In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a short treatise with a provocative hypothesis. Cowen challenged his audience to look beyond the gleam of the internet and personal computing, arguing that these innovations masked a more troubling reality. Cowen contended that, since the 1970s, there has been a marked stagnation in critical…
Well… I think I just see them as two separate issues. Your point is 100% valid but I’m not sure it undoes any of the argument about progress on fundamental research; I just see them as tangential issues.
Like, we’re still exploiting people and the environment of the global south. That didn’t go away (in fact we arguably got more efficient at it as the systems became more refined and less go-in-with-gunboats brute force). But for some reason the progress in base research did go away, and he’s trying to get to the reasons why that happened. If we’d actually undone colonialism but lost progress in basic research as a consequence of that then yes; but I don’t think that’s how it happened.
The point that, he shouldn’t be thinking only of good scientific progress in the wealthy sector of the first world and everyone else isn’t real important, yes I 100% agree with. I also think it’s not strictly an either-or though – the same systems that are screwing a highly educated person in Idaho who can’t get funding for their good idea, are the same systems screwing the Honduran farmer. If getting to the reasons behind (a) are going to lead to shedding any amount of light on (b) via some further investigation then I’d be in favor of that.
Well, I would love to talk about fundamental research. But the author of the article actually conflates research and economical growth. That’s why I was discussing the problems that come up when you only focus on economic growth. Especially fundamental research is not expected to reliably generate economic benefits. That’s the whole point of it.
I think that the author actually gave the answer, or at least a more compelling one, in the article itself: any research and especially fundamental research gets harder the more you already know. We already plucked all the low- and medium-hanging fruits. Now we need to wrestle more and more with much harder niche problems often on much smaller or bigger scale (transistors on atom level vs huge climate models).
The author may also have conflated research with its economic output out of a confusion. In my view, the opposite is the case. Research is more and more under capitalist pressure to produce output, to compete with other researchers and to publish whatever you can in record time. This is detrimental to research, as this competition leads to many more papers that are nonsensical or that only lead to tiny progressions. No one has time to actually research anything in depth because you have to publish right away and have to persuade investors that your research is the next breakthrough. Under heavy competition, researchers then begin to steal findings from each other or try to cheat in some other way. The supposed room-temperature superconducter finding last year was such a case where they tried to publish their findings before the rest of the team. Had they spend just more time researching, they may have found that it actually wasn’t a superconducter. Weren’t they under such a financial pressure, they wouldn’t even had the incentive to publish this finding. And then there are all these predatory journals that thrive under capitalist pressure.
This system is rotten. Research does not do well under capitalism. Maybe that’s what the author tried to say as well? I doubt it but I haven’t read the last part.