The Atlantic - We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But ... America is running out of new ideas. “Everywhere we look we find that ideas … are getting harder to find,” a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT famously concluded in a 2020 paper. Another paper found that “scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” and yet another concluded that “new ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did.”
January 15, 2023
What's happened to creativity?
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3 comments:
This is because all the money is investing in money instead of people or real progress. When the money is going places that do not help humanity, the ideas run out eventually. you can only scam for so long before it catches up to you.
the second part is that as the planetary ecosystems crash it gets harder and harder to get actual economic growth. Most of what we call growth is simply funny money games by the rich to skim off everything for themselves. There are plenty of good ideas on how to help humanity, but they are shut out of the mainstream by the rich.
I think ‘creativity’ is still there, but these referenced articles seemed to merely be comparing the ratio of new ideas in science to some kind of economic outcome.
I ‘sort-of’ read the Stanford and MIT article, but felt ill equipped to understand what was stated. I never did find what was meant by “endogenous growth”. But I have been around since the 1950s and have seen a great increase in technology and economic growth. Especially after 1970.
OK, maybe expenditures have outweighed what companies have felt to be new scientific ideas and technology, but economic growth sort-of depends upon a healthy economy and that has been hobbled by so many investments going overseas, a war on ‘labor’, and profits being funneled away from any sort of ‘middle-class’ and merely lining the pockets of management and investors, serving no practical purpose toward aiding a healthy 'growing' economy.
But, if anybody suggests that we “own” Wall Street, Banking, or stifle management (or politicians and lawyers) earnings… well Forget it.
The Abstract to the article “Are the ‘Flow of Ideas’ and ‘Research Productivity’ in Secular Decline?” proved to be an exercise in Beating My Head Against The Wall.
The Abstract to “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives” was written in 2020, in a manner more easily read, less pedantic, but left me wondering just what economic growth means.
To support my post, above:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/16/richest-1percent-amassed-almost-two-thirds-of-new-wealth-created-since-2020-oxfam.html
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