Research effort up 23x since 1930s yet productivity fell 41x; no AI turnaround in 2025 data
ChenhaoTan · x · 2026-10-21
livingscience revisits "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find" (Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, Webb): since the 1930s US research effort rose 23-fold while growth per researcher fell 41-fold, with the same pattern in computer chips, crop yields, and new drugs.
The team replicated the paper's data and code and extended it to 2025: ideas are still getting harder to find. Research productivity was still falling 5% a year before the pandemic, matching the original rate. New drugs are the main exception, but those pipelines predate AI — and even in protein structures, where AI's impact should be easiest to spot, no turnaround is visible in the data yet.
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