Are Good Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

You can make a decent sandwich with a hot dog bun, peanut butter, butter, and a banana. You are welcome.

Perhaps the ratio of (good ideas) to (number of people educated to solve problems) has been going down. That’s the relevant metric if you are talking about the problem from a social standpoint. Making an uneducated guess, the denominator has increased globally by at least a factor of two, and maybe a factor of ten, over the last fifty years. You need an explosive growth in new ideas, spawned perhaps by new physics or biology, to keep the ratio from declining. IT has been that tech for the last 70 years.

no, the knowledge frontier expanded. To reach the point where you have a good idea you must be exposed to a lot of existing knowledge (as well as bad ideas), which by itself increase every year.

Hence just to become a professional in a subject, you must spent 10-20 years (probably also getting an advance degree), until you can start having good ideas.

So I would say that the amount of good ideas is inverse to the amount of existing knowledge taken by some growth rate.

I don't think the universe has reached some kind of natural ceiling on unhappy customers so in terms of startups, no. Plenty of unhappy customers out there!