Perhaps the ratio of (good ideas) to (number of people educated to solve problems) has been going down. That’s the relevant metric if you are talking about the

Perhaps the ratio of (good ideas) to (number of people educated to solve problems) has been going down. That’s the relevant metric if you are talking about the problem from a social standpoint. Making an uneducated guess, the denominator has increased globally by at least a factor of two, and maybe a factor of ten, over the last fifty years. You need an explosive growth in new ideas, spawned perhaps by new physics or biology, to keep the ratio from declining. IT has been that tech for the last 70 years.