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Has the Rate of Technical Progress Slowed?
Amiga Trombone writes "An article in the IEEE Spectrum argues that the rate of technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years. While there have been advances in areas such as computers, communications and medicine, etc., the author points out that these advances have largely been incremental rather than revolutionary. He contrasts the progress made within the life-span of his grandmother (1880-1960) with that in his own (1956-present). Having been born the year after the author, I've noticed this, too. While certainly we've produced some useful refinements, little of the technology available today would have surprised me much had I been able to encounter it in 1969. While some of it has been implemented in surprising ways, the technology itself had largely been anticipated."
Some advancements at odds with large well financed corporate business models are buried before they get off the ground. Others are bought out and ripped up for competing. Where the cat is already out of the bag, war is waged against the advancement to try and control the damage (*IAA Vs the Internet). These anti-competitive practices have only got worse as the decades roles by and as we can see from all the *IAA lawyers in the DOJ, appear to have the full backing of government, regardless of who is in power (a vote for anti-progress perhaps?).
Okay, let's see: The "ignorant" parent post you object to has (1) an hypothesis on the role of consumer debt in social control, and thus the (political-economic) incentive to promote such debt, and (2) an hypothesis about why power tools from the 50s often still run reliably today, while those from within the last ten years have useful lifespans of a few years at best. In both cases it notes a change in phenomena, and posits a plausible explanation.
Your response only insults the degree to which the poster is "educated" in "economics." Now, economics has often been called "the dismal science" by economists. And that was before the near-total failure of their theories to enable 99+% of them to comprehend what was happening over the last several years until it nearly crashed the world economy. Maybe where we need innovation is in throwing the fucking economists out, into the same trash heap where the 19th Century's snake-oil salesmen and the 14th Century's peddlers of saints' finger bones lie moldering?
Perhaps the parent poster's hypotheses will be core realizations of the first scientific economics, once it has been realized that the "rational actor" at the core of current theory explains economics as well as phlogiston explains fire?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton