Stagnation in a tweet:

Late 19th–early 20th c.: Oil, electricity, chemical engineering, germ theory, all going on at once.

Mid–late 20th c.: Information/communication technology… and that's about it.

Nuclear & space aborted. Genetics & nanotech not yet arrived.

This is the S-curve analysis—looking at the distribution & timing of different curves, more than at the size & shape of each individual curve: https://rootsofprogress.org/teasing-apart-the-s-curves

In this light, the big question of stagnation is: why did we only open up one big new field in the mid-20th c.?

Break it down like this. Major areas of tech:

• Manufacturing
• Agriculture
• Energy
• Transportation
• Information
• Medicine

Late 19th–early 20th century:

• Electricity (and the assembly line) transformed manufacturing, and gave us electronic communications
• Oil & the internal combustion engine transformed transportation & agriculture (tractor, refrigerator)

Continuing…

• Chemistry gave us synthetics: plastics, dyes, synthetic fertilizer & pesticides, pharmaceuticals, etc.
• Germ theory led to sanitation, pasteurization, vaccines, antiseptics, and eventually antibiotics

Everything was transformed at once → high growth

Mid–late 20th century, only information technologies have been revolutionized in the same way. Manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, and medicine look a lot like they did in ~1970. With incremental improvements, no doubt! But only incremental ones.

Nothing is wrong with information/communication technology. The computer revolution in and of itself isn't disappointing—it's amazing.

The problem is, it's all we've got. The problem isn't what happened, but what *didn't* happen.

Imagine if instead in mid–late 20th century, we'd also had:

• Nuclear power → cheaper manufacturing, agriculture, transportation
• Genetic engineering → new therapies, maybe a cure for cancer, life extension?
• Nanomaterials → new manufacturing & construction possibilities

In that alternate timeline you could imagine that, once again, the whole economy was revolutionized at once, and we sustained the high growth of ~100 years ago.

If this is right, the big question is: why didn't that happen?

PS: Some are interpreting this as saying that information technology wasn't a big deal. No! Whole point of this thread is the *opposite*—that computing was legitimately huge, and that slower growth last ~50 yrs is due to the lack of other equally huge innovations alongside it.

If you don't look at the *breadth* of fundamental innovation going on in the late 1800s & early 1900s, and how that played out through the mid-1900s, then you fall into either:

1. Information technology revolution was lackluster, or
2. GDP slowdown isn't a real growth slowdown

I am coming to the view that neither of those are correct: The GDP slowdown is real, but *not* because the computer revolution was in any way disappointing. Rather because that breakthrough is shouldering the burden of growth alone, with no simultaneous breakthroughs to help out.