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In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And mor... See more