✨ A twist on the notion that big ideas are getting harder to find

Another problem with another possible AI solution

While World Fairs haven't graced American soil since New Orleans' 1984 exhibition, they once commanded remarkable cultural currency. The 1964 New York iteration attracted some 51 million visitors, drawn as much to General Motors' Futurama exhibit as to Michelangelo's Pietà, as I write in The Conservative Futurist. Recognizing this public fascination with tomorrow, The New York Times commissioned science fiction author and futurist Isaac Asimov to envision the world of 2014.

His predictions reflected the era's boundless technological optimism. Asimov envisioned radioisotope batteries powering cordless appliances and fission plants supplying "well over half the power needs of humanity." Experimental fusion reactors, he predicted, would be operational by 2014. These atomic aspirations accompanied his forecasts of lunar colonies and underwater cities. That America's newspaper of record published such technological prophecies demonstrates how thoroughly techno-optimism had permeated elite institutional thinking.

Yet cracks in Asimov's (overall) Up Wing vision appeared before the 1960s ended. Then the post-war Up Wing era clearly collapsed in 1973 amid recession and plummeting productivity growth. Half a century after this "Great Downshift," economists remain puzzled. Unlike the Great Depression, whose causes coalesced into a rough consensus within a few decades (prompting Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke's famous mea culpa to Milton Friedman: "We did it. We're very sorry"), the decline in innovativeness lacks an elegant singular explanation.

While this newsletter typically focuses on the policy mistakes that likely contributed to this slowdown, there were also macro headwinds at play. Among the suspects: