Tyler Cowen on the Great Stagnation, pro-progress policy, metascience, and more
&quot;There&#x27;s a commonly noted productivity slowdown in the Western world starting in 1973 that I and some other people here have written about.&quot;<p>We don&#x27;t remark on this enough, but it is truly surprising (and worrisome) that the era when computers took over the world has also been an era of failed productivity growth and stunted economic growth. Every prediction suggested that computers would take us in a happy direction: that computers would increase productivity. More so, the spread of knowledge was supposed to enable an increase in the speed of innovation. Simply having Wikipedia exist should have contributed to the uptick in some kinds of progress. But now, we look back on the last 50 years, and we can see how wrong all of those predictions were.<p>Productivity stalled in the 1970s and has never again regained its previous speed on a sustained basis. New business formation stalled in the 1970s, the number of new startups has steadily declined since then. We&#x27;ve seen the greatest wave of corporate consolidation in history: as recently as 1999 there were still 8,000 publicly traded corporations on the various USA stock markets, but now there are only 3,400 such companies. And economic growth has generally been weak, despite a few good years, such as 1995-2000. The period since 2000 has been especially weak, even as computers became universal.<p>There is no technology in history where the predictions were so wrong, compared to the actual historical result. The decades when computers took over the economy were supposed to be boom years, instead we now call them &quot;The Great Stagnation.&quot;