Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation is out now
“A bubble is not simply a collective delusion but an expression of a future that is radically different from now.”
Beyond tulips, beyond Beanie Babies, beyond housing prices, financial bubbles have been the driving force behind some of the most transformative inventions of the past 100 years, from nuclear energy and spaceflight to semiconductors and digital currency.
The Manhattan Project’s $2 billion price tag and purpose-built company town allowed the US to achieve nuclear fission at scale. The Apollo program’s $24 billion budget gave rise to integrated circuits, advancements in materials research—and put a man on the Moon. Moore’s law rallied the semiconductor industry around a concrete vision of technological development that laid the foundation for personal computing, smartphones, and AI.
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation—out today—makes the case for bubble revisionism. “A bubble is not simply a collective delusion,” write Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, “but an expression of a future that is radically different from now.” Properly understood, they are our ticket out of economic stagnation and toward a more abundant and optimistic future.
According to many variants of techno-optimism or pessimism, progress just happens—either the Singularity arrives or civilization collapses. But progress isn’t mechanistic. It is spectacularly singular and requires an explicit and unified vision of the future. We’ve written this book to develop, in a sense of urgency, a deeper understanding of the dynamics that govern technological innovation. Our aim is to learn from the deep lessons of the past so we can create the future. As such, this book is an exhortation to take more risks and speed the transition from the Great Stagnation to the Great Acceleration.
If we inspire only one reader to start a new hard-tech company, contribute to a scientific breakthrough, or take some other risk with a potentially high civilizational payoff, we will have succeeded. If you’re already working on such a project, don’t give up—our future depends on it.
We need to make more progress.
—Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber