this is a pretty fascinating look at innovation and creative output in developed societies.
Link: The Speculist: Innovation in Decline?.
Smart observes that Heubner makes a better case for an overall worldwide decline in per capita innovation, noting that similar ideas have been proposed by Tessaleno Devezas and George Modelski, as well as Francis Fukuyama and John Horgan. He suggests that there may well be a per-capita saturation point for innovation within a given population, similar to a saturation point previously observed for a population's energy consumption once its per capita income exceeds a certain point.
I imagine that the explosive increase in world population in the twentieth century due to improved health care meant that it was difficult for societies to scale up their educational infrastructure to keep the ratio of educated to uneducated persons at the same level as it was in the nineteenth century.
I think that with the amount of information available for free through the Internet and the processing power in cheap computers that is available to regular folks that we'll see the rate of innovation climb again. All I know is that if I had had the Internet and a PC with an AMD Athlon processor in high school, I probably could have been publishing original research at the age of 16.
Posted by: Scott Peterson | Sep 30, 2005 at 10:23 PM
regarding your comment about scaling up education infrastructure, it's important to recognize that education in the 19th century was largely a function of choice and economic ability, it was in the 20th century that standardized compulsory education was introduced. All of which just means that education infrastructure became a national priority and therefore infrastructure was developed.
Posted by: jeff | Oct 01, 2005 at 07:00 AM