I agree with your conclusion, Maxwell, and this piece was a joy to read. Jason’s comment also seems correct to me in that subdomains very clearly exhibit the phenomenon of ideas getting harder locally. Still, the fallacy of composition tells us to be wary of summing up these subdomains. Diversification across subdomains may the answer to how the innovation frontier can continue to expand despite ideas getting locally more challenging.
I’m curious to hear what you think is the scarce resource. After trying my hand at starting a company and working in venture capital, I’ve come to appreciate that often the idea is quite important. The old hobbyhorse of execution vs idea feels like a false dichotomy though. The best companies do not spring forth from entrepreneurs’ heads like Athena, fully dressed for battle, but they are also not A/B tested into existence. Similarly, science seems to move forward through a combination of dogged empirical work and theoretical insight.
Here are a few areas I’d like to read more about: courage, ignorance/fools and subversion/tricksters. I always think of the strange case of Medicine Nobel Dr. Barry Marshall, who debunked long established medical beliefs about stress being the cause of gastric ulcers by performing risky self experimentation that involved infecting his gut with bacteria: https://asm.org/Podcasts/MTM/Episodes/The-Self-Experimentation-of-Barry-Marshall-MTM-144
Thanks for sharing the “the unreasonable effectiveness of insurance” books and pieces about fire safety. This is also a theme that fascinates me, and while I was working in reinsurance modeling for cybersecurity I became fascinated with the history of steam boilers. This technological innovation is a great case study for progress that creates problems that requires more progress to solve.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company (now a part of MunichRe) was created to address this problem and the blog post below describes why the sinking of the Sultana steam ship in 1865 was a critical turning point: https://blog.hsb.com/2015/03/30/sultana/
I believe this precedent setting case predates the UL by about 30 years and well before the commercialization of electricity (besides nascent telegraph systems). Prior to the HSB Inspection and Insurance Company, insurance was limited to covering mostly natural causes of marine/storm (ancient) and property/fire (Stuart Era) losses. There was risk of piracy, so some of the losses were man-made, but prior to the Industrial Revolution technological risk was solved by lack of progress.