I’ve been reading old articles about about hedonic adjustment and followed one trail to a 1983 paper by William Nordhaus about the productivity slowdown between the 1960s and 1970s. He wrote: “Is it not likely that we have temporarily exhausted many of the avenues that were leading to rapid technological change?” (1981 working paper version here). Timothy Bresnahan and Robert Gordon pounce on this in their introduction to the 1996 NBER volume they edited on The Economics of New Goods: “The world is running out of new ideas just as Texas has run out of oil. Most new goods now, compared with those of a century ago, are not founding whole new product categories or meeting whole new classes of needs.” (Apropos of Texan oil, see this: Mammoth Texas oil discovery biggest ever in USA, November 2016.)

Gordon has, of course, doubled down on this argument in his magisterial The Rise and Fall of American Growth. (It is btw a great holiday read – curl up under a blanket for a couple of days.)

This reminded me I’d seen this post by Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:  A Very Depressing Paper on the Great Stagnation.

I haven’t yet read the paper it refers to, nor the earlier Jones one, and will do of course. It’s just that it seems we’ve been running out of ideas for over 30 years. I’ll say nothing about sequencing the genome and the consequent medical advances, new materials such as graphene, advances in photovoltaics, 3G/wifi/smartphones, not to mention current progress in AI, robotics, electric cars, interplanetary exploration. Oh, and chocolate HobNobs, introduced in 1987. Excellent for productivity.

For the time being, I’m going to stick with the hypothesis that we haven’t run out of ideas.