jhorgan@stevens.edu
Date: April 7, 2018 at 5:20:24 PM EDT
Economists show that increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns.
Once again, I'm brooding over science's limits. I recently posted Q&As with
three physicists with strong opinions on the topic -- David Deutsch, Marcelo
Gleiser and Martin Rees -- as well as this column: Is Science Infinite?
Then, in March I attended a two-day brainstorming session -- which I'll call
The Session -- with 20 or so science-y folks over whether science is slowing
down and what we can do about it.
The Session was inspired in part by research suggesting that scientific
progress is stagnating. In Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?, four
economists claim that ``a wide range of evidence from various industries,
products, and firms show[s] that research effort is rising substantially
while research productivity is declining sharply.'' The economists are
Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb, all from Stanford, and John
Van Reenen of MIT.
As an counter-intuitive example, they cite Moore's Law, noting that 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.'' The researchers found similar trends in research related to agriculture and medicine. More and more research on cancer and other illnesses has produced fewer and fewer lives saved....
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-hitting-a-wall/