital, political will, and scientific purpose are aligned. The Apollo Program follows with equal force, not only as a technological feat, but as a cultural achievement, a moment when space exploration became a secular religion that united a nation. The chapter on fracking shows how overlooked technologies can reshape global energy markets when belief and capital converge. Bitcoin is explored through the lens of faith and ideology, tracing how a fringe cryptographic idea evolved into a financial movement. Finally, Moore’s Law serves as the through-line, the longest-running bubble of them all, in which the expectation of exponential growth became a prophecy that the tech industry collectively chose to fulfill.
What sets Boom apart is not just the history, but the philosophical framework that runs beneath it. The authors argue that speculative fervor is not just a financial condition, but a cultural one. These bubbles function like religious awakenings. They require faith, sacrifice, and a vision of something greater than the present. The book draws an implicit parallel to David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, where optimism and problem-solving are treated as moral responsibilities, and it quietly echoes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where the rocket becomes a symbol of human longing to transcend. Pynchon’s rocket, like the technologies in Boom, is not just a machine, but a vessel for meaning. It carries with it the hopes and fears of an era.
The final chapters offer a sharp and timely critique of the dominant worldview shaped by scarcity and sustainability. Boom challenges the neo-Malthusian belief that we live in a world of fixed resources, where the best we can hope for is to limit human impact. Instead, it argues that scarcity is often manufactured, and that the real constraint is human imagination and will. Nature is not a static equilibrium to be preserved, but a dynamic source of energy and possibility to be unlocked. The idea that stability is the ideal state is, in the authors’ view, a misunderstanding of how progress happens. Stability is not peace. It is decay.
The book closes with one of the strongest philosophical statements in recent nonfiction. It serves as a manifesto for technologists, builders, and believers in human potential:
“What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature’s intrinsic superabundance.
There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits.
Scarcity isn’t a built-in feature of our world; the universe produces more energy and offers more matter than we could ever desire to capture, convert, and consume.
Against the dominant neo-Malthusian moral philosophy of scarcity, which assumes a static equilibrium state of nature that must be protected from humans’ exploitative tendencies and corrupting influences, we need to recognize that equilibrium is not, in fact, an ideal or achievable state but a segue to stasis, decline, and death.”
Boom is a call to action. It is a reminder that we build the future not through restraint, but through courage. It is a warning against passivity and a defense of belief. For anyone working in technology, investing in progress, or simply wondering why the world feels stuck, this book is not optional. It is essential.
September 29, 2025
This book contains two main insights.
Firstly, the book proposes that America has been trapped in a state of stagnation for the past half century. Productivity and wage growth has slowed, technological progress in every field except Information Technology has decelerated, income inequality and debt has skyrocketed, and cultural indicators like levels of societal nihilism the quantity of new movies (as opposed to sequels as spinoffs) are worrying.
The lack of technological progress is a big question that the book takes much time worrying about. Since 1970, our civilization has enjoyed the fruits of exponential progress in semiconductors and software, but every other field seems to have stagnated. Our yearly energy production has largely stayed the same, our transportation infrastructure has not gotten any better, and the insides of our homes look largely the same. The technological optimists of the mid 20th century thought that by now, we would have energy too cheap to meter, space colonization, and doubled lifespans. None of these dreams turned into reality, and the last half-century of technological progress did not keep pace with the innovation we enjoyed during the first half of the 20th century.
There is much debate to what the causes of this stagnation is. Tyler Cowen thinks we plucked the low hanging fruit of technological and scientific progress — you can only invent electricity or the steam engine once. Others think society has become more risk averse - researchers focusing on safe incremental projects instead of risky game changers, regulatory bodies prioritizing obsessive safety at the cost of progress, movie studio executives choosing to make the 20th sequel instead of take the risk of trying something new.
The second main idea of the book is that Bubbles, particularly ones driven by optimism in an emerging technology, are the solution to breaking out of stagnation and jump starting technological and economic growth.
To see why, we first have to examine the dynamic of bubbles. Participants in a bubble are utterly captivated by a vision of the future that, if come to be, would uplift human civilization to a higher level. These participants, whether wealthy investors or genius technologists, do everything in their power to participate in this bubble, often with conflicting goals. Some genuinely feel driven by a deeper mission in helping humankind, others are in a thymotic quest for power and glory, others just want to become rich. As the bubble grows, more and more of the world’s capital and talent rush in, often (but not always) resulting in the transcendent vision being achieved.
Yes bubbles are often wasteful, for example the big telecom companies likely spent too much building fiber optic cable and other internet infrastructure than what they should of for optimal returns, similar to how British railroad companies built too many railways during the 1840s. But this excess infrastructure — though not providing a great ROI for the corporations — laid the groundwork for further economic growth. The overbuilt internet structure paved the way for now giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta to thrive, while the overbuilt British railway system made transporting goods across the country extremely cheap.
Though AI isn’t talked about much in this book, much of the text that references past bubbles can be applied to the “AI Bubble”. As of right now, big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on AI and data center capex. The AI Bubble shares many characteristics with other bubbles. There’s a transcendent vision of the future — building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — which if achieved can usher in a transformation that puts the Industrial Revolution to shame. Wealthy Investors from national pension funds to Saudi princes are putting their chips down - and the most brilliant minds of our age are rushing to join the top AI Labs.
There is definitely exuberance and possibly inflated valuations. In the private markets, pre-revenue companies are raising money at 20-30 billion dollar valuations. There are several AI labs that were founded in just the past few years, that now have valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
But these characteristics, the book argues, are vital for crossing the threshold of “activation energy” needed to make breakthrough technological innovations that are upstream of significant growth and dynamism.
One of my favorite books of the past few years! 5/5
Firstly, the book proposes that America has been trapped in a state of stagnation for the past half century. Productivity and wage growth has slowed, technological progress in every field except Information Technology has decelerated, income inequality and debt has skyrocketed, and cultural indicators like levels of societal nihilism the quantity of new movies (as opposed to sequels as spinoffs) are worrying.
The lack of technological progress is a big question that the book takes much time worrying about. Since 1970, our civilization has enjoyed the fruits of exponential progress in semiconductors and software, but every other field seems to have stagnated. Our yearly energy production has largely stayed the same, our transportation infrastructure has not gotten any better, and the insides of our homes look largely the same. The technological optimists of the mid 20th century thought that by now, we would have energy too cheap to meter, space colonization, and doubled lifespans. None of these dreams turned into reality, and the last half-century of technological progress did not keep pace with the innovation we enjoyed during the first half of the 20th century.
There is much debate to what the causes of this stagnation is. Tyler Cowen thinks we plucked the low hanging fruit of technological and scientific progress — you can only invent electricity or the steam engine once. Others think society has become more risk averse - researchers focusing on safe incremental projects instead of risky game changers, regulatory bodies prioritizing obsessive safety at the cost of progress, movie studio executives choosing to make the 20th sequel instead of take the risk of trying something new.
The second main idea of the book is that Bubbles, particularly ones driven by optimism in an emerging technology, are the solution to breaking out of stagnation and jump starting technological and economic growth.
To see why, we first have to examine the dynamic of bubbles. Participants in a bubble are utterly captivated by a vision of the future that, if come to be, would uplift human civilization to a higher level. These participants, whether wealthy investors or genius technologists, do everything in their power to participate in this bubble, often with conflicting goals. Some genuinely feel driven by a deeper mission in helping humankind, others are in a thymotic quest for power and glory, others just want to become rich. As the bubble grows, more and more of the world’s capital and talent rush in, often (but not always) resulting in the transcendent vision being achieved.
Yes bubbles are often wasteful, for example the big telecom companies likely spent too much building fiber optic cable and other internet infrastructure than what they should of for optimal returns, similar to how British railroad companies built too many railways during the 1840s. But this excess infrastructure — though not providing a great ROI for the corporations — laid the groundwork for further economic growth. The overbuilt internet structure paved the way for now giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta to thrive, while the overbuilt British railway system made transporting goods across the country extremely cheap.
Though AI isn’t talked about much in this book, much of the text that references past bubbles can be applied to the “AI Bubble”. As of right now, big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on AI and data center capex. The AI Bubble shares many characteristics with other bubbles. There’s a transcendent vision of the future — building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — which if achieved can usher in a transformation that puts the Industrial Revolution to shame. Wealthy Investors from national pension funds to Saudi princes are putting their chips down - and the most brilliant minds of our age are rushing to join the top AI Labs.
There is definitely exuberance and possibly inflated valuations. In the private markets, pre-revenue companies are raising money at 20-30 billion dollar valuations. There are several AI labs that were founded in just the past few years, that now have valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
But these characteristics, the book argues, are vital for crossing the threshold of “activation energy” needed to make breakthrough technological innovations that are upstream of significant growth and dynamism.
One of my favorite books of the past few years! 5/5
December 19, 2024
Hobart and Huber (HH) claim that bubbles are good.
I conclude that this claim is somewhat true. That's partly because they redefine the concept of a bubble in ways that help make it true.
Boom is densely packed with relevant information. Alas, it's not full of connections between the various pieces of information and any important conclusions. Nor does it excel at convincing me that its claims are true.
E.g. HH want us to believe that bubbles will help us escape the Great Stagnation that we've been experiencing since about 1970. If this book were my first exposure to this claim of stagnation, I'd likely still be puzzled by the belief that we've stagnated. I'll reiterate my advice to read Where Is My Flying Car?, the book that convinced me there's something real and important about the Great Stagnation.
What do HH mean by a bubble?
The most important feature seems to be a definite or constrained vision of a future with something novel that attracts unusual commitment from early adopters. Their concept is broad enough to include financial bubbles, filter bubbles (ranging from QAnon to Moderna), the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project.
Bubbles are full of FOMO, such as fear of missing out on the weapon that will win the war.
Bubbles help to generate risk tolerance. That matters because:
A few more relevant quotes:
Did I learn any investment-relevant ideas from Boom? Probably not. I expect some AI-related bubbles in the next 5 to 10 years (both by the standard concept of financial bubbles, and by HH's concept). Those will likely be unusually big, since AI is causing unusually big changes. I'm not willing to predict whether those bubbles will be on balance good or bad. I don't yet see over-investment or excessive risk-taking in AI. I do see the kind of trends that are likely to produce such excesses any year now.
I'll guess the book is about 75% correct.
One example that I'm classifying as mostly false is the claim that Moore's Law has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. See the descriptions of the more general Wright's Law for counter-arguments.
It's unclear who, if anyone, would benefit from reading this book.
I conclude that this claim is somewhat true. That's partly because they redefine the concept of a bubble in ways that help make it true.
Boom is densely packed with relevant information. Alas, it's not full of connections between the various pieces of information and any important conclusions. Nor does it excel at convincing me that its claims are true.
E.g. HH want us to believe that bubbles will help us escape the Great Stagnation that we've been experiencing since about 1970. If this book were my first exposure to this claim of stagnation, I'd likely still be puzzled by the belief that we've stagnated. I'll reiterate my advice to read Where Is My Flying Car?, the book that convinced me there's something real and important about the Great Stagnation.
What do HH mean by a bubble?
The most important feature seems to be a definite or constrained vision of a future with something novel that attracts unusual commitment from early adopters. Their concept is broad enough to include financial bubbles, filter bubbles (ranging from QAnon to Moderna), the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project.
Bubbles are full of FOMO, such as fear of missing out on the weapon that will win the war.
Bubbles help to generate risk tolerance. That matters because:
policies designed to preserve or optimize abstract macroeconomic aggregates, such as "wealth" or "employment" tend to inhibit the vital process of constant industrial revolution ... "creative destruction without destruction," "capitalism without bankruptcy," and "risk without consequences" essentially amount to Christianity without Hell. And since hell is not an attractive political pitch, the technocratic policies of perpetual risk suppression constantly create more risk the harder they attempt to annihilate it. Naturally, eternal stagnation is preferred over economic collapse, which is not a political option. Stagnation, in other words, is a choice.
A few more relevant quotes:
only innovation-accelerating bubbles can prevent the apocalypse. ... Reality-bending delusions are underrated drivers of techno-economic progress.
Unless they're deliberately kept secret, transformative corporate R&D projects always face an uphill climb from a skeptical public and worried competition. But that also introduces the filter bubble phenomenon so necessary for transformative innovation. Some of the people working at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies feel like they're part of a tiny minority who understand the implications of AI and therefore have a responsibility to make it happen first so they can make it happen right. It's this kind of tension, between the fear of ending the world and the feeling of being the only one who can save it, that produces transformative technological change.
An especially striking example is the excessive risk-taking and over-investment in generative AI
Did I learn any investment-relevant ideas from Boom? Probably not. I expect some AI-related bubbles in the next 5 to 10 years (both by the standard concept of financial bubbles, and by HH's concept). Those will likely be unusually big, since AI is causing unusually big changes. I'm not willing to predict whether those bubbles will be on balance good or bad. I don't yet see over-investment or excessive risk-taking in AI. I do see the kind of trends that are likely to produce such excesses any year now.
I'll guess the book is about 75% correct.
One example that I'm classifying as mostly false is the claim that Moore's Law has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. See the descriptions of the more general Wright's Law for counter-arguments.
It's unclear who, if anyone, would benefit from reading this book.
September 5, 2025
This book, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, was one of the recent nominees for the Manhattan Institute's annual Hayek Book Prize. Its Amazon page has blurbs from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. So I did the University Near Here's Interlibrary Loan service, and—whoa, this is not really what I expected.
It's about bubbles. I had a superficial understanding (and my impression was that it was the standard understanding): bubbles are "irrational exuberance", where investments in a certain good/service skyrocket. Early investors, if they're adroit, get out near the peak and make out like (sometimes literal) bandits. Everyone else sees their positions become worthless, and need to start wearing those barrels held up by suspender straps. Bubbles richly deserve their bad reputation.
Hobart and Huber have a broader concept: bubbles aren't necessarily bad. Sometimes they are world-changers, innovative remedies for stagnation. And we desperately need to break out of our post-1970 stagnation. They note the changeover from a gold standard to fiat money as the prime mover of that, introducing the era of excessive risk aversion, artificially-set interest rates, endless bailouts, etc.
They consider a number of examples of the kind of thing they're talking about: the Manhattan Project; Apollo; Moore's Law; Corporate R&D; fracking; and, finally, Bitcoin. (As in: "Gee, if I'd bought Bitcoins when I first heard about it…") Notable: the co-dependence of various bits of a boom. For example, continuing improvement in computer/networking hardware makes possible to newly-practical applications. Those new applications then drive further hardware innovation. And…
The authors make some dubious historical analysis. Was the "main purpose" of the Manhattan Project (and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to "subdue the Russians" (page 105)? I'm far from an expert, but what I've read suggests that's a fringe view; we mainly wanted to avoid a bloody invasion of Japan by American troops.
Do ICBMs deliver their payloads "halfway across the globe in fifteen minutes" (page 117)? No, it's more like 45. (That's pretty fast, of course, but it's also pretty easy to get this right.)
Do "doped" semiconductors have "a surplus or deficit of electrons" (page 141)? Not exactly; that would give them a net electric charge. The doping atoms introduced into the semiconductor crystal have a "surplus or deficit" of valence electrons, which allows electrons (or "holes") to meander through the lattice easily and controllably.
Things get kinda weird at the end, with explicit religious allegory. Page 236: "In sum, markets collectivize contagious mimetic desires and suppress their violent discharge. The market achieves a quasi-sacred status in our desacralized culture; it represents a transcendent absolute, irreducible and beyond human understanding and control." Uh, yeah, maybe.
And don't miss the explanation (page 257) how "Bitcoin's founding narrative manages to nod toward every major branch of religion."
May 14, 2025
So I approached Boom by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber with high expectations, with endorsements from people like Peter Thiel, I was hoping for a groundbreaking exploration of how market irrationality and speculative bubbles might fuel innovation. This was especially interesting as it could be seen as a critique of the current market system (i.e. neoliberalism), from someone who isn't a Marxist. The exploration of market cycles is something that both Hayek and Keynes were focused on, so this is a well trodden path for economists to argue about for ages on both sides. So with this book I was particularly shocked to find that these authors spin a new take on the business cycles, that essentially the markets are fueled by bubbles.
Instead, I found the book frustratingly superficial: it introduces the provocative idea that markets are irrational, in regards to technical innovation, but never develops it; it fails to build a coherent theory of bubbles; its middle section reads like disconnected tech case studies; and its conclusion—essentially calling for another bubble—feels like an intellectual shrug. I will also noted glaring omissions of new waves, things like LLMs, and China new rise in technical in global prominence (TikTok, BYD, Huawei), which make the book feel disconnected from current reality. A really important question that was left throughout the whole book is well who is starting this bubble, private markets, or the public government, how should we think about this trade off. Ultimately, I see Boom as a missed opportunity to challenge neoliberal assumptions of innovation, rating it 3/5 for failing to live up to its premise or engage meaningfully with the forces shaping our economic future.
The authors would do well to actually split this up into three different books or choose to write just one, one an exploration of exciting technologies, two a new explanation of business cycles and how irrationality is actually good for innovation, and three a spiritual metaphysical book about why we should pursue technology. Right now Boom is trying to do all three, with its biggest success happening in the second part, talking about the development of exciting technologies.
Instead, I found the book frustratingly superficial: it introduces the provocative idea that markets are irrational, in regards to technical innovation, but never develops it; it fails to build a coherent theory of bubbles; its middle section reads like disconnected tech case studies; and its conclusion—essentially calling for another bubble—feels like an intellectual shrug. I will also noted glaring omissions of new waves, things like LLMs, and China new rise in technical in global prominence (TikTok, BYD, Huawei), which make the book feel disconnected from current reality. A really important question that was left throughout the whole book is well who is starting this bubble, private markets, or the public government, how should we think about this trade off. Ultimately, I see Boom as a missed opportunity to challenge neoliberal assumptions of innovation, rating it 3/5 for failing to live up to its premise or engage meaningfully with the forces shaping our economic future.
The authors would do well to actually split this up into three different books or choose to write just one, one an exploration of exciting technologies, two a new explanation of business cycles and how irrationality is actually good for innovation, and three a spiritual metaphysical book about why we should pursue technology. Right now Boom is trying to do all three, with its biggest success happening in the second part, talking about the development of exciting technologies.
December 28, 2024
"If only one reader starts a new hard-tech company, contributes to a scientific breakthrough, or takes some other risk with a potentially high civilizational payoff [...] we will have succeeded" (17). So ends the introduction to the book, which is indeed a perfect encapsulation of the book's perspective-- from start to finish, "Boom" absolutely reeks of Silicon Valley techno-optimism, whether it be the extremely second-hand ideas (drawing on the most basic understanding of Baudrillard, Heidegger, Kuhn, and of course a double-dose of Girard) to basing the core of the book off of fairly trite examples of technological progress (Apollo project, Manhattan project, semiconductors). To someone familiar with tech canon, this book will provide little new information beyond its simple stated idea that "bubbles can be good for society by causing the building-out of useful infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't have happened". And to someone unfamiliar, this book is not a great introduction--even for the topics it covers, there are absolutely glaring omissions. For instance, even though it talks about "energy is another field that possesses the potential for technological transcendence" (265), it does not mention solar *at all* in that section (instead focusing entirely on nuclear), and even though it dedicates a full chapter to fracking, it does not *at all* mention the ways in which fracking technologies have helped pave the way for certain advancements in geothermal (despite this potentially rather directly furthering the primary argument of the book!)
Hence, while this book does not seem to have any information that is *wrong*, and does have utility if someone is trying to, for whatever reason, get a basic overview of a certain strand of Silicon Valley discourse, I doubt I would ever recommend this book to anyone else.
Hence, while this book does not seem to have any information that is *wrong*, and does have utility if someone is trying to, for whatever reason, get a basic overview of a certain strand of Silicon Valley discourse, I doubt I would ever recommend this book to anyone else.
October 13, 2025
The book does connect financial bubbles and moonshot technological innovations with human nature, in order to explain why bubbles arise - and how they could offer a compelling way out of our current "stagnation" as a society. This is the main premise, and I think is mostly achieved.
I found many of the reasons for stagnation they presented as fairly sensible. However, I would have appreciated more in-line charts and collections of data on the page to back up certain arguments, rather than an intense reliance on footnotes. Many of the arguments being made are easy to prove (or disprove)with data, and I think more of this would have helped their case
The book very often feels too wordy. Although I understand the connection between technological vision, spiritualism, and human meaning, I think it went slightly too far on the connection between technologies and religion in later stages of the book. Though as a non-religious person, I still found the ideas thought-provoking even for parts I didnt really relate to.
It did feel like there was an over-reliance on Bitcoin as an example in some parts which soured things a bit for me. I will admit I'm a bit of a Bitcoin skeptic, but I have a much easier time relating to the "spirituality" of human longevity and genetics research, manned space travel, environmentalism, and other fields than the religious undertones of Bitcoin. I think this point alone subtracted one full star for me.
Overall: worth reading if you're into technology, human progress, and economics - I think this will inspire people. However, don't expect a super data-driven analysis of the characteristics of a bubble to presented - the concepts presented do make sense, and they do rely on a number of examples, but I'd have liked even more effort to have been put into proving them systematically with all "bubbles" across history.
I found many of the reasons for stagnation they presented as fairly sensible. However, I would have appreciated more in-line charts and collections of data on the page to back up certain arguments, rather than an intense reliance on footnotes. Many of the arguments being made are easy to prove (or disprove)with data, and I think more of this would have helped their case
The book very often feels too wordy. Although I understand the connection between technological vision, spiritualism, and human meaning, I think it went slightly too far on the connection between technologies and religion in later stages of the book. Though as a non-religious person, I still found the ideas thought-provoking even for parts I didnt really relate to.
It did feel like there was an over-reliance on Bitcoin as an example in some parts which soured things a bit for me. I will admit I'm a bit of a Bitcoin skeptic, but I have a much easier time relating to the "spirituality" of human longevity and genetics research, manned space travel, environmentalism, and other fields than the religious undertones of Bitcoin. I think this point alone subtracted one full star for me.
Overall: worth reading if you're into technology, human progress, and economics - I think this will inspire people. However, don't expect a super data-driven analysis of the characteristics of a bubble to presented - the concepts presented do make sense, and they do rely on a number of examples, but I'd have liked even more effort to have been put into proving them systematically with all "bubbles" across history.
December 15, 2024
I wanted to like this but couldn’t tell what the purpose of this book was. At first, I thought it was a defense of the concept of the “bubble” as necessary for technological innovation. The argument goes - many technological developments would not have been possible without "bubbles" - aka an assembly of true believers with a near-religious vision for the future that coordinate together to and attract capital and funding to their cause that paired with their hard work, results in their prophecy being ultimately fulfilled.
The “some bubbles are actually good not bad” thesis wears out pretty quickly though. Then, most of the book is spent giving overviews of major technological advancements in the twentieth century - Manhattan project, Apollo project, Bell Labs, etc. - which I could have read about in any science history book. Then the last few chapters start to get into the philosophy and theology of technology, but aren't rigorously argued enough to leave me convinced.
I think the authors should have picked a focus. A few ideas:
- A history of the “technological bubble” (vs truly speculative bubbles) - in the vein of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions but with historical examples - and a wider range of examples than the obvious 20th-century ones.
- A history of "faith" as necessary for technological advancement - the last part of the book starts to get into this, but it's incredibly interesting and warrants deeper exploration across history.
- A philosophical / normative argument that we should actually build technology to get closer to transcendence. At the end, it felt like the authors were getting close to directly arguing that we should try to bring about transcendence / the eschaton with technology, but they didn’t quite get there. I didn’t leave convinced that they actually believe we can, or at least, bring about a future that is positive (do nukes get us closer?) But then they drop this in as the very last sentence - “Only by embracing a radically different future with singular commitment and sacrifice, often in defense of the many, can we release ourselves from stagnation, stasis, and decline. This is our transcendent mission.” Why should I believe this?
- A philosophical / normative argument that we should be more ambitious in our technological goals, drawing on examples throughout history to show that things that seemed “insane” or “bubbly” actually became self-fulfilling prophecy.
On the bright side, the bibliography was a gem - many references across philosophy and history of science and technology - much to follow up on. I also think this was a decent survey of topics in "progress" studies and various philosophers on the purpose of technology.
The “some bubbles are actually good not bad” thesis wears out pretty quickly though. Then, most of the book is spent giving overviews of major technological advancements in the twentieth century - Manhattan project, Apollo project, Bell Labs, etc. - which I could have read about in any science history book. Then the last few chapters start to get into the philosophy and theology of technology, but aren't rigorously argued enough to leave me convinced.
I think the authors should have picked a focus. A few ideas:
- A history of the “technological bubble” (vs truly speculative bubbles) - in the vein of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions but with historical examples - and a wider range of examples than the obvious 20th-century ones.
- A history of "faith" as necessary for technological advancement - the last part of the book starts to get into this, but it's incredibly interesting and warrants deeper exploration across history.
- A philosophical / normative argument that we should actually build technology to get closer to transcendence. At the end, it felt like the authors were getting close to directly arguing that we should try to bring about transcendence / the eschaton with technology, but they didn’t quite get there. I didn’t leave convinced that they actually believe we can, or at least, bring about a future that is positive (do nukes get us closer?) But then they drop this in as the very last sentence - “Only by embracing a radically different future with singular commitment and sacrifice, often in defense of the many, can we release ourselves from stagnation, stasis, and decline. This is our transcendent mission.” Why should I believe this?
- A philosophical / normative argument that we should be more ambitious in our technological goals, drawing on examples throughout history to show that things that seemed “insane” or “bubbly” actually became self-fulfilling prophecy.
On the bright side, the bibliography was a gem - many references across philosophy and history of science and technology - much to follow up on. I also think this was a decent survey of topics in "progress" studies and various philosophers on the purpose of technology.
July 17, 2025
As a longtime subscriber to Byrne Hobart's newsletter, I was excited to pick this up, but ended up slightly disappointed by it. The central contention is that societal progress comes when financial models are cast aside and irrational exuberance takes over in the form of aggressive technological investment. He differentiates between bubbles where nothing changes and bubbles where the future looks radically different to the past. I have two issues with this. The first point is that the history of some bubbles seems to suggest that they accelerate adoption of novel technologies rather than creation. The railroad boom and even the internet bubble are prime examples where technology was proven prior to bubble formation but a rollout was possible through exuberance. The second issue is that the examples given are crowbarred in. I don't think it's intellectually honest to suggest that centralised funding going for a low-probability goal is the same as a widespread bubble that forms organically and explodes in such a way. It applies the result of the actions to a cause - had the Russians beaten the US to the Moon would they still use the same reference - I am doubtful.
The final issue I have with the book is its incessant verbosity and pomposity; endlessly long sentence filled with stupid philosophical jargon to make itself sound more intelligent (and failing to do so, particularly when one Latin expression was incorrect).
The final issue I have with the book is its incessant verbosity and pomposity; endlessly long sentence filled with stupid philosophical jargon to make itself sound more intelligent (and failing to do so, particularly when one Latin expression was incorrect).
October 6, 2025
Subscriber of The Diff, the writer's newsletter.
The book could be interesting to someone who has not heard about the stories in the books ... which have all heavily been written about. All the citations and stories read like the Thiel-Adjacent canon: central philosopher is René Girard, examples of bubbles are R&D labs and crypto ...
The key insight of the book is that financial bubles enable innovation by de-risking it and gathering talent through a shared vision. The author reveals this "finding" in the first pages of his introduction, but that left me quite confused: economists have written for at least 20 years on the role of bubbles in financing innovations (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technol... ). Thus, someone roughtly familiar with innovation economics would find most value in the stories.
As for the stories used to illustrate the fact that key innovation mostly happened through bubbles ... I'm not quite convinced. For example, Xerox was appropriately valued at the time it created PARC. There was a lot of money flowing into it because it was a very rich company.
The book could be interesting to someone who has not heard about the stories in the books ... which have all heavily been written about. All the citations and stories read like the Thiel-Adjacent canon: central philosopher is René Girard, examples of bubbles are R&D labs and crypto ...
The key insight of the book is that financial bubles enable innovation by de-risking it and gathering talent through a shared vision. The author reveals this "finding" in the first pages of his introduction, but that left me quite confused: economists have written for at least 20 years on the role of bubbles in financing innovations (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technol... ). Thus, someone roughtly familiar with innovation economics would find most value in the stories.
As for the stories used to illustrate the fact that key innovation mostly happened through bubbles ... I'm not quite convinced. For example, Xerox was appropriately valued at the time it created PARC. There was a lot of money flowing into it because it was a very rich company.
December 27, 2024
One of the few truly infuriating books I read this year. I was hoping for a systematic treatment of bubbles and a narrative which left room for plurality on their impacts. Instead, this work is nothing more than dogmatism and thinly reskinned Thiel and Cowen arguments I’ve heard in shorter format. The only true “new” item here is a literature review format, hopping from Heidegger on technology to Feyerabend on epistemic anarchism without once sitting in these new spaces. What would a real reckoning with Feyerabend mean for science policy in a post-truth consensus? No discussion, just a simple hand wave to more deliberate thinkers in order to add “depth”. What seems on display here is a libertarian “theory of everything” which attempts to tie monetary policy (the existence of Fed guidance) to everything from discount ratings (very plausible), to the replication crisis (much less plausible), to a supposed “cultural stagnation” (bullshit). This book is thin and should be disregarded for other more systematic thinking on each separate issue.
February 11, 2025
This is a hot mess. I was looking forward to some kind of mathematically based way of looking at the productive effects of speculative bubbles—something I had never thought of. I am inclined to agree that innovation is driven by variability. That’s where I THOUGHT this was going.
But if there is a coherent explanation of that theorem—I couldn’t find it. What I got instead was a complete misunderstanding of the difference between a bubble and what I guess is just capital investment. I don’t even understand how Hobart equates those two things. There are entire chapters about the Manhattan project and the Apollo mission that are predicated on those being bubbles. How was the Manhattan project a bubble? I do not think that word means what you think it means. Which is unfortunate because the whole book makes absolutely no sense if it doesn’t use the definition of a bubble.
So there’s that.
Then there is a quasi-religious discussion of beliefs “other” people have. I’m just going to stop here.
But if there is a coherent explanation of that theorem—I couldn’t find it. What I got instead was a complete misunderstanding of the difference between a bubble and what I guess is just capital investment. I don’t even understand how Hobart equates those two things. There are entire chapters about the Manhattan project and the Apollo mission that are predicated on those being bubbles. How was the Manhattan project a bubble? I do not think that word means what you think it means. Which is unfortunate because the whole book makes absolutely no sense if it doesn’t use the definition of a bubble.
So there’s that.
Then there is a quasi-religious discussion of beliefs “other” people have. I’m just going to stop here.
June 4, 2025
I have mixed feelings about this book. I honestly never seemed to get very into it; it took me a while to finish despite it being short. You can tell the book was written by multiple authors based on how different the chapters can be from one another. I found the inclusion of footnotes to be quite overwhelming. There were sometimes whole paragraphs written in the footnotes. They were so frequent that you didn't know whether you should just skip them, but then again you could be missing out on good information by doing so.
However, the highs of this book are incredible, particularly the chapters on Manhattan Project, Apollo missions, and Moore's Law. They are some of the most interesting chapters I've ever read. The last chapter was on another level. Combining themes of philosophy, religion and technology into one final blast to close the book was an incredible choice. It redeems all the previous wrongs. Even if you didn't read the rest of the book, this last chapter alone makes the whole thing worth it.
However, the highs of this book are incredible, particularly the chapters on Manhattan Project, Apollo missions, and Moore's Law. They are some of the most interesting chapters I've ever read. The last chapter was on another level. Combining themes of philosophy, religion and technology into one final blast to close the book was an incredible choice. It redeems all the previous wrongs. Even if you didn't read the rest of the book, this last chapter alone makes the whole thing worth it.
January 4, 2025
Fit into the genre of “actually, bubbles are good” takes that have been circulating lately. Appreciated it in this moment as I struggle to balance “building for an immediate customer” at work with building for the vision of the future.
Where this differed from other similar writings is the invocations of metaphysics and religiosity in its analyses of bubbles and bubble behavior - surprised there was no mention of Durkheim “collective effervescence” - which at times I appreciated for its willingness (maybe courage?) to contextualize prima facie unserious modern moments like meme stocks etc into more staid historical and cultural trends that might only seem more serious in hindsight because they happened a while ago; at other times went over my head and made me feel insufficiently read; and at other times stretched credulity and all felt a bit much, like ex post facto attributions of meaning and significance to what others might call get rich quick schemes.
Anyway, I enjoyed it.
Where this differed from other similar writings is the invocations of metaphysics and religiosity in its analyses of bubbles and bubble behavior - surprised there was no mention of Durkheim “collective effervescence” - which at times I appreciated for its willingness (maybe courage?) to contextualize prima facie unserious modern moments like meme stocks etc into more staid historical and cultural trends that might only seem more serious in hindsight because they happened a while ago; at other times went over my head and made me feel insufficiently read; and at other times stretched credulity and all felt a bit much, like ex post facto attributions of meaning and significance to what others might call get rich quick schemes.
Anyway, I enjoyed it.
March 16, 2025
I got laid off and was stressed so this took longer than expected.
This was great until the end and where it kept talking about thiel and musk as if they’re progenitors of the future we should be trying to build.
Good:
1. The concept and explanation of the technological slowdown after the 1970s strictly due to the changes in the cultural consciousness in the west was amazing.
Bad:
1. Sadly, musk/thiel are not the ones building a future worth living in and they’re the ones extracting resources from today to that prevents a more abundant tomorrow. The visions of the organizations these individuals operate are the only things about them worth admiring.
2. The final chapter started well and then ended poorly with the last half of chapter 3 being almost completely redundant, boring and, not interesting. The only thing interesting about it was tying it to religion but then it goes into a derivative regurgitation of the past 120 pages for no reason.
This was great until the end and where it kept talking about thiel and musk as if they’re progenitors of the future we should be trying to build.
Good:
1. The concept and explanation of the technological slowdown after the 1970s strictly due to the changes in the cultural consciousness in the west was amazing.
Bad:
1. Sadly, musk/thiel are not the ones building a future worth living in and they’re the ones extracting resources from today to that prevents a more abundant tomorrow. The visions of the organizations these individuals operate are the only things about them worth admiring.
2. The final chapter started well and then ended poorly with the last half of chapter 3 being almost completely redundant, boring and, not interesting. The only thing interesting about it was tying it to religion but then it goes into a derivative regurgitation of the past 120 pages for no reason.
January 5, 2025
This was a totally reasonable book, and might be quite revelatory to anyone unfamilar with the classic Thiel / Cowen Great Stagnation arguments might be interesting. Unfortunately, it read a bit more like a fugue, repeating the greatest hits - Apollo! Manhattan! Semiconductors! Bitcoin? - as it meandered through a classic modern techno-optimistic view. I enjoyed listening to this book, but it felt exceptionally derivative of other primary sources like Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Where Is My Flying Car, Structures of Scientific Revolutions, Schumpeter and Kuhn. It was helpful in terms of repetition of the conventional Silicon Valley faux-contrarian thinking, but isn't a book that I would recommend - I think that going deeper into some of the primary material would be more productive; this book felt more like a very quick survey course.
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