By contrast, “technology” in 1967 would have meant computers, but also rockets, supersonic aviation, the Green Revolution in agriculture, new medicines, and more. Society was advancing on many different fronts.
I believe progress has slowed since then. How does one measure this? It is extremely difficult, but that is no excuse for nihilism. There’s a basic, Econ 10 intuition, which is that cornucopian tech progress should trickle into productivity gains and income growth, which we have not seen. The younger generations, starting with the millennials and their boomer parents, believe they will do worse than their parents, and unless something changes, I am inclined to believe them. Or there’s the literal question of how fast we’re moving—after building ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century, we hit a peak with the Concorde, which was decommissioned in 2003. If you factor in the post-9/11 airport security theater, we travel considerably more slowly than we did in the 90s. Or on health, life expectancies are not going up as fast as they were earlier in the 20th century.
I prefer to measure outputs than inputs, but there are around 100 times as many PhDs being produced today as there were in the 1920s. Even if we say things haven’t slowed, and we are making as much progress as we did in the ‘20s—when we formalized quantum mechanics, discovered penicillin, etc.—then the productivity of the average scientist is 99% lower today. That in itself is worth understanding and is at odds with the cornucopian story of progress that we normally tell.
Figuring out “why” we stagnated is even harder than the already difficult question of how much progress we are making. My cop-out answer is that “why” questions are over-determined. There’s a “nature” explanation—we picked the low-hanging fruit and ran out of ideas. The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated.