Good point, though I don’t find looking at a selection of areas as too convincing. I could just as easily choose areas with consistent exponential growth that I would guess don’t look like this, like solar panels or genome sequencing. Even if things were getting better on average you would expect some things to get less efficient over time too. (for example, think about that inflation components chart people share all the time)
One last thing: we would probably want to look at output and not inputs. Robert Gordon’s sort-of nemesis, Chad Syverson, has done work on how some big super-trends take a long time to develop and even have an impact on the world, like steam rail and electricity. Might be worth looking into as a counterpoint to the Gordon thesis.
Well, the point of a lot of this is to look at outputs as a function of inputs. That is what Bloom 2020 is looking at. You need some measure of inputs (they basically use R&D spending, deflated by the wage rate) and some measure of output (GDP, transistor density, crop yields, etc.) and then you figure out the quantitative relationship.
If solar panels or genome sequencing don’t look like this, that would be very interesting! My guess would be that they do.
Good point, though I don’t find looking at a selection of areas as too convincing. I could just as easily choose areas with consistent exponential growth that I would guess don’t look like this, like solar panels or genome sequencing. Even if things were getting better on average you would expect some things to get less efficient over time too. (for example, think about that inflation components chart people share all the time)
One last thing: we would probably want to look at output and not inputs. Robert Gordon’s sort-of nemesis, Chad Syverson, has done work on how some big super-trends take a long time to develop and even have an impact on the world, like steam rail and electricity. Might be worth looking into as a counterpoint to the Gordon thesis.
Well, the point of a lot of this is to look at outputs as a function of inputs. That is what Bloom 2020 is looking at. You need some measure of inputs (they basically use R&D spending, deflated by the wage rate) and some measure of output (GDP, transistor density, crop yields, etc.) and then you figure out the quantitative relationship.
If solar panels or genome sequencing don’t look like this, that would be very interesting! My guess would be that they do.