The Decline and Stagnation of Empires of the Mind

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -Winston Churchill

This week's Economist has a long-form piece on the growing concern that the rate of technological innovation is falling.  If true, this is the kind of thing that would give sci-fi writers and futurists the world over the heebie-jeebies: no flying cars for suburbanites, nor The Matrix-style insta-martial arts lessons.  Oh, the humanity, indeed.

To wit, here's the crux of the hand-wringing, the gnashing of the teeth, and the rending of the garments:

Some suspect that the rich world’s economic doldrums may be rooted in a long-term technological stasis. In a 2011 e-book Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that the financial crisis was masking a deeper and more disturbing “Great Stagnation”. It was this which explained why growth in rich-world real incomes and employment had long been slowing and, since 2000, had hardly risen at all (see chart 1). The various motors of 20th-century growth—some technological, some not—had played themselves out, and new technologies were not going to have the same invigorating effect on the economies of the future. For all its flat-screen dazzle and high-bandwidth pizzazz, it seemed the world had run out of ideas.

I read Tyler Cowen's book a year and a half ago, and he makes the case that all of the "low-hanging fruit" of innovation had been plucked from the Tree of Knowledge, and all that's left to us is either barren branches or apples so high up the tree as to be out of our reach for the foreseeable future.   

It's a flashy metaphor, and one that I think sometimes obscures the point instead of illuminating it.  The real idea going on here is that while our TVs may get bigger, and I am sure I'll live long enough to see the roll out of iPhone 1000, no transformation on the scale of the introduction of electricity or flight will be seen in our lifetimes:

There will be more innovation—but it will not change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustion engines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.

But...that's a breathtakingly bold assumption.  And while Tyler Cowen and others can marshal an army's worth of evidence (e.g., here and here), this is a bandwagon I am deeply reluctant to jump on.
My problems with this hypothesis cut in basically two directions.   One, is that I think economics in general has a problem with time scale.  We only have quality data for a small handful of countries for only the past (at best!) 50 or so years.  50 years in the scale of human history is pretty small.  And those 50 years specifically, if you think about it, were pretty damn unique.   Even in the much-heralded rush of technology and development between 1800-1960, there were still lulls and slower periods in between major discoveries and their implementation:

Roughly a century lapsed between the first commercial deployments of James Watt’s steam engine and steam’s peak contribution to British growth. Some four decades separated the critical innovations in electrical engineering of the 1880s and the broad influence of electrification on economic growth. Mr Gordon himself notes that the innovations of the late 19th century drove productivity growth until the early 1970s; it is rather uncharitable of him to assume that the post-2004 slump represents the full exhaustion of potential gains from information technology.

Second, the issue might less be that the Tree of Knowledge has yielded up all of her most ripened fruits to us, and more that the effort to harvest as much as possible may have damaged the orchard.  Compare how people like Nikolai Tesla or Marie Curie worked, in their homes, or in glorified workshops; and now think of what a modern laboratory looks like.   Forget their surroundings, even, and think about how to become a reputable research scientist today involves a Ph.D. (21+ years of education), plus a post-doc (1-2 years), and the securing of grants and one's own laboratory.   By not just formalizing, but by institutionalizing, the process by which research is done, we may have found a way to direct more resources at science than before, but we have also drastically raised the cost.

A modern lab not only has to apply for grants for all of its expensive machines, but also has to abide by any number of safety rules created by federal agencies, state agencies, and whatever else on top of this a university might add in.  Thomas Edison did not need to worry about OSHA breathing down his neck, but labs in academia and in the private sector are highly concerned.  Further, all of this increased expense in machinery, conditions, and labor practically incentivizes relatively risk-less, sure-shot, piecemeal scientific advances.  The expiry of a grant can jeopardize the existence of the very laboratory itself, and there's no faster way to lose grants than to have no published papers to show for the money.  So, a researcher faces very strong pressures to only push the boundaries of knowledge incrementally, rather than risk taking a bigger jump, failing, and effectively losing all of their funds.

In the end, our desire for greater control of the process of discovery, instead of leaving it to some crackpots in their basements, that might be, in the end, choking the wellsprings of knowledge with weeds.