Category: Health

Regulatory Healthcare Price Caps Create Perverse Incentives With Unintended Consequences

Lorens Helmchen and Tony LaSasso’s op-ed in The New York Times argues that when regulators enforce price caps on medical treatments, they create perverse incentives for healthcare providers. For fragile patients with complicated maladies, the cost of treatment may exceed the price cap the regulators allow the healthcare provider to charge. In that case the healthcare provider has a perverse incentive either to deny the patient care, or to give the patient a lower, ineffective, level of care.

I argue elsewhere that there are better ways to reduce the too-high costs of healthcare, e.g., increase competition by repealing certificate of need requirements before opening new healthcare facilities, reduce practice restrictions on nurse practitioners, and eliminate the mandated Phase 3 RCTs required for FDA drug approval.

The Helmchen and LaSasso op-ed is:

Lorens Helmchen and Tony LoSasso. “Capping the Cost of Health Care Is a Mistake.” The New York Times (Tues., July 20, 2026): A23.

(Note: the online version of the op-ed has the date July 20, 2026, and has the title “This Is Not the Answer to Soaring Health Care Costs.”)

With Skin-in-the-Game Urgency, Wexler Sought Cure and Was Enrolled in RCT in Spite of Age

I argue that a person who has a disease, or has a relative who has a disease, sometimes has a skin-in-the-game sense of urgency in seeking a cure for the disease. The urgency sometimes energizes them to ignore perverse incentives, and to overcome obstacles and constraints, that slow or block the efforts of academics, pharma firms, or government regulators, to fight the disease. The passages quoted below suggest that Nancy Wexler has a skin-in-the-game urgency to cure Huntington’s disease.

An important side-note to her story is that investigators conducting an RCT to test a possible drug to fight Huntington’s disease, decided to enroll Wexler in their RCT, despite her being older than the upper limit set in their RCT protocol. This illustrates my claim that in the actual messy real-world there are many ways that RCTs, as implemented, deviate from the ideal “gold standard” RCTs that are discussed in the theoretical literature.

(p. D1) At age 80, Nancy Wexler has Huntington’s disease, a dreaded brain disease that destroys a person’s ability to control movements. There is no treatment. There is no cure.

. . .

Nancy is not just any Huntington’s disease patient. For decades, she led a research effort in a remote area of Venezuela that found the gene responsible for Huntington’s. That work yielded a blood test that enable at-risk people to find out if they are destined to get the disease.

. . .

(p. D5) After graduating from Radcliffe College, she was in Europe on Fulbright fellowship when she was called home to learn her mother had the disease.

. . .

When his wife’s slide into the disease could no longer be denied, Milton called both sisters home and sat them down in his bedroom. The 50-50 chance now hung over both of them, too. He gave them some advice they never forgot: Don’t waste your life.

Alice decided to ignore Huntington’s and her own risk. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” she told me. She became a historian.

Nancy had a different reaction. She would make Huntington’s the focus of her life, getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. Her thesis subject: the experiences of people with Huntington’s, and of those at risk for getting it. She thought of that choice as a way of coping with her situation. She wrote that it was a version of something the American Psychiatric Association called implosion theory — “a technique used in behavior therapy where the client is flooded with experiences believed to be relevant to the client’s fear.”

“I could talk about Huntington’s without seeming selfish and whiny,” she explained. “I could talk about how people felt in the context of helping them.”

. . .

On frequent trips to California, Nancy was also helping her father lead the Huntington Disease Foundation. The group’s gatherings couldn’t be further from the staid scientific meetings that are the main staple of academic life. There were no traditional talks, no slides. Instead, Nancy and her father invited creative scientists — who may or may not have ever thought about Huntington’s before — to brainstorm about ways to find the gene, scrawling their ideas on a whiteboard. The meetings always included a Huntington’s patient, or the family member of a patient, so the scientists could understand what was a stake.

. . .

The search for the gene began in earnest in 1980, focusing on three communities around Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, that had the greatest prevalence of Huntington’s disease in the world.

. . .

Nancy led the research team, returning to Venezuela regularly for 22 years and collecting more than 4,000 blood samples from Venezuelans. She cared deeply for them, and even helped establish a nursing home for Huntington’s patients.

For the full article, see:

Gina Kolata. “Carrying On After Choosing Uncertainty.” The New York Times (Tues., June 23, 2026): D1 & D5.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original article, the phrase Don’t waste your life is italicized for emphasis.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date June 11, 2026, and has the title “The Researcher Who Didn’t Want to Know.”)

In the Actual Messy Real-World, RCTs Can Be a Fool’s Gold Standard

George Stigler used to emphasize that when we compare markets to the government we often make an unfair comparison. We compare the ideal theoretical government, with the actual messy real-world market. We do the same thing in comparing methods of reaching medical truth. In this analogy the role of the government is played by double-blind randomized clinical trials (RCTs). In ideal theory, RCTs are the “gold standard.” The story quoted from below, shows that a lot can go wrong when RCTs are conducted in the actual messy real-world.

Note that the flaws in the RCT were NOT caught in the peer-review process, but were caught by “online sleuths and physicians,” practitioners with a sense of urgency and mission.

(p. D2) Early this year, a medical journal article caught the attention of cancer patients and doctors worldwide because of its extraordinary conclusion. Simply changing the time of day that immunotherapy was administered appeared to produce a stunning benefit for lung cancer patients.

Those who received IV infusions in the morning had their cancer kept at bay for twice as long as those who got it in the afternoon, according to the results from a clinical trial in China and published in the journal Nature Medicine in February [2026]. The study also reported that the patients lived nearly twice as long.

. . .

But on Wednesday [June 24, 2026], Nature Medicine retracted the study, citing a list of inconsistencies and irregularities in the trial’s design and results.

. . .

Among the issues that the journal cited in its retraction notice: Records that were supposed to be locked before the study started were changed midway through. There were discrepancies between the Chinese version of the study’s plan and the translated version. Every patient remained treated and tracked in the study’s first year, and no one dropped out because of side effects — highly unusual in an oncology study. And unusual patterns were found in the timing of follow-up scans.

“Due to the amount and nature of the problems identified, the editors no longer have confidence in the integrity of the results,” the journal said.

. . .

China’s critics often question the reliability of its biomedical research. Experts said that, similar to studies in the United States, China’s research output spans a wide range in quality: Some Chinese scientists run their studies at the most meticulous standards. Others were said to cut corners.

. . .

The study had enrolled 210 patients with advanced lung cancer at Hunan Cancer Hospital in Changsha, a city in south-central China. Patients were randomly assigned to receive infusions of an immunotherapy — Merck’s blockbuster drug Keytruda or Tyvyt, which is not approved in the United States — either before or after 3 p.m.

The study reported that tumors did not progress for 11 months in patients who received the earlier infusions, compared with six months for those given the later infusions. Patients receiving the earlier infusions lived for 28 months, compared with 17 months for those infused later in the day.

. . .

Dr. Anil Makam, an epidemiologist and health services researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said such a drastic benefit, if real, would have prompted infusion clinics to overhaul staffing and scheduling to shift appointments to earlier in the day.

“If we believed the effects, it would be malpractice not to,” he said.

But within days after the study’s publication in Nature Medicine, online sleuths and physicians like Dr. Makam began raising concerns on social media and in blog posts. Less than three weeks after the study was published, the journal published an editor’s note saying it was investigating the issues.

In a statement on Thursday [June 25, 2026], Dr. João Monteiro, chief editor of Nature Medicine, which is published by Springer Nature, said, “We are grateful to the research community for bringing these concerns to our attention.”

For the full article, see:

Rebecca Robbins. “‘Too Good to Be True’: Chinese Study on Cancer Therapy Is Retracted.” The New York Times (Tues., June 30, 2026): B3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the Houreld article was updated June 25, 2026, and has the title “‘Too Good to Be True’: A Chinese Study on Timing Cancer Therapy Is Retracted.” Where there is a slight difference in wording, the quotations above follow the print version.)

Elders Can Catalyze Progress

Max Planck is oft-quoted as saying that new theories do not triumph by convincing their opponents but by their opponents dying off and a new generation taking over. The claim is plausible but some evidence suggests it is false (Hull et al. 1978; Diamond 1980).

Our elders may sometimes be obstacles to progress, but they also may sometimes instead be catalysts of progress.

Those who deviate from mainstream views often suffer in terms of job security and career advancement. So most tone down their deviations and swim with the current.

But when you retire, your money and your time are your own. The penalties of deviation are fewer. And some, when they retire, want to take advantage of a last chance to make the world better. So to pursue their ikigai they swim toward progress, not toward prudence.

Take Ira Long who died recently. She had been an organic chemist. When she retired she wanted to take more direct action to do good. The AIDs epidemic was in full swing, so she contributed her expertise to the AIDs activists who stood up against the FDA to save lives by making new therapies available sooner.

Those involved with both sides of the conflict, say that Iris Long made a difference:

(p. 30) Iris Long, a chemist whose knowledge of the intricacies of pharmaceutical clinical trials and the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process made her a transformational figure in ACT UP, the militant political action group dedicated to ending the AIDS crisis, died on April 4 [2026] in Astoria, Queens.

. . .

By 1987, when Dr. Long first attended a meeting of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, she had retired from her work as an organic chemist. She was looking to help people directly, rather than in a laboratory. She was not politically active, didn’t know anyone with AIDS and wasn’t even sure she had ever met anyone who was gay.

“God, the epidemic was getting so bad, and she thought she could help,” Jim Eigo, a writer and leading ACT UP member who worked closely with Dr. Long, said in an interview.

. . .

“She was their scientific North Star,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview. “She told them that if you’re going to interact with the scientific community, you’re going to have to understand the science.”

. . .

Her guidance, Mr. Eigo said, empowered key ACT UP members, including Mark Harrington, to communicate with researchers and officials at the F.D.A. and other government agencies on a more equal, and therefore less confrontational, footing.

“They became so expert,” said Peter Staley, a prominent member of ACT UP, “that I witnessed some shocking conversations between Mark Harrington and Fauci talking about his lab work, and Fauci would just look stunned by Mark’s questions.”

. . .

Dr. Long, Mr. Eigo and Garry Kleinman, another ACT UP member, made a presentation to New York University doctors who were conducting clinical trials for AIDS drugs. The meeting soon led the F.D.A. to adopt parallel drug trials — with the result that patients who had exhausted azidothymidine, or AZT, the first drug approved to treat AIDS, could now take another drug (initially ganciclovir) that had passed the agency’s safety trials even while it was still being tested for effectiveness.

. . .

. . . Dr. Long knew that her background could be useful to the group. Her research had focused on a class of antiretroviral drugs called nucleoside analogues — altered sugar molecules trained to lure diseased cells away from healthy cells — of which AZT was one.

“She fully recognized that this would be one of the biggest epidemics in the history of mankind, and that not enough people were stepping up,” Mr. Staley said.

At an early meeting, Dr. Long was speaking to a large group that was growing restless with her presentation. She was not a gifted speaker — although she was better in small groups — but the activist Vito Russo rose to her defense.

“Shut up and listen!” he shouted, according to Mr. France’s book. “Listen! I don’t think any of you paid Iris Long the respect you should. There is no one doing any work in ACT UP that has a greater chance of doing real good for people with AIDS.”

. . .

“I was always a laboratory person, and now, interacting with people, it was completely different and something I had never done before,” she told the ACT UP Oral History Project in 2003. “I was not a joiner before, at all. But I was a fighter-type person that would fight for somebody’s rights.”

The AIDs activist rebellion is an important proof-of-concept. The concept is that the FDA should allow patients more choice of what medicines they consume. (Or another way to say it is that the power of the FDA to restrict free choice should be limited.) This is one of the rare cases where those with urgent ‘skin-in-the-game’ succeeded in speeding up or unbinding the regulatory process, in order to save lives (see Bhidé 2017).

While waiting for more libertarian policies, those with limited longevity may infer from the AIDs example that guerilla activist tactics can be justified and effective (see Thierer 2020, Tusk 2018).

Other cases where those who quit their jobs, or retired from them, swam toward progress can be found in in Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis exposé. Contaminated cell lines are apparently endemic in medical research, undermining the reproducibility and clinical usefulness of much research. Scientists using the cell lines do not have the time or incentive to investigate this. If they discovered that their cell lines were contaminated, their past research and future careers could be jeopardized.

So to identify the contamination it takes the rare mission-oriented persons who are free of (or who have freed themselves from) perverse incentives.

Roland Nardone, at the age of 77, “was asked what he intended to do with the rest of his life” (Harris 2017, p. 96). He embarked on a “ten-year quest to straighten out . . . [the] glaring problem” of “bogus cell lines” (Harris 2017, pp. 96-97).

Amanda Capes-Davis “quit her job” at an institute in Sydney, Australia “to devote her full attention” to identifying contaminated cell lines (Harris 2017, pp. 97-98).

Christopher Korch “retired from academic, spends his energy, . . . , trying to untangle decades of bungled science surrounding cell cultures” (Harris 2017, p. 102).

Those with their own resources are less constrained to conform, and so pay a lower price when they choose to catalyze progress. This group includes the retired, as well as self-made entrepreneurs, the inheritors of wealth, or the occupiers of sinecures. PalmPilot founder and neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins (2021) is an example, as are some of the Victorian gentlemen scientists (see Champlin 1994; Harris 2017, pp. 169-170; Knell 2000; Maddox 2017; Repcheck 2004; Rudwick 1985).

The Iris Long obituary quoted above is:

Richard Sandomir. “Iris Long, 92, Chemist, Virus Expert And Science Mentor to AIDS Activists.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., April 19, 2026): 30.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 17, 2026, and has the title “Iris Long, Scientific Mentor to AIDS Activists, Dies at 92.”)

Bibliography of Other Articles and Books Mentioned above:

Bhidé, Amar. “Constraining Knowledge: Traditions and Rules That Limit Medical Innovation.” Critical Review 29, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 1–33.

Champlin, Peggy. Raphael Pumpelly: Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Age and the Acceptance of Cliometrics.” Journal of Economic History 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1980): 838–41.

France, David. How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed Aids. New York: Knopf, 2016.

Harris, Richard. Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Hawkins, Jeff. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 2021.

Hull, David L., Peter D. Tessner, and Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. “Planck’s Principle: Do Younger Scientists Accept New Scientific Ideas with Greater Alacrity Than Older Scientists?” Science 202 (Nov. 17, 1978): 717–23.

Knell, Simon J. The Culture of English Geology, 1815-1851. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2000.

Maddox, Brenda. Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017.

Repcheck, Jack. The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group, 2003.

Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Thierer, Adam. Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2020.

Tusk, Bradley. The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics. New York: Portfolio, 2018.

Federal Government Should Respect Citizens by Being Honest About Vaccine Side-Effects

I believe that some vaccines are among the most effective medical interventions to save lives. But I also believe in free choice, and that the government should be transparent in admitting the side-effects that occur, to varying degrees, with all vaccines. So I was puzzled and annoyed by the article quoted below on a CDC panel vote to withdraw support for immediate vaccination of neonates against hepatitis B. One of those seeking withdrawal of support for the vaccine cited “vaccine-injury claims paid out by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program” as evidence of side-effects. Then we get to the part that puzzles and annoys me: “the federal government has said that such settlements shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about vaccine safety.”

Why not? It’s not the only relevant evidence, but it is relevant evidence. Why should we exclude it? Because it goes against the federal government’s status quo mandate? If there is a better reason, the article does not mention it.

(p. A1) A key vaccine panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted 8-3 to nix a recommendation that all newborns be given a first dose of hepatitis B vaccine.

. . .

(p. A4) The newly appointed acting director of the drugs division at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, suggested to the panel that hepatitis B vaccines shouldn’t be given to children at all. She pointed to other countries including Denmark that don’t recommend the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns. CDC scientist Adam Langer said many of those other countries including Denmark have national health systems, in which it is easier to screen and track infected mothers.

[Mark Blaxill, a longtime antivaccine activist who now works at the CDC] argued that vaccine-injury claims paid out by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program showed that the hepatitis B vaccine causes harm. But the federal government has said that such settlements shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about vaccine safety.

For the full story see:

Liz Essley Whyte and Sabrina Siddiqui. “Vaccine Panel Nixes Hepatitis B Guidance.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2025): A1 & A4.

(Note: ellipsis added; the words in brackets are from a couple of paragraphs earlier in the article.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 5, 2025, and has the title “CDC Panel Remade by RFK Jr. Votes to Alter Hepatitis B Vaccine Guidance.”)

Thomas Jefferson Thanked Edward Jenner for Advocating Vaccine

As a classical liberal, and an advocate for faster innovation, I am sympathetic to much in the health freedom movement. But I think some in the movement are making a mistake in being opposed to all vaccines. Some vaccines have done some harm, but overall the best vaccines are some of the greatest advances in medicine. I like Thomas Jefferson’s statement in the passage from the review quoted below.

(p. C8) In the 1780s Thomas Jefferson was serving as a diplomat in France when the Marquis de Lafayette brought him a message of unwelcome news from Virginia: His young daughter Lucy had died of whooping cough. The letter did not spare the absent father the grim truth: “Her sufferings were great.” Jefferson ultimately buried four of his children (including two girls named Lucy). He knew what he was saying when he wrote appreciatively to Edward Jenner, the English physician who discovered vaccination, that “medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility.”

For the full review see:

Kyle Harper. “Sickness And Civilization.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 24, 2026): C7-C8.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 23, 2026, and has the title “‘The Great Shadow’: Sickness and Civilization.”)

The book under review is:

Bauer, Susan Wise. The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026.

We Do Not See the Benefits That Regulations Block

We owe to Henry Hazlitt the insight that we do not see what wonders would be, if the government was less active. We see the bridge that the government builds with our tax money. But we do not see the refrigerators, televisions and vacations that the taxpayers would have had if they had not been taxed to build the bridge. The same insight applies to government regulation.

The CEO of Oura, an increasingly popular ring that collects health data, has penned a brief op-ed, telling us a couple of features that Oura would now have if they were regulated less:

With a reformed regulatory structure, Oura customers could already be benefiting from a range of advanced features, including screening for high blood pressure. Hypertension is one of the most significant risk factors for heart disease and stroke, while high blood pressure in pregnancy can signal pre-eclampsia, a complication that endangers mother and baby. Another primed capability, sleep-apnea detection, would give users an early-warning tool for a condition that often goes undiagnosed and can lead to serious complications.

The CEO of Oura’s op-ed is:

Tom Hale. “With Less Regulation, Your Oura Ring Could Do More.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 20, 2025): A11.

(Note: the online version of the op-ed has the date Dec. 19, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Henry Hazlitt’s great little book, mentioned in my comments, is:

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1952.

FDA Worked Better and Much Cheaper Before 1962 Expansion

Before 1962, the FDA regulated for drug safety, but not for drug efficacy. If the FDA returned to regulating only for safety, that would imply that Phase 3 randomized clinical trials would no longer be mandated. Phase 3 trials are usually more expensive than the Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials combined. They cost a lot more, and usually take a lot longer. If the FDA no longer mandate Phase 3 trials we will have more drug innovation, more quickly, and have much lower costs. And we will have more freedom.

(p. A13) From 1938 through 1962, the Food and Drug Administration required proof of safety before drug approval but not proof of efficacy. The approach was abandoned due to a significant misunderstanding of the thalidomide tragedy—when thousands of babies outside the U.S. were born with severe birth defects.

The issue with thalidomide was a failure of safety, not efficacy. But under pressure to react, Congress required, through the Kefauver-Harris Amendments of 1962, proof of efficacy before granting marketing approval. The new rule addressed a problem that didn’t exist and, in doing so, imposed a substantial new cost burden.

Before 1962, developing a drug took about two years. Now it takes 12 to 14 years. Since 1975 real development costs have risen about 7.5% a year, roughly doubling every decade. Today, we estimate that bringing one successful drug to market costs about $9 billion on average.

For the full commentary, see:

Charles L. Hooper and Solomon S. Steiner. “Deregulation Can Make Medications Cheaper.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 18, 2025): A13.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 17, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Attia Makes Case for Optimism That Rapamycin Can Extend Human Lifespans

Dr. Peter Attia gives a clear summary of the state of knowledge about the promising supplement rapamycin. (The YouTube clip above, posted by 60 Minutes, is from the CBS 60 Minutes episode that first aired on Sun., Oct. 26, 2025.)

We Need to “Tolerate Heterodox Smart People” if We Want to Achieve Big Things

Peter Thiel is often quoted as having said many years ago that “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” (as quoted in Lewis-Kraus 2024), a reference to the original limit to the length of a tweet on Twitter. The quotations below are all from the more recent Peter Thiel, who was having a conversation with NYT columnist Ross Douthat. He still believes that we are not boldly pursuing big goals, the only exception being A.I. Is the constraint that big goals are impossible to achieve, or do we lack people smart enough or motivated enough to pursue them, or do we regulate motivated smart people into discouraged despair?

(p. 9) One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it.

. . .

And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments.

. . .

I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years. And I said: Well, if that’s true, you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits because we’re going to have so much growth, the growth will take care of this. And then — well, he’s still worried about the budget deficits. This doesn’t prove that he doesn’t believe in the billion robots, but it suggests that maybe he hasn’t thought it through or that he doesn’t think it’s going to be as transformative economically, or that there are big error bars around it. But yeah, there’s some way in which these things are not quite thought through.

For the full interview, see:

Douthat, Ross. “Are We Dreaming Big Enough?” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 29, 2025): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 26, 2025, and has the title “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist.”)

Peter Thiel’s yearning many years ago for flying cars was quoted more recently in:

Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “Flight of Fancy.” The New Yorker, April 22, 2024, 28-39.