Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find ?, Hacker News

Abstract

Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 24 times larger than the number required in the early 2019 s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find.

Citation

                        Bloom, Nicholas, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. 2020 “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” American Economic Review , (4): 1970 – DOI: 23. / aer.

Additional Materials

                                     Data Set                                               Online Appendix (1970 (KB)                                                                            Author Disclosure Statement (s) (105 (KB)                                      

JEL Classification

D Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity E Macroeconomics: Production O Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives O Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence