How can the education–industrial complex remain after so many years of criticism, and, it seems, a growing public awareness of its nonsense?
A review of Paper Belt on Fire by Michael Gibson
Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University, by Michael Gibson (Encounter Books, 374 pp., $33.99).
T his March will mark 36 years since the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Since then, we’ve never lacked for laments over the decline of higher education, from Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep. But a nagging fact accompanies these and other powerful indictments: Higher education is still declining. It would be churlish to fault any book for not single-handedly slaying its chosen dragon. But perhaps we can concede that the marginal value of books in this genre is not as far from zero as we might like.
How can the education–industrial complex remain after so many years of criticism, and, it seems, a growing public awareness of its nonsense? The arguments for a true education faced a fundamental challenge. Granted, ex hypothesi, that college was a waste of time; what, then, was the intelligent youth to do? It’s all well and good to conclude that college is a hoax and to pursue education on one’s own; but as long as the money and prestige continued to go to the credentialed, and the university bubble continued to swell, those who opted to forgo its purported benefits found themselves at a disadvantage. Even the most Socratic lover of wisdom could feel jilted when employers proved to value résumés and awards over an independent spirit after all.
Recognizing the conundrum, Michael Gibson has adopted a wholly more practical approach to toppling the false idols of the university. Gibson has put his money where his mouth is, and has made his career betting on the idea that because what happens in elite universities and other centers of power is bunk, one can make a killing by tapping the reserves of talent among the uncredentialed. His new memoir-manifesto, Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University, is the story of how that bet has paid off.
Gibson is general partner and co-founder of the 1517 Fund, a venture-capital fund that backs “hackers, makers, scientists, and renegades” — but only those without a college degree. Previously, he helped manage the Thiel Fellowship, which pays young people $100,000 to “build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Through his recounting of his adventures at both organizations, Gibson provides a forceful case for, and guide to, pursuing technological innovation outside the ivory tower.
To appreciate the significance Gibson attributes to this mission, look no further than 1517 Fund’s name, which refers to the year that Martin Luther inaugurated the Reformation with his 95 theses, which were able to spread throughout Europe with the help of the printing press. Gibson wants to usher in another “moment in history when a great social transformation was accelerated by technology.” The name also makes clear his enemies: the gatekeepers who decide what everyone else gets to think — in Gibson’s telling, the Catholic Church in 1517, and the entire nexus of universities, the media, hedge funds, government bureaucracies, and more today. Together, these institutions constitute the Paper Belt: “In D.C., they print money, visas, and laws on paper. In Delaware, companies incorporate on paper. In NYC, they print media on paper. And in Boston, Harvard and MIT print diplomas on paper.” Gibson’s mission is to burn them to the ground.
Gibson’s journey from aspiring philosophy professor to Peter Thiel colleague to venture capitalist despite having no experience in finance is full of exciting anecdotes about the discovery of brilliant but diploma-less minds. He revels in contemplating crazy “what if?” ideas and in puncturing the pretensions of the prestigious: Rhodes Scholars, for example, are “the very best of the second-rate who contemplate nothing but looking good in the eyes of a committee.” Crucially, Gibson has seen the success to back up his words: “1517 Fund’s returns place it in the top one or two percent of all funds in its class,” without an MBA in sight.
Both the adventures with mad scientists and spats with bien pensant elites are breezily but persuasively told. Readers may find themselves drafting their own 95 theses envisioning a different future. And to that end, Gibson helpfully includes a survey of areas deserving more attention, such as nuclear power, supersonic jets, and immunotherapies. True to his roots in academic philosophy, Gibson also throws in musings on such figures as Epictetus, Polybius, and (as one might suspect from a Thiel disciple), René Girard.
Gibson complements the autobiographical portions of the book with a broader exploration of progress and stagnation. He sees the stalling of technological innovation as the fundamental fact of the last half-century. Much of this diagnosis echoes the arguments of such figures as Tyler Cowen, Robert Gordon, and Thiel himself. Where Gibson is most novel is in his fusing of the stagnation thesis with an account of institutional decay and elite corruption. He does so by confronting an essential yet rarely asked question: If our elites are really so mediocre, how did they get to be in charge? Or, as Gibson would put it, why are there paper belts in the first place?
For Gibson, it is not quite that the mediocre nevertheless made their way to the top, at least originally; rather, the talented rose to the top, and then became mediocre. Stagnation has meant that there are no new ideas or technologies to challenge the established institutions, allowing the latter to grow fat and lazy. To make matters worse, when these institutions have bothered to act, it’s only been to shore up their position and block out intrepid innovators. The result is a stagnation spiral: Institutions use their resources to “poison the sources of creativity and thicken the barriers to entry,” making new ideas increasingly rare, and when they do appear, they struggle to succeed against lengthening odds, ensuring that the aristocrats remain safe.
This life cycle from flourishing to failure is an iron law of history for Gibson, most recently typified by California, and especially Silicon Valley. But he leaves an escape hatch of sorts: Institutions can prevent decay and collapse if they are continually “renewed by the dynamics of competition and new entry.” A new wave of upstarts, in other words, just might jolt us out of our decadence, take down the old guard, and renew our society. The stakes for such a renewal couldn’t be higher: “The fate of our civilization depends upon replacing or reforming our unreliable and corrupted institutions.”
This is a point that both the techno-optimists and the university pessimists will need to learn. Despite their differences in priorities and outlook, both the putatively apolitical technologists imagining a remarkable future and the temperamentally conservative professors recalling an idyllic past will be disappointed if they ignore the necessity of outmatching and displacing our elites and institutions. Flying cars and liberal-arts seminars alike will come, not through wishing our sclerosis away or pleading for internal reform, but by countering the long-term institutional barriers that prevent innovation. Paper Belt on Fire shows that it can be done.