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Has Human Progress Stalled? And, If So, What Can We Do About It?
Why aren’t things better, asks science journalist Michael Hanlon? Twitter, yes. Flying cars, no. From Aeon:
Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. … The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.
Hanlon’s thesis echoes one of themes of the film Interstellar, where astronaut-turned-farmer Cooper wonders why mankind has stopped striving:
We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt. We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.
To put those observations in economic terms, you are talking about a period when economic growth was about 40% faster annually than what came after. When economists talk about this growth slowdown, they usually point to how productivity growth averaged nearly 3% during the period 1947-1973 and then decelerated, as seen in this chart:
Lots of theories about why this happened. Maybe all the low-hanging fruit of innovation had been picked. Maybe all the benefits from revolutionary technologies like electricity generation and the combustion engine were played out. Maybe too much government regulation. Or maybe the problem is cultural:
Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes. … . In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible. … In 1992, the Swiss genetic engineer Ingo Potrykus developed a variety of rice in which the grain, rather than the leaves, contain a large concentration of Vitamin A. Deficiency in this vitamin causes blindness and death among hundreds of thousands every year in the developing world. And yet, thanks to a well-funded fear-mongering campaign by anti-GM fundamentalists, the world has not seen the benefits of this invention.
In the energy sector, civilian nuclear technology was hobbled by a series of mega-profile ‘disasters’, including Three Mile Island (which killed no one) and Chernobyl (which killed only dozens). These incidents caused a global hiatus into research that could, by now, have given us safe, cheap and low-carbon energy. … Apollo almost certainly couldn’t happen today. That’s not because people aren’t interested in going to the Moon any more, but because the risk – calculated at a couple-of-per-cent chance of astronauts dying – would be unacceptable … Scientists and technologists were generally celebrated 50 years ago, when people remembered what the world was like before penicillin, vaccination, modern dentistry, affordable cars and TV. Now, we are distrustful and suspicious – we have forgotten just how dreadful the world was pre-Golden Quarter.
Data also show how we are starting businesses at lower rates and less likely to job hop. Demographics might be playing a role if we are indeed growing more cautious. We are a decade older, on average, today than in 1970 and perhaps more risk averse for that reason. Younger societies tend to be more dynamic, creative, and entrepreneurial, as Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker noted. And economist Robert Gordon cites demographics as one big reason when he thinks the era of fast US economic growth is over.
But there is reason for optimism, too. Maybe the “great stagnation” is really just a pause rather than a new normal (and maybe things are better than we think but our industrial-age economic stats don’t capture it). For instance: The digital revolution might really be in its early stages with its greatest impacts on our lives yet to come, as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue. They make a comparison to how it took awhile — a generation — for electric motors to boost productivity when they began to replace steam engines. Factory managers still had to figure out the best way to use this powerful new tools. Nor should we play down more recent achievements. As Hanlon concedes, “Sci-fi visions of the future often had improbable spacecraft and flying cars but, even in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles of 2019, Rick Deckard had to use a payphone to call Rachael.”
But to circle back to Hanlon’s thesis, if we are becoming less risk tolerant can we change that? Maybe. We could make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow innovative new businesses by removing tax and regulatory barriers and ending government favoritism for incumbents. We could change how we compensate business executives to encourage longer-term thinking. We could spend more on basic research for the blue-sky projects that business is unlikely to pursue. I also like this from Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, who spoke last week at a Cato conference on economic growth:
Published in GeneralNations have to shed their corporatism and materialism and short-termism. How can that be accomplished? It’s necessary for families and schools to bring up children and educate children to appreciate a life of adventure, of exploration, of exercising curiosity, exercising imagination, exercising creativity. … The humanists have been raising a hue and cry about the need to get the classics back into the schoolroom. And I think that fits very well with the need to have that kind of education if we’re going to get spirited, intrepid innovators.
You can talk about overregulation and undereducation and the like.
I’ll toss out another issue: software.
It turns out that software has downsides. Almost everything now has software. Software has become so cumbersome that it now takes longer to implement a software change than it once took to implement a hardware change.
Contrast the relatively short times it took to introduce aircraft in the past with the longer times now required (despite having access to software tools to be used in design). Much of the increase is due to software. Consider the F-35 as an example.
Software now infects hardware. In many things, a hardware change can throw the software off. A reengineering of hardware that tales a given amount of time could require a rewriting of software that requires several times as much more.
I think the risk thing probably explains lack of innovation better than anything. People are too afraid of failure/ridicule/injury/poverty/etc. Nowadays safety and comfort trump everything else.
The fact that government has become so stifling certainly doesn’t help either.
Conservative angst-mongers need to get their talking points squared away. On one hand innovation and technology is threatening to make humans obsolete (link) and on another we’re not innovating fast enough.
We don’t have flying cars because flying cars are an idiotic idea.
Ditto for personal jetpacks.
No next question.
I’m gonna take your point and say that software is actually what makes things awesome. Software is dynamic hardware is static. Take the Tesla Model S. Because it is an electric car and doesn’t idle if you take your foot of the “gas” and the break the car just sits there. There is no idle to move the car down the road. Well, people complained, they wanted the car to move forward slowly (say in traffic). So Tesla released a software update and now the car has “creep” mode which mimics a car moving at idle. Hardware is commodity, software is where it is at.
James, the future is bright and endless. I recommend you put this on endless loop and start feeling happy!
It may be awesome, but it has become surprisingly slow to change and has slowed down other areas.
Maybe in the aviation industry, but no where else.
That’s just because the software engineer has Facebook, cat videos, and Ricochet to distract them all day. Get rid of the internet and software engineers would be a lot more productive!
Does anybody else think it is ironic that we had a post yesterday about innovation being so fast it takes away jobs, while today we have a post asking the question as to whether innovation has slowed?
Ummmm….yea.
No, his point is well taken. I work in the high tech industry, and it happens to us. We had a major software upgrade to some of our machines which has generally been positive, but it interacts poorly with our plasma cleaners. Something with the legacy code already on the machines and the lack of tech time to work on it. Essentially what happens is the “Active Alarms” page comes up empty every time, but if you acknowledge the alarms you can then go into the event logging and figure out what you agreed to.
You have to clear the alarms in order to figure out what’s in them.
Naturally, this is not something we want to live with, but we haven’t had enough programmer time to fix it yet.
Engineers are trained to reduce risk. Risk matrices are everywhere.
They are NOT trained to maximize reward. I have never seen a reward matrix to balance a risk matrix in a product development plan.
This is part of the problem, and it stems from the fact that people lose their jobs when things go wrong, but they never “win” correspondingly when things go right.
Psychologists have known for decades that people are irrationally risk averse.
there is no wonder in the world. I believe the only animating force in america is how to divvy up the glory of the past.
I think its going to come back to time perspectives
Speak for yourself. I know a lot of animated and creative people!