I've observed a similar thing in areas like film: most of today's films are reboots, rehashes, and remakes or at least are exploring themes and plot templates already laid down. Musical innovation lasted longer but seems to have effectively stagnated since the late 1990s. I haven't heard anything in a long time that doesn't just riff on something pioneered before the year 2000.
There are pockets here and there: films like Primer and Upstream Color, experimental electronic music, deep learning. But none of these things are quite as dramatic as, say, the film 2001, Pink Floyd or Kraftwerk, or the integrated circuit.
There's objective evidence of something "breaking" around that time in economics, too. Wage growth basically stopped shortly after 1970: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HY153_realwa_G_...
I've wondered if future historians might not look back at ~1970 as the end of the enlightenment and the beginning of the next dark age.
But what happened?
I haven't got a clue. Explanations I've toyed around with include things like:
- Philosophy: the 1970s saw the rise of both religious fundamentalism and its secular "Skeptic" counterpart -- dogmatic, fundamentalist ideologies that assert that we already know everything and there is nothing new to discover. When I go back before 1970 I'm often struck by the boldness and fearlessness of scientists and other intellectuals back then. The rise of "new age" thinking, which is also hostile to reason and enlightenment ideas, might also play a role. It seems like since 1970 people have become either total woo-woo new-age flakes (no rigor) or closed-minded fundamentalists (no creativity or imagination). Before that time it seems like you had more who were both rigorous and visionary.
- Economics: did we "cancel progress" by shifting from a progressive economic system that invested in the future to a conservative one that only invests in the present? Or was the decoupling of wages from productivity the actual root cause of the rest of the apparent stagnation?
- Psychological: did we experience "future shock" and double down on retro and nostalgia? This sort of fits in with what I discuss under philosophy.
- Television: before the popularity of TV people read books and interacted socially and kids played outside. TV is a passive medium that pulls people in and then feeds them all the same information, and it takes time that people might otherwise spend on interactive, social, and exploratory pursuits. Did TV make us stupid? The generation who grew up watching TV started to enter the workforce around 1970.
- The War on Drugs: To what extent were the geniuses of the past "augmenting" with over-the-counter amphetamines, easily obtainable psychedelics, etc.? I've heard anecdotes but has anyone ever even asked this question in anything approaching a rigorous way? Or is it too taboo? There was a general worldwide crackdown on mind-altering substances around 1970. Perhaps the kind of crazy creativity and extreme achievement we saw during the glory days is simply not something the human mind tends to do in its natural state.
- Slow Malthusian Collapse: was the "limits to growth" more or less correct, but the effect is unfolding a lot slower than predicted and with strain and collapse manifesting in less obvious ways?
- Bureaucratization: Was there a shift during that time toward a more bureaucratic academic and scientific community that is more hostile to "maverick" thinkers and new ideas? Do today's researchers spend more time sucking up to grant funding and tenure committees and making sure to walk the straight and narrow to avoid being labeled "cranks" instead of really thinking and investigating? Or do the systems for selecting for scientific careers select good bureaucrats over geniuses? The same processes might be at work in other areas, e.g. the takeover of music and film industries by "MBA thinking" over people who actually care about art.
- Educational System Decline: Did we over-bureaucratize or otherwise compromise education somehow? Were older teaching methods better?
- Demographics: We're having smaller families, which might affect both growth and parenting styles (more "helicopter parenting"). Nothing obvious here but who knows?
Shrug. But it is alarming to say the least.
Edit: here are some explanations I don't buy:
- Political Correctness / Diversity: There's a wing of the right that thinks that runaway equality and diversity ideology has some responsibility for this. If that's true then why are some of today's most innovative places also left-of-center culturally and why are the bastions of Red State America not centers of innovation? At best I see no correlation in either direction.
- Dysgenics: Even if "stupid people" are breeding more, genetic changes are too slow to account for this. Then you have things like the Flynn Effect, which argue the opposite. Again I see at best no correlation.
- Lack of War: Was it all WWII? I personally don't buy it. WWI didn't result in anything close to the postwar boom, and before that we had millennia of running around and hacking each other up with swords without inventing any integrated circuits or jet engines. Why didn't the Crusades or the endless wars of late Rome lead to a technological explosion? Why didn't Genghis Khan or the Aztecs land on the Moon?