In a now famous 2020 paper Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb document a puzzling trend: since 1940, research inputs have increased by 23-fold but productivity growth, which economists usually suppose is the output of research, has stayed constant or declined.
As someone with a science background but not in academia, I may be completely wrong with my perspective below. I found your article thought-provoking. However, I’d like to add a few things as per my reading and observations:
1. Talent Drain to Other Industries: Beyond expanding the research labor force, it’s worth considering how other industries, particularly finance and technology, draw top talent away from academia. These fields offer faster paths to high earnings and success than scientific research's long, uncertain road, which may deter many capable individuals from pursuing academic careers.
2. Competition for Top Talent: Related to this, companies in high-stakes industries often recruit aggressively to gain even marginal advantages. This creates a talent constraint for academia, as individuals with the highest research potential may be lured into roles outside of traditional research sectors.
3. Publish or Perish Culture: The excessive focus on publishing papers over conducting meaningful, long-term research may also play a role. When researchers are pressured to produce frequent publications, it can discourage risk-taking and favor incremental work over groundbreaking discoveries.
4. Institutional Inertia: Planck’s principle—“Science progresses one funeral at a time”—is relevant here. With longer lifespans and tenure systems in academia, outdated ideas and methods may persist longer than they should, potentially stifling innovation.
5. Grant Process and Conformity: I’ve read about concerns with how the NIH’s grant review process prioritizes conformity over creativity. In a world where low-hanging fruit has already been picked, funding riskier, novel ideas are essential. However, reviewers’ intellectual investments and reputations may bias them against approving unconventional approaches, hindering the research direction.
These factors, combined with the ones you’ve outlined, suggest that the decline in research productivity is not just a function of ideas getting harder to find but also a systemic issue with how talent and resources are allocated. Addressing these structural problems could help mitigate the decline in productivity and unlock greater potential in scientific research.
I came here to say the exact same things - not only is academic culture increasingly Sisyphean and chasing it's own tail, but the finest minds in our generation are being wasted generating clicks for the Eyeball Mines and creating synthetic financial instruments.
I faced this choice myself - I published in two science disciplines, and I looooovvvveed research. Research was one of those "wait, you'd pay ME to do this? I'd pay YOU to do this!" things for me. But the academic culture is ridiculous and caught in a death spiral of meaningless signaling and farming out tiny increments of 90% known "advances" into crappy papers nobody reads or cares about because that's the way grants / citations are won.
After my first couple of publications, I looked at the amount of effort vs the amount of reward and impact on the world, and decided I'd have a much bigger impact on the world by starting a business. So I did, and doing that (starting and growing businesses) turned out to be a much better use of my time in terms of impact and compensation.
Everyone in my social circle (all grad or Phd folk) did the same thing. They looked at academia, looked at the FAANGS and finance or entrepreneurism, and it was a pretty easy choice.
If society wants talent in the sciences to STAY in the sciences and actually drive innovation, they need to completely reform the grant system, academic culture, and academic compensation to be more in line with the budgets, cultures, and work practices a smart person can get in finance or at the FAANGS - otherwise we're going to keep collectively losing out on the best minds of our generations driving actual innovation and scientific advance.
I enjoyed your comment, and to your point about one-on-one education, I'm planning on home schooling my kids, and paying grad students when they get to a point that they want to dive deeper on a subject than I can credibly guide them in myself - I definitely think it's the right way to go (especially with how soul crushing most public education is).
I'm pro transaction tax myself, but I don't think it would actually end with finance bros coming back and becoming teachers and scientists - it's a systemic thing at this point, where the incentive and culture differences between "private enterprise" and "academia" (and "public service," another area where a lot of talent never goes any more) are simply too large to be bridged by a small tweak in just one industry.
Even if you nerf hedge funds, Goldman and the like still exists as a talent vacuum. Even if you nerfed finance in toto, you still have Mckinsey, BCG, Deloitte, and the FAANGS. And even if you somehow nerfed ALL of them, there's always creating your own company.
And I don't think we should nerf them, I should be clear - I think economic growth is important, and that the Mckinsey-to-executive-suite pipeline leads to genuinely better leaders at F100's, and that the FAANG talent pipeline has had positive spillover effects as their employees get bored and do their own things or work for smaller companies, and promulgate better practices and scalable infrastructure throughout the commercial world. Also, their R&D and moonshot divisions are genuinely working on some good stuff that actually CAN positively affect the world at scale (like Waymo, which has brought us real self-driving cars).
I genuinely think the best road forward is for grant dispensers, academia, and research institutes to step up - if you want talent, and if it costs $500k+ a year in comp to actually get the best talent, then they need to step it up, so they can actually keep those big brains somewhere they're doing something useful.
You can't blame the brains for seeing a bad system and leaving it, you've got to fix the bad system.
Good points. However, on the first one I think you would have to show that this effect has increased over time. It has clearly always been a factor so, to be explanatory, it would have to have become more important.
I found the book Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (https://tinyurl.com/ytm3ubw9) quite interesting, as it touches on some of these topics. While I don’t agree with everything in the book, I think it makes some valuable points about improving the grant process and directing funding toward research in novel areas.
That's a valid point. As I said in my previous post, I am not in academia or research, so it is all just my observations and readings, and not based on any data I have collected.
My observations and readings over the past decade have shown a growing trend where individuals with degrees in Physics and other sciences opt for careers in technology, hedge funds, and investment firms rather than pursuing research or academia. This shift appears to be driven mainly by the potential for higher earnings in these fields. I will give you one of the examples of my reading around this topic. Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today, 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolize the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A Harvard study found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. In 1970, twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, but 20 years later, the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
In 1970, American stocks were held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling financial assets. We would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between London and New York financial markets in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point, though, these taxes would make all of us more prosperous. They would give everyone a more equal share of the pie, and the whole pie would be more significant. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could return to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
Do you have any evidence that the people doing research are being less well taught? anecdotally, it seems like more biological scientists are parsing big data sets of genomics and proteomics, and fewer are doing quality biochemistry experiments with protein purification.
Wouldn’t one expect the amount of intrinsic talent invested into research to have exploded over the past few decades as the research industry globalized its recruiting pool?
Interesting discussion Maxwell. I suppose this research suggests that the famous "Ideas are Getting Harder to Find" mantra may be somewhat overblown. Has anyone looked into researcher age as a function of output/productivity?
As I understand it, young people have greater fluid intelligence. Assuming that the research "labor force" is aging like the rest of society, might this impact productivity as well?
Either way, somewhat comforting that the decline in research productivity isn't potentially as dire as it appears on the surface.
As someone with a science background but not in academia, I may be completely wrong with my perspective below. I found your article thought-provoking. However, I’d like to add a few things as per my reading and observations:
1. Talent Drain to Other Industries: Beyond expanding the research labor force, it’s worth considering how other industries, particularly finance and technology, draw top talent away from academia. These fields offer faster paths to high earnings and success than scientific research's long, uncertain road, which may deter many capable individuals from pursuing academic careers.
2. Competition for Top Talent: Related to this, companies in high-stakes industries often recruit aggressively to gain even marginal advantages. This creates a talent constraint for academia, as individuals with the highest research potential may be lured into roles outside of traditional research sectors.
3. Publish or Perish Culture: The excessive focus on publishing papers over conducting meaningful, long-term research may also play a role. When researchers are pressured to produce frequent publications, it can discourage risk-taking and favor incremental work over groundbreaking discoveries.
4. Institutional Inertia: Planck’s principle—“Science progresses one funeral at a time”—is relevant here. With longer lifespans and tenure systems in academia, outdated ideas and methods may persist longer than they should, potentially stifling innovation.
5. Grant Process and Conformity: I’ve read about concerns with how the NIH’s grant review process prioritizes conformity over creativity. In a world where low-hanging fruit has already been picked, funding riskier, novel ideas are essential. However, reviewers’ intellectual investments and reputations may bias them against approving unconventional approaches, hindering the research direction.
These factors, combined with the ones you’ve outlined, suggest that the decline in research productivity is not just a function of ideas getting harder to find but also a systemic issue with how talent and resources are allocated. Addressing these structural problems could help mitigate the decline in productivity and unlock greater potential in scientific research.
I came here to say the exact same things - not only is academic culture increasingly Sisyphean and chasing it's own tail, but the finest minds in our generation are being wasted generating clicks for the Eyeball Mines and creating synthetic financial instruments.
I faced this choice myself - I published in two science disciplines, and I looooovvvveed research. Research was one of those "wait, you'd pay ME to do this? I'd pay YOU to do this!" things for me. But the academic culture is ridiculous and caught in a death spiral of meaningless signaling and farming out tiny increments of 90% known "advances" into crappy papers nobody reads or cares about because that's the way grants / citations are won.
After my first couple of publications, I looked at the amount of effort vs the amount of reward and impact on the world, and decided I'd have a much bigger impact on the world by starting a business. So I did, and doing that (starting and growing businesses) turned out to be a much better use of my time in terms of impact and compensation.
Everyone in my social circle (all grad or Phd folk) did the same thing. They looked at academia, looked at the FAANGS and finance or entrepreneurism, and it was a pretty easy choice.
If society wants talent in the sciences to STAY in the sciences and actually drive innovation, they need to completely reform the grant system, academic culture, and academic compensation to be more in line with the budgets, cultures, and work practices a smart person can get in finance or at the FAANGS - otherwise we're going to keep collectively losing out on the best minds of our generations driving actual innovation and scientific advance.
I have commented about something similar for another article that said we do not produce enough geniuses:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/where-geniuses-hide-today/comment/80427394
I enjoyed your comment, and to your point about one-on-one education, I'm planning on home schooling my kids, and paying grad students when they get to a point that they want to dive deeper on a subject than I can credibly guide them in myself - I definitely think it's the right way to go (especially with how soul crushing most public education is).
I'm pro transaction tax myself, but I don't think it would actually end with finance bros coming back and becoming teachers and scientists - it's a systemic thing at this point, where the incentive and culture differences between "private enterprise" and "academia" (and "public service," another area where a lot of talent never goes any more) are simply too large to be bridged by a small tweak in just one industry.
Even if you nerf hedge funds, Goldman and the like still exists as a talent vacuum. Even if you nerfed finance in toto, you still have Mckinsey, BCG, Deloitte, and the FAANGS. And even if you somehow nerfed ALL of them, there's always creating your own company.
And I don't think we should nerf them, I should be clear - I think economic growth is important, and that the Mckinsey-to-executive-suite pipeline leads to genuinely better leaders at F100's, and that the FAANG talent pipeline has had positive spillover effects as their employees get bored and do their own things or work for smaller companies, and promulgate better practices and scalable infrastructure throughout the commercial world. Also, their R&D and moonshot divisions are genuinely working on some good stuff that actually CAN positively affect the world at scale (like Waymo, which has brought us real self-driving cars).
I genuinely think the best road forward is for grant dispensers, academia, and research institutes to step up - if you want talent, and if it costs $500k+ a year in comp to actually get the best talent, then they need to step it up, so they can actually keep those big brains somewhere they're doing something useful.
You can't blame the brains for seeing a bad system and leaving it, you've got to fix the bad system.
Good points. However, on the first one I think you would have to show that this effect has increased over time. It has clearly always been a factor so, to be explanatory, it would have to have become more important.
I found the book Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (https://tinyurl.com/ytm3ubw9) quite interesting, as it touches on some of these topics. While I don’t agree with everything in the book, I think it makes some valuable points about improving the grant process and directing funding toward research in novel areas.
That's a valid point. As I said in my previous post, I am not in academia or research, so it is all just my observations and readings, and not based on any data I have collected.
My observations and readings over the past decade have shown a growing trend where individuals with degrees in Physics and other sciences opt for careers in technology, hedge funds, and investment firms rather than pursuing research or academia. This shift appears to be driven mainly by the potential for higher earnings in these fields. I will give you one of the examples of my reading around this topic. Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today, 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolize the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A Harvard study found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. In 1970, twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, but 20 years later, the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
In 1970, American stocks were held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling financial assets. We would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between London and New York financial markets in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point, though, these taxes would make all of us more prosperous. They would give everyone a more equal share of the pie, and the whole pie would be more significant. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could return to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
Do you have any evidence that the people doing research are being less well taught? anecdotally, it seems like more biological scientists are parsing big data sets of genomics and proteomics, and fewer are doing quality biochemistry experiments with protein purification.
Wouldn’t one expect the amount of intrinsic talent invested into research to have exploded over the past few decades as the research industry globalized its recruiting pool?
Interesting discussion Maxwell. I suppose this research suggests that the famous "Ideas are Getting Harder to Find" mantra may be somewhat overblown. Has anyone looked into researcher age as a function of output/productivity?
As I understand it, young people have greater fluid intelligence. Assuming that the research "labor force" is aging like the rest of society, might this impact productivity as well?
Either way, somewhat comforting that the decline in research productivity isn't potentially as dire as it appears on the surface.