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The Essay: The latest explanation for slow tech progress: science is broken

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Michael Strain on technological progress (part two)

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“The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.” - Freeman Dyson

The Essay

🧪 The latest explanation for slow tech progress: science is broken

If my count is correct, we are now beginning the fifth wave of explanations — at least since I’ve been covering the issue — for the apparent slowdown in technological progress (whether measured by the lack of flying cars or slow productivity growth).

Explanation #1: The age of the Great Inventions is over. It’s a notion most associated with Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon thanks to his well-reviewed 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. TL;DR summary: The key advances of the Second Industrial Revolution (electricity, motor and air transport, motion pictures, radio, indoor plumbing) made possible a Special Century of fast productivity growth from 1870ish to 1970ish. And the subsequent Information and Communications Technology Revolution — the name suggests its narrower focus — has failed to match the productive oomph of the 2IR.

Explanation #2: Economists are mismeasuring productivity growth. Just after Gordon’s book hit the market in 2016, there arose a counter-explanation: Productivity isn’t weak, our ability to measure it is. TL;DR summary: Maybe our 2 percent (real annual GDP growth) economy is really a 3 percent economy since productivity statistics are (a) bad at measuring quality improvement in software and special-purpose hardware versus in general-purpose hardware like PCs, and (b) free goods such as Facebook and Google Maps don’t show up in GDP.

Explanation #3. Big ideas are getting harder to find. This big economics idea is most associated with the paper “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, the first version of which came out in 2017. TL;DR summary: Economic growth arises from people creating ideas. But much of the “low-hanging fruit” has been picked. Climbing higher the Tree of Knowledge requires lots more researchers and resources: “More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find.”

Explanation #4. It’s government's fault. Maybe date this notion as breaking into the public consciousness — or at least that of Twitter — to the March 2020 viral essay “It’s Time to Build” by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. TL;DR summary: Our public and private institutions aren’t innovating as boldly or imaginatively in atoms as they are in bits. Too little funding for venturesome R&D, too much interest in innovation-suffocation regulation. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Also: Where are our Mars colonies, underwater cities, and coast-to-coast nuclear reactors, both fission and fusion?

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And what is Explanation #5, you ask? Science is broken. How can science “break,” exactly? When it becomes less productive in terms of generating significant advances in our understanding of how our world works.

Faster, Please!

🧪 The latest explanation for slow tech…

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