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Recent studies show that scientific progress is decelerating and tends to stagnate on the whole. In the paper “Innovating Harder and Harder to Find?” published in March of this year, four economist... Read more...
24 May 2018
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... Read more...
13 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, ... Read more...
02 May 2018
Once again, I’m brooding over science’s limits. I recently posted Q&As with three physicists with strong opinions on the topic--David Deutsch, Marcelo Gleiser and Martin Rees--as well as this c... Read more...
07 April 2018
To sustain economic growth, the United States must double its overall research effort every 13 years. That’s because it is taking an increasing amount of effort to generate enough ideas to power the econ... Read more...
02 February 2018
John Van Reenen, an economist at MIT and another of the “Ideas” paper’s authors, has performed studies that look at talent cultivation in the U.S. by trying to determine the likelihood of som... Read more...
15 December 2017
The skepticism about future growth potential is becoming international. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom recently pointed out that innovation as a growth engine has become increasingly costly. "What worr... Read more...
05 December 2017
Economists have a hard time explaining why productivity growth has been shrinking. One theory: true innovation has gotten much harder – and much more expensive. So what should we do next? John V... Read more...
29 November 2017
We’ve picked all the low hanging fruit when it comes to new ideas, and the world is set for more parsimonious times. This is the idea put forward in a recent research paper by Nicholas Bloom, John Van Re... Read more...
23 November 2017
In Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (NBER Working Paper No.23782), Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb argue that, to maintain a given rate of economics growth, resources devote... Read more...
10 November 2017
Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb show through detailed analysis of firms that research productivity is declining even as research efforts are rising. One of their key findings: &... Read more...
30 October 2017
Modern-day inventors–even those in the league of Steve Jobs–will have a tough time measuring up to the productivity of the Thomas Edisons of the past. That’s because big ideas are getting har... Read more...
20 October 2017
"Ideas, and in particular the exponential growth they entail, are getting harder and harder to find," according to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States. The... Read more...
03 October 2017
There may come a whole range of inventions that we can hardly imagine today. Already existing innovations also need some time to affect productivity in production chains. This concerns robotics and a range of ... Read more...
27 September 2017
A new working paper at the NBER looks into the productivity of research effort, that is, how research effort correlates with an increase in output. ‘Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find‘, authored by N... Read more...
26 September 2017
Nicholas Bloom, a SIEPR senior fellow and co-author of a paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, contends that so many game-changing inventions have appeared since World War II th... Read more...
25 September 2017
A fascinating new paper by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues at Stanford and MIT has created waves by claiming that ideas are getting harder to find, which implies that many more researchers are needed to maintain... Read more...
17 September 2017
14 September 2017
…the “dearth of new ideas” thesis still resonates. A new paper from Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, Michael Web and MIT’s John Van Reenen examines this particular aspec... Read more...
A team of top boffins is starting to worry that humans are running out of ideas and are citing the tech industry’s inability to come up with a solution for Moore's Law as a case study. Economic resea... Read more...
13 September 2017
Research just isn’t as effective as it used to be In a paper published Monday through the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", economics professors Nich... Read more...
11 September 2017
Alex Bryson, John Forth and Richard Freeman present research into the benefits of all-employee stock purchase plans. They find that employees who joined the plan were more committed to the firm, more satisfied with their... Read more...
12 February 2015