How is "innovation rate" actually being measured?
It’s hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn’t been affected by mainstream internet and mobile smartphone adoption, which happened the last 15-20 years.
It’s hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn’t been affected by mainstream internet and mobile smartphone adoption, which happened the last 15-20 years.
The Internet got going in the 1990s, and everyone in the US was basically connected by (say) 2010. Can you be "more connected" that already having your business or home being online 24/7 (i.e., DSL or cable, not dial-up modem)? Certain transfer speeds have gone up, and going from a V.92 56kbps to DSL is improves things, but how much productive is going from 10 Mbps to 50Mbps: do you get a 5x rise in economic productivity?
Can you point to a FRED chart or cite a DOI that shows that GDP is better in societies pre- and post-smartphone?
If all KPIs have been affected, then it should be easy to post a graph and see where there is an inflection point or change in the slope.
If you find it so hard to believe, shouldn't it be easy for you to cite the data showing so?
Diminishing returns has kicked in for me. But hard to rule out any future bursts until the baseline raises. Perhaps lower latency could make things like VR and AR more appealing and useful.
* reduce infant or child mortality?
* reduce maternal mortality?
* increase average life spans (by, say, double-digit percentages)?
* increase health or quality of life such that people at the end of their lives are more mobile, and perhaps have less onerous medical conditions?
* produce more food in the same amount of land?
* produce more food with fewer inputs (energy, labour, fertilizer, water)?
* produce more manufactured things with fewer inputs (energy, labour, metals)?
* allow for faster transportation with more efficiency?
It's all very well to invent something, but in what ways does it improve people's lives:
> Fortunately Gordon indicates that it is not an end to innovation, but a decline in the usefulness of future inventions that is taking place. Documenting the impressive rise in standards of living between 1920 and 1970, with rising TFP, he claimed that it will be more difficult than before to replicate such improvements in advanced countries like the United States. In the earlier period, the American standard of living doubled every 35 years; in the future this doubling (for most people) may take a century or more. Moreover, the newer innovations do not seem to be benefitting all segments of society, which in turn reflects rising inequality in the advanced countries.
> Gordon’s thesis raises many questions: Is he correct in saying that the era of rising labor productivity associated with innovation and technological change over? Will the digital economy imply a new rise in the standard of living? From a development perspective, what implications does his thesis have for middle- and low-income countries?
* https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/declining-pac...
Well yes, they're aiming for those goals.
On the grandparent comment's link, you'll notice that they mention striving for the UN's sustainabile development goals, which includes all of that (+ others like gender equality).
Or on this link about theme weeks[1] which includes more of the same.
And everyone wants to create a longer-lasting light bulb, or a beer that tastes great and is less filling, but what are the odds of that actually happening?
LED bulbs are great, but how much of an improvement are they over CFL bulbs? Both are better than incandescent, but electrical light was a quantum leap over candles and gas/oil lighting. See absolute plumeting since 1800s, and electric light from 1900 to 1950:
* https://ourworldindata.org/light-at-night
In the last ~50 years things have improved, but the differences are tiny compared to past gains: and that's Gordon's thesis.
The responses are very cultural and nothing like what would be required to accomplish anything large.
To give an example. We could make tubes with hot and/or cold water running from Siberia to the Sahara. There are plenty of design challenges in such project. The correct mindset is to take a broad outline calculating ROI so that you have an idea how much the state of the art needs to improve for it to be viable. Then you take the largest expenses or technical hurdles and ponder what could be done to ease the pain point. You can ponder the diameter vs the temperature vs the flow rate or pressure, the distance between the pumps etc etc, not to build anything but to train the brain noodle.
If it wasn't a stupid idea people would be doing it already.
Many countries, if not all, had a period where great things were done. After that comes defeatism nihilism and a preference for talking about tarifs, Epstein, 911, etc
With tiny improvements everything shifts around. The steam engine had many challenges that have been solved long ago. Imagine that the 100 mph carburator didn't happen because you lose much of the throttle control. How silly this excuse is in the age of hybrids? It's pretty much a non-argument.