Noah's case here is against the people who indicate global poverty as a result of free markets.
Hickel, an anthropologist by training, has two major theses about the world:
He believes that global poverty reduction is a myth, and He believes that degrowth is the best solution to environmental problems.
Noah thinks Hickel believes this to justify anti capitalism.
Acc to World bank data, at both 1.90$ and 5.50$ a day levels, poverty has fallen in the last few decades.
Noah thinks "all the countries that have been successful at reducing poverty have adopted a mixed approach — neither free-market dogma nor command economies, but hybrid affairs with large components of both activist government and private business."

LOTs and lots of sublinks inside the article, worth digging further.
Things Patrick is optimistic about in 20s-
1) Opportunity due to internet
2) Progress in biology -"I think the 2020s are when we'll finally start to understand what's going on with RNA and neurons."
- One suggestion is that RNA is actually part of how neurons think and not just an incidental intermediate thing between the genome and proteins.
3) Energy Tech - Cheaper Batteries, renewables . The second order effects - decrease in air pollution will be huge.

Why has growth slowed? Why was it fast in the 20th
century?
- We might never be able to see that kind of growth again, given demographic headwinds of that time among other factors.
1) Science itself is changing a lot - Federal spending on R&D is about half of what it was in the 70s and 80s, as a percent of GDP. For example, peer review in the modern -- legitimacy-conferring -- sense of the term is a postwar invention and arose more as a result of funding bureaucracies and controversies than any scientific exigency. Thinks that many changes that we have made may not have been for the best.The how of science matters more than what.
2) Cultural shift -do we just not want good things? As Ezra Klein recently described in the New York Times, and Marc Dunkelman has written about in his great piece about Penn Station, a particular version of distorted, hypertrophic progressivism that took hold in the 1970s may have had (and still be having!) quite significantly stifling effects. We perhaps shifted from placing emphasis on our collective effectiveness in advancing prosperity and opportunity for people to the perceived fairness that was embodied in whichever particular steps we happened to take. Or, to say that another way, we shifted our focus from sins of omission to sins of commission.
3) Instituitions and first mover disadvantage - institutional dynamics and how principal/agent issues and collective action problems seep into our systems over time. "The period of the early twentieth century was an era of building in the broadest sense, from universities to government agencies to cities to highways. The byproduct of this period of building is maintenance and we haven't figured out how to meta-maintain -- that is, how to avoid emergent sclerosis in the stuff we build."
4) Talent allocation - maybe the talented people are working on the wrong things
5) Our explanations are wickeder - While we have to be careful to not over-diagnose explanations involving low-hanging fruit (since they can easily be excuses), I think it is clearly the case that the major open problems in many domains involve emergent phenomena and complex/unstable systems that often have lots of complex couplings and nonlinear effects and so on. In easy words - all the low hanging fruits have been invented, now lie ahead the tougher challenges.

How did culture get affected? - Maslow's Hierarchy-style explanations are decently plausible... it's arguably the case that enough people in the US had climbed high enough on Maslow's Hierarchy by, say, 1970 that other considerations became focal

War - War has accelerated innovation a lot of times.

Role of govt- I also think that certain kinds of R&D are public goods and that they'll very likely be underprovided without deliberate mechanisms to address that (such as public funding of R&D), and I'm conceptually strongly supportive of those mechanisms. While I consider myself strongly pro-free market and pro-freedom, I am not a libertarian, and I think this is the kind of place where a traditionally libertarian approach simply doesn’t have much that’s useful to say. Supports govt as a buyer

What does imputed average elasticities mean?
I think that the industrial policy folks too often talk about "the returns to publicly-funded R&D" as a monolithic whole. I would ask them: exactly how will you choose who gets funded? What will the relevant incentive structure for those people be? What's your theory for how they'll do top-tier science/research/innovation/etc.? These are tough questions! Building systems that allocate capital well at scale and through time is hard. If they have good answers, I'm probably supportive... more experimentation would be great. If not, I'm less hopeful.

Tech actually reduces inequality - https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/342055?journalCode=jole