Is America Really Running Out of Original Ideas?

The absolute dominance of the market isn't solely an ideological problem: it's also a practical, material impediment to storytelling, including the kind of stories that might be dangerous in a good way, or at least aesthetically interesting and worth having around. All we have is what the market gives us; all the art we enjoy was determined at some

economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.

He processed in silence for two minutes, and when he emerged from his trance, he was philosophical. “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets t

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