Interesting article, but the fact that Peter Thiel didn't bet any money on it was disappointing. It could just be a case of the halo effect. There's just too many stories of "I predicted this too!". A broken clock is right 2 times per day.
Yes, very disappointing. This guy is an investor. His job is make a lot of guesses about the future, monitor all of them so he can learn what works and what doesn't, and place money on those guesses he believes in strongly. This article covers a pretty cool theory, but I'm sure Thiel has plenty of similarly provocative theories that turned out to be wrong.
Still, treating an organization's constituents' campaign contributions as a performance indicator for the organization is a pretty cool hack.
His rationale seems like it should be easily testable, though.
For example, the coolness and talent argument should apply to most intellect based companies. So, say software companies, should also have the same correllation between success and politics.
The free market argument can be applied to other investment firms.
The government intervention argument is trickier to test. I don't know of another business that has the same setup as banks.
