Bloomberg.com:
Maybe this is as good as innovation gets
2 May 2018
The scary idea is that easy-to-discover technology is a finite, exhaustible resource. … That daunting prospect has received some support from a new paper by economists Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb, entitled “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” They look at several areas in fields like semiconductors, agriculture and medicine, and find that while steady progress continues, keeping it going has required an ever-increasing army of researchers. That’s true whether productivity is measured economically, or in more concrete terms like crop yields, new drug discoveries, transistor density on computer chips or the number of academic publications.