It is inherently difficult to distinguish between an entrepreneur’s skill and luck, even in retrospect. Peter Thiel, however, is the cofounder of two different billion-dollar technology businesses and the first outside investor in Facebook. If he’s only lucky, I’d like to borrow his rabbit’s foot.

William Ewart Gladstone, in his 1866 budget speech, warned that Britain faced the prospect of exhausting its domestic coal within a century and had poor prospects of finding sufficient alternative energy sources. This was not an idiosyncratic point of view. The year before, the economist William…