In 2020 a paper from economists at the University of Stanford – Are ideas getting harder to find? – argued that research productivity is falling everywhere.
In the US alone research productivity is falling by half every 13 years. As they note:
Put differently, just to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the United States must double the amount of research effort every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.
Comparing this to Moore’s Law – the idea that the number of transistors in a microchip doubles every two years – the authors calculate that it requires 18 times more researchers to discover a new idea now than in 1970.
