@article{Alston:320517,
      recid = {320517},
      author = {Alston, Julian M. and Pardey, Philip G.},
      title = {Are Ideas Really Getting Harder to Find?},
      address = {2022-04},
      number = {1701-2022-787},
      series = {Staff Paper P22-6},
      pages = {33},
      year = {2022},
      abstract = {Bloom et al. (2020) attribute the post-WWII slowdown in  growth of U.S. TFP and other productivity measures to a  decline in research productivity. A weakness in their  approach is that the authors measure research productivity  as the annual growth rate of industrial or economywide  productivity divided by the number of researchers,  contemporaneously. They give no consideration to the  stock-flow relationships whereby current research effort  gives rise to increments to a stock of depreciable  knowledge and hence an evolving path of enhanced  productivity over an extended but possibly finite future  period. Using examples from agriculture, for which we have  comparatively rich data, we revisit established ideas and  evidence on links between research spending and  productivity. On both conceptual and empirical grounds, we  question whether the evidence supports the claim that a  decline in productivity of researchers is responsible for  the slowdown in productivity growth that has been observed,  the large increases in numbers of scientists and in  spending per scientist notwithstanding. },
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/320517},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.320517},
}