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I fundamentally disagree -- there is a difference between incremental and revolutionary advances. They are qualitatively different types of steps.

http://adamierymenko.com/c/

Nevertheless this Bloomberg article makes a good concrete counterpoint to Thiel and Stephenson. Part of the problem is that these things are horribly difficult to quantify. How do you measure "fundamental advance?" I'm not aware of any good metric for that.

I wonder though if the real problem isn't the decline in wage parity since ~1970. It's not that innovation's stopped, but the rate at which people can afford new innovation has slowed since more and more people can't afford anything but basic necessities.

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> I wonder though if the real problem isn't the decline in wage parity since ~1970. It's not that innovation's stopped, but the rate at which people can afford new innovation has slowed since more and more people can't afford anything but basic necessities.

Parity is not purchasing power. Inflation adjusted wages for the bottom quintile are up 20% from 1970. The poor/middle-class getting poorer has only happened since 1999-2000 so I don't think that is responsible for a lack of innovation.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...

Middle class income has been flat since the 70s and discretionary income has decreased.

Do you have a source? It's true that household income has been flat since the 1970's, but the nature of households has changed, there are a lot more single parents where there used to be two income earners.

If you look at income on a per person basis, we're much higher (in inflation adjusted terms) than we were in the 1970s.

The reverse is true: there a more two income earners now but household income hasn't increased as much. Per person is flat.

http://youtu.be/akVL7QY0S8A?t=9m2s

> Per person is flat.

Median income for fully employed males is flat.

Of course, if you make enough incremental steps, the result is revolutionary. See for example, the series of small incremental steps from the the first transistor to the current 2 billion transistor integrated circuits.

TL;DR on the blog article I posted: in any complex fitness landscape there are points unreachable by simple gradient ascent. Innovation simply cannot be 100% incremental. Leaps must occur, and these are qualitatively different from hill climbing.

Or the series of small steps between primordial sludge and a man on the moon.

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