Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find

For half a decade we’ve been worrying that ideas are getting harder to find. In fact, they might just be harder to sell.

Excerpt: "However if ideas remain as discoverable as ever, but their economic impact is fading, then we need to look downstream from the laboratory. The decline in allocative efficiency should be more of a main focus — we need to throw more of our intellectual capital at understanding how to increase competitiveness and the market potential for innovative firms and technologies, in the same way that we've focused on understanding how to make better technologies.

The narrative that "ideas are getting harder to find" has profoundly shaped how economists and policymakers think about innovation and growth. It implies we're fighting against some fundamental law of diminishing returns in human creativity.

But what we’re actually fighting against is a flaw in our markets that prevents that creativity from being rewarded economically. If we want to restore growth, we should stop worrying about whether we've picked all the low-hanging fruit and start taking that fruit to market."