Has science and innovation stagnated?

What can we do to increase the speeds of growth?

Feb 03, 2022

“These so-called bleak times are necessary to go through in order to get to a much, much better place.” - David Lynch

I’ve been spending plenty of time over the last couple of weeks expanding on the question I raised in my previous article about whether we — as a society as a whole — are progressing with regards to innovation and science or not. I fell into this deep rabbit hole of different perspectives ranging from completely disheartening, depressing, and scary, to conclusions that are a little bit more optimistic. Measuring progress isn’t easy and you can use certain direct measures as inputs like quantity of science produced, patents, numbers on life expectancy, crop yields, total number of money raised by startups, Moore’s Law, and more. However, by utilizing each of these measures, it’s easy to apply a very reductionist and mono-definitional perspective that doesn’t capture the complexity and nuances of the question at hand and are each vulnerable to valid critiques. All of the different approaches to view what the problems are problems (and whether there is a problem at all), and the approaches to solutions to solve those problems is definitely quite overwhelming.

During the beginning of the pandemic in April 2020, Marc Andreessen posted the highly popular and slightly controversial article, IT’S TIME TO BUILD, as a collective call to arms and part bashing of America’s failure to build as the cause of the shameful response to COVID-19. He says that the consequences of this inability to build could be seen elsewhere—in housing development, education, manufacturing, and transportation. “You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally,” he wrote. “You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.”

At the same time, Tyler Cowen notes in my favourite piece of his, Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down?:

When we look at the numbers, the growth in aggregate magnitudes is far more encouraging. The world supports more people than before, a given innovation is enjoyed by more people than before, and aggregate wealth is on the rise. Overall, aggregate rates for global economic growth have been robust. Science is much bigger and better than in the past, no matter what may be the case with various per capita rate of change magnitudes. Progress on the aggregates but not the per capita rates of change seems to reflect quite significant and indeed somewhat neglected features of the contemporary world.

Individual measures are slowing down but the aggregate data shows we’re doing better than ever throughout humanity’s history. At best, the best conclusion I think is that we’re stagnating. It is important to note though, that the growth we experienced after the industrial revolution wasn’t necessarily a natural state of progression that was bound to happen, it was an anomaly. But it is nice to figure out ways to maintain or increase the growth rate we’ve been experiencing.

In The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat writes:

“The ideology of exploration and discovery has been much more necessary than in many past civilizations, offering a new form of consolation to replace what faith and tribe and family and hierarchy had once supplied. In modernity, the former world is always passing away; the solidity of the past always melting into air. But the promise is that tomorrow will bring something new; that a better life is just a long sea voyage or wagon train away; that ours is an age of ever-unfolding wonders that more than compensate for what’s been lost.”

But recently, society hasn’t been looking at the future in terms of uncharted lands and new frontiers. Donald Trump’s presidency was run on the premise of making America great again rather than making it better. It was based on nostalgia rather than ambition. We’ve stopped looking at life with exploration and discovery, but with the repurposing of existing technology to mostly allow ourselves to stay the same, improve incrementally, or reduce the burden of the damage that we’ve caused ourselves. Electric cars or 99% of green projects are fantastic but they’re not inherently world-altering innovation like the airplane, steamship, or the internet.

For the innovation rooted in exploration and discovery, we’ve always been at the cusp of technologies that haven’t yet arrived, business models promising that they can be one day be profitable and just need to grow at all costs, or just companies bullshitting their way through (fuck you Theranos for moving us backwards by years). How long have we all been reading the same headlines about “Researchers have identified new x that can be the cure for cancer” or if any of you remember the extreme hype around graphite being the material that was going to be used in absolutely everything and change the world.

As much innovation we hear about in the medical space, no major type of antibiotic has been released since the 1980s and no major psychiatric drug has been approved in decades. More money was spent by pharma companies in the 1990s and 2000s for R&D and acquisitions than ever before, but fewer and fewer new medications are being approved. Research effort is not the same as research productivity. Growth in users by companies is not the same as economic productivity and real-world value (which is also a problem caused by the capitalistic society and systems that VC funds have supported).

Rome wasn’t built in a day and it also didn’t fall in a day. It stagnated for multiple generations before its ultimate collapse. Rome, from the time of the conquest of Italy, was quite similar to Rome at the fall of the Western Rome Empire (about 750 years depending on who you ask). Rome was great at absorbing the technology for each of the areas they would conquer, like Macedonian concrete, but they were poor at innovating their own technological spread and finding applications for it. Romans copied the Carthaginian ships in the 200-100 BC’s but failed to build anything meaningful beyond that technology for the next 800 years.

The stagnation was caused for a variety of reasons including focus on military and expansion, civil wars, wealth inequality, and more, but this all caused a lack of need to innovate and invest on new ideas as much because there wasn’t much to gain from it. It’s also difficult to maintain and grow your lovely advanced cities when literally every penny your empire earns has to be spent on an outrageously large military to defend it from constant threats on literally every border.

There’s always been a lag between research and science to commercialization, but I truly think we’re reaching a point where there is lack of that commercialization happening at a scale much larger than before. We’re continuously doing research for the sake of research and not giving the right resources and tools to build. We’re still exploring frontiers (to some degree), conquering new lands, and absorbing new information, but we’re not truly improving on those Carthaginian ships.

Despite all of this doom and gloom, I do think that COVID has been a fantastic catalyst to jumpstart innovation in many ways. Looking back throughout history, pandemics and catastrophic events do have that effect. John F. Kennedy once observed that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of two words — one meaning “danger” and the other meaning “opportunity”.

The Black Death that devastated Europe in the 14th century caused a massive shortage in labour leading to agricultural workers to demand better payment and conditions, ultimately bringing down serfdom as a whole. It allowed society at the time to question oppressive traditions, working and living conditions, and wealth disparity as a whole. The Black Death killed between a 1/3 to 1/2 of the population, but it also helped clear a path to the Renaissance by bringing about great changes in the economic and social order.

Epidemiology really didn’t exist until the 1918 flu pandemic, where we were forced to question patterns, causes and effects in disease and create better systems for preventative care and socialized healthcare — leading to centralized healthcare systems and employer-sponsored insurance.

The pandemic, like all before it, has allowed us to look back at things through a first principles lens, and question why we do what we do and how we do it, and what systems can and should be overhauled. It led to a collaboration of researchers across institutions and nations, the serendipitous discovery of phenomena and tools that become keys to answering other questions, and the creativity that researchers use in the face of necessity. Globally, I can’t think of anything else where we worked together (for the most part) at this scale.

On a more granular level, we’ve seen immense change occur within just the last 2 years: GPT-3 by OpenAI was announced, mRNA vaccines, telehealth gained popularity (and we questioned many current processes that act as a barrier to access), we started truly questioning why clinical trial research and development takes so long, some of the broken systems within the peer-review and publishing process, and we implemented systemic changes in a variety of other industries. Through first principles, COVID upended nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives ranging from how we live and work, how we purchase things, and how supply chains deliver.

But despite being a great catalyst, identifying changes and questioning processes isn’t enough. In a study by McKinsey, they found that most executives in every industry except pharma, aren’t focusing on innovation and that seeing opportunities emerge isn’t the same as seizing them.

I wrote in my previous article relating Chaos theory to how innovation progresses within society:

However, on the other hand, equilibrium is death. If a company stays in one place or uses the same strategy for too long, their mechanisms for coping with change will erode. Change is inevitable. Blockbuster lost its competitive advantage in the 2000s when its stores dominated the market. Unwilling to deal with the turmoil that responding to the change would bring, the company leaders failed to adapt and stuck with its old strategies.

If you fail to adapt to the new realities of a system, you will die.

I can continue to synthesize the copious amount of content I consumed that argues whether we’re progressing faster or stagnating, but instead, I’ll share a bunch of cool pieces that I read at the end that explains things much better than I can (Tyler Cowen, for example, is one of the best modern nonpartisan and unemotional intellectuals of today, in my opinion).

But what I will do, is build a hypothetical VC fund thesis based on solutions to some of the most prevalent problems I’ve identified that is causing the stagnation we’ve experienced over the last couple of decades and how we can sustain the growth we experienced from COVID. I’ll save that for the next article!

Tune in next time on Razi’s Newsletter!

Razi’s Newsletter

Has science and innovation stagnated?

What can we do to increase the speeds of growth?

Discussion about this post