Burden of Knowledge
#big-ideas #innovation/frontier #invention #knowledge
As humanity's collective knowledge grows, innovation paradoxically becomes more difficult. Economist Benjamin Jones calls this "the burden of knowledge." The more we learn, the further the frontier stretches.
Today, it takes nearly four decades to reach that frontier prepared to contribute a great invention. While our education improves, the journey length expands. The peak age for groundbreaking discoveries has risen from 30 in 1900 to nearly 40 by 2000. This burden manifests in declining research productivity despite increased effort—researchers needed to double microchip transistors is now 18 times larger than in the early 1970s, while overall research productivity has fallen by a factor of 41 since the 1930s. "If a rising burden of knowledge is an inevitable by-product of technological progress," Jones concludes, "pessimistic predictions for long-run growth" are in order. Standing on the shoulders of giants, as Sir Isaac Newton did, becomes harder when those shoulders reach ever higher into the sky.