Nicholas Bloom: prediction

Transcript context

…Aren’t some of the old sectors currently the most dynamic? Well, Tesla is the electric motor. I mean, you’re right. The electric motor — again, it’s not my expertise, but I think the first cars were, in fact, electric cars back in, like, 1900. Whether you call that a new field or an old one, the progress is driven on batteries. So batteries — we looked at this, actually. There are several areas we looked at in our paper. I had a paper with Chad Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb looking at whether innovation and productivity is slowing down. We looked at several sectors to try and evaluate this. Some of them lacked complete data in either inputs or outputs, but one of them is batteries, and batteries have made slow but steady progress. For example, lithium-ion batteries are much more effective. Recently, batteries have gotten to the stage where electric cars are feasible because you need to, obviously, store enough energy. It’s not so much the electric motor is a new idea — it’s that batteries make it possible. If you want to ask what areas are new, I would practically look at, say, patents. There’s an enormous amount of new companies floating on the stock market. Patents are a very simple way to look at what technologies are new, in the sense that they add new fields. You look at patents that don’t seem to patent or cite much that’s gone before them. They’re truly radical. And there’s a huge research literature on exactly this. If I understand your estimates correctly, efficacy per researcher, as you measure it, is falling by about 5 percent a year. That seems phenomenally high. What’s the mechanism that could account for such a rapid decline?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.