It's an OK article, but it's basically an economist doing a survey article of what other economists have written. No reliable metric for "ideas" is proposed. T

It's an OK article, but it's basically an economist doing a survey article of what other economists have written. No reliable metric for "ideas" is proposed. This may be related to Baumol's cost disease, which was on HN yesterday. Most of the areas where innovation is effective involve manufacturing or other technologies that are not labor intensive. So, while they can push costs down in some areas, they do so in areas that are already highly efficient. If you could cut the price of basic steel by 30%, few would notice, because the raw steel cost of most products is tiny. There's a fad problem in US finance. Right now, so much investment is going into AI data centers that anything else is hard to fund. US electric cars, US copper mining, and US rare earth separation, and solar farms are all under-funded, despite known good ROI. They're all boring. What passes for capitalism in the US isn't really that good at capital allocation any more. It's too detached from physical reality.