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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

Principal Investigator(s):  View help for Principal Investigator(s) Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University; Charles I. Jones, Stanford University; John Van Reenen, MIT; Michael Webb, Stanford University

Version:  View help for Version V1

Name File Type Size Last Modified
IdeaPFDataAppendix.pdf application/pdf 261.1 KB 09/09/2019 09:36:AM
IdeaPFPrograms.zip application/zip 111.6 MB 09/09/2019 10:18:AM
ReadMe.txt text/plain 449 bytes 09/09/2019 10:16:AM

Project Citation: 

Bloom, Nicholas, Jones, Charles I., Van Reenen, John, and Webb, Michael. Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2019. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-09-09. https://doi.org/10.3886/E111743V1

Project Description

Summary:  View help for Summary Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore's Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas --- and the exponential growth they imply --- are getting harder to find.



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Published Versions

V2 [2020-03-30]

V1 [2019-09-09]

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