" Even if one doesn’t accept every point made by Hobsbawm, Brenner, or similar Marxist thinkers, their analysis at least has a sturdy basis in political economy and material reality. By contrast, Thiel has a bizarrely cultural analysis of stagnation that doesn’t even pass the laugh test. The Western world, he claims, entered into five decades of anemic growth because of the counterculture of the 1960s. According to Thiel, “in my telling of the history of the 1970s…the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.” Thiel adds that “everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson.”
Because of the hippies, says Thiel, Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and safety that stalled technological growth."