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The lack of exponential increase in labor productivity is sometimes used as an argument that tech innovation has slowed down in recent decades — that the big innovations like electric power and the car are behind us and more recent inventions have been more minor in impact — that the narrative of accelerating progress toward Singularity is bogus in... See more

We increasingly believe that progress is inevitable. Progress, though, is not guaranteed. We must work for it. Otherwise, our living standards will not improve, and may get worse. 

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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The rate of technological progress is slowing. The only major exceptions are semiconductors, DNA sequencing, and communications technology. Side effects of slow growth plague the economy [...] In response, we’ve lowered our efficiency standards.

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to sp... See more