Cracks in the Great Stagnation

For the last 60 years, we’ve seen consistently low productivity growth rates in the US and across the Western world. Meanwhile, recent scientific discoveries seem to be less fundamental to our understanding of the world than previous breakthroughs have been. While the growth of digital technology has been tremendous since the 1990s, it’s the only significant part of our world that seems to have been changing. To look up from our smartphones is to see a physical environment that looks basically the same as it did in 1970. Innovation has been constrained to the world of bits and left the world of atoms mostly untouched.

This might finally be changing. Last month, the economist Tyler Cowen speculated that we may be seeing signs that this Great Stagnation is ending. Since his article was published, we’ve already seen almost a dozen announcements that have only driven home the point further. There seem to be cracks in the Great Stagnation and light is peaking through on the other end.

 
Innovation in the physical world
Most obviously, the recent announcement of the successful development of several vaccines to the novel coronavirus are a sign that America (with some help from Germany) is still capable of achieving Big Things when we are pushed to it. Despite consistent failings of the US regulatory state in delaying the adoption of face masks and in slowing the rollout of mass testing, the US essentially bet the farm that our strong biotech clusters would be able to create a vaccine to a new disease in record time, and it looks like we’re going to be able to do it in under a year!

It’s worth highlighting just how speedy this development timeline is when compared to the vaccines for diseases like polio and measles.

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Πηγή: agglomerations.tech