Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?¶
Bloom, N., Jones, C. I., Van Reenen, J., & Webb, M. (2020). Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?. American Economic Review, 1104-1144.
Cited by¶
1 citation across 1 artifact.
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Primes¶
- Diminishing Incremental Gains
- Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb (2020) sharpened this question for R&D specifically, showing that what looks like exhaustion of an idea pool is partly a research-productivity decline once measurement is corrected for the rising number of researchers required to sustain a fixed growth rate.
This sourceResearch productivity per researcher has fallen sharply; sustaining a constant innovation rate requires ever-larger researcher inputs — apparent idea-pool exhaustion is partly a measured research-productivity decline.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb treat long-run growth as the product of effective researcher numbers and research productivity, and present evidence "from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply", with the researchers needed to sustain Moore's Law rising more than eighteen-fold. Falling output per researcher behind an apparently exhausted idea pool is what the sentence attributes to them. The work reports the direction and scale of the productivity decline rather than a share, so the sentence's partly is not quantified by it.
“Assuming a constant growth rate for Moore’s Law, the implication is that research productivity has fallen by this same factor of 18, an average rate of 6.8 percent per year.”
- Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb (2020) sharpened this question for R&D specifically, showing that what looks like exhaustion of an idea pool is partly a research-productivity decline once measurement is corrected for the rising number of researchers required to sustain a fixed growth rate.
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