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How to Reverse the Innovation Slowdown
Be prepared for the next great transfer of wealth. Buy physical silver and storable food.
mises.org / Peter St. Onge / FEBRUARY 15, 2016
Is innovation slowing? Will it stop? A new paper by one Jonathan Huebner in the awesomely-named journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change argues that innovation is slowing, indeed it’s halved in the past hundred years.
Because Huebner is a physicist, he naturally looks for abstract and generalizable reasons. These take him to dark places: he worries that technology has an “economic limit” or perhaps that our brains have a limit we’re bumping against. He concludes, “The rate of innovation reached a peak over a hundred years ago and is now in decline. This decline is most likely due to an economic limit of technology or a limit of the human brain that we are approaching.”
A central problem with Huebner’s theory is that economics is not physics. Because people have brains, we come to do things, or come to believe things, in clusters or “cascades.” And these cascades depend on being personally influenced, personally incentivized, or personally forced.
Economies aren’t smooth machines; they’re lumpy things, influenced by particular individuals with particular motivations and desires using particular resources.
Comparing with the Golden Age of Innovation
The biggest lump in Huebner’s comparison is that he’s comparing today to a period known popularly as the “Gilded Age” and which met its end under particularly suspicious circumstances.
The post How to Reverse the Innovation Slowdown appeared first on Silver For The People.
Thanks to BrotherJohnF
Source: http://silveristhenew.com/2016/02/14/how-to-reverse-the-innovation-slowdown/
