Is innovation inevitably slowing down, rendering economic growth prospects “dismal”?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0096
Whether or not Lord Kelvin really asserted in 1900 that nothing new remained to be discovered in physics, the prediction surfaces from time to time, usually to be criticized or even mocked. For many in the technorealm, the recent Wall Street Journal essay “Why innovation won’t save us ” would call to mind its confident pessimism.
‘For more than a century,’ says the essay’s subhead, ‘the U.S. economy grew robustly thanks to big inventions; those days are gone.’
The author, Robert J. Gordon, is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. Princeton University Press will publish his next book, Beyond the Rainbow: The American Standard of Living Since the Civil War. His essay reviews innovations that ‘allowed the American standard of living to double every 35 years,’ then explains why he thinks that ‘for most people in the future, that doubling may take a century or more.’
Gordon first lists Edison’s light bulb and power station; then elevators, consumer appliances, and internal-combustion engines; then telephones, phonographs, motion pictures, and radio; then television, air conditioning, the jet plane, and interstate highways. He observes:
The profound boost that these innovations gave to economic growth would be difficult to repeat. Only once could transport speed be increased from the horse (6 miles per hour) to the Boeing 707 (550 mph). Only once could outhouses be replaced by running water and indoor plumbing. Only once could indoor temperatures, thanks to central heating and air conditioning, be converted from cold in winter and hot in summer to a uniform year-round climate of 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit.
Growth continued, Gordon says, during the computer revolution. But ‘many of those developing and funding new technologies recoil with disbelief,’ he reports, at his ‘suggestion that we have left behind the era of truly important changes in our standard of living.’
To prove the claimed slowdown, Gordon charges that new medical techniques like proton-beam therapy ‘often fail to deliver,’ that pharmaceutical research ‘appears to be entering a phase of diminishing returns,’ that accelerated oil and gas production ‘merely holds off future economic decline,’ and that manufacturing is only ‘performing a marvelous ballet, on a shrinking stage.’ He adds discouraging words about the demographics of coming retirements and laments that ‘American educational attainment continues to slide ever-downward in the international league tables, due to cost inflation at our universities, $1 trillion in student loans, abysmal test scores and large numbers of high-school dropouts.’
In sum, he predicts, the ‘future of American economic growth is dismal, and policy solutions are elusive. Skeptics need to come up with a better rebuttal.’
Gordon does at least touch on the rebuttal implied by those who criticize the pessimistic certitude in the discredited, 113-year-old prediction that some attribute to Lord Kelvin. Gordon writes:
In setting out the case for pessimism, I have been accused by some of a failure of imagination. New inventions always introduce new modes of growth, and history provides many examples of doubters who questioned future benefits. But I am not forecasting an end to innovation, just a decline in the usefulness of future inventions in comparison with the great inventions of the past.
Nowhere, however, does Gordon mention the profound unpredictability of scientific results or acknowledge the legions of researchers laboring optimistically with, as the British physicist and novelist C. P. Snow once put it, the future in their bones.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.