Is America Really Running Out of Original Ideas?

Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing.

bad cultural and institutional incentives can deaden creativity as surely as Netflix’s algorithms. A flood of research dollars and prescriptions going in the wrong direction, because everyone wants to imitate everyone else, is the scientific equivalent of everybody making the same dress because that seems to be what the consumer wants — no literal ... See more

When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we'd all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation-it's idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for

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That is a major omission! If the slowdown in TFP growth can be explained by ideas getting harder to find, why did growth hit a brick wall in 1973 as opposed to slowly decaying as soon as ideas became harder to find?

Well, one question to ask might be “Which factors contributed to TFP growth in the last good decades, the 1950s and 1960s, and when wer

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Which is all to say: there is always something a little, well, dangerous, about the concept of originality: a danger that has been elided by our contemporary startup-statured culture, which holds as gospel that imitation is for normies, and innovation for the kind of geniuses most people now secretly believe themselves to be.