michael_nielsen

There's lots of corroborating evidence: e.g., the rise in ages at which scientists make key discoveries. Here are the average ages of discovery for early versus recent Nobel prizewinning discoveries. (Jones and Weinberg: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910 … )pic.twitter.com/vCsj7UNjhU

The rise in size of scientific research teams also suggests it’s getting harder to make discoveries. (Fortunato et al: http://barabasi.com/f/939.pdf  )pic.twitter.com/MPtSlh36IL

There's also the massive decline in the growth of economic productivity since the 1950s, as documented by people such as Robert Gordon https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton-ebook/dp/B071W7JCKW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542218574&sr=8-1&keywords=robert+gordon+rise+and+fall+of+american+growth … and @tylercowen https://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-eSpecial-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1542218607&sr=8-7&keywords=tyler+cowen …pic.twitter.com/1ECYsSIQwv

In a similar vein, there’s the recent work by Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb, suggesting that ideas are getting harder to find: https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf …pic.twitter.com/cbrao49xf0