TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bloom, Nicholas
AU  - Jones, Charles I
AU  - Van Reenen, John
AU  - Webb, Michael
TI  - Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 23782
PY  - 2017
Y2  - September 2017
DO  - 10.3386/w23782
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23782
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23782.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nicholas Bloom
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: 650/725-3266
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: nbloom@stanford.edu

Charles I. Jones
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305-4800
Tel: 650/725-9265
Fax: 650/725-0468
E-Mail: chad.jones@stanford.edu

John Van Reenen
Department of Economics
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
E-Mail: j.vanreenen@lse.ac.uk

Michael Webb
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
E-Mail: mww@stanford.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2018-10-16
AB  - In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of 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 every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. Across a broad range of case studies at various levels of (dis)aggregation, we find that ideas — and in particular the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder and harder to find. Exponential growth results from the large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.
ER  -