Nicholas Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s start with your piece with coauthors on whether progress in science has slowed down, and you argue that it has. I would ask, which are the areas where progress in science has not slowed down? Ooh, that’s a good question. That’s not what I’m normally asked about. Where has it not slowed down? I’m not doing any deep personal insight here, but just looking at the valuations of firms in exciting areas, it’s going to be things like AI. I’m going to guess social media, genetic medicine. I think of what’s going on at Stanford. I know there’s a huge explosion of work in Stanford. Several of my friends and colleagues on campus are working on genetic medicine. All kinds of amazing things there, actually. Wearables — one of my friends here is actually working with Apple on getting devices in the Apple Watch so it can check your heart rate and tell you in advance if there’s complications in your heart and basically pre-warn you. I don’t want to be too super pessimistic that all science is dying, and you’re right. You’re exactly right. In the research we looked at, we showed, for example, progress on cancer had an acceleration in the ’80s and ’90s. It seems that field after field eventually starts to decline. And there aren’t enough new fields that are growing to offset the bulk of the current fields that are declining. So if progress in Moore’s Law is slowing down, progress in crop yields is slowing down, cross-sectionally, what is different about the areas where progress in science is speeding up?…

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