Thanks for putting your thoughts regarding the Great Stagnation out there, Sam. It would be great to hear more about your thoughts on demography and economic growth, as you know we were promised flying cars during a baby boom! One thing I have noticed is that there seems to have been an 'ageing' of the typical science PhD graduate, the s…
Thanks for putting your thoughts regarding the Great Stagnation out there, Sam. It would be great to hear more about your thoughts on demography and economic growth, as you know we were promised flying cars during a baby boom! One thing I have noticed is that there seems to have been an 'ageing' of the typical science PhD graduate, the same goes for the humanities, though I will restrict my question to science to make responding less time consuming.
Controlling for cultural factors, to what extent do you think demographics might feed into the TFP data? Internet and universities aside, the great leaps in science you mention were made by comparatively young people: Penzias and Wilson were just 31 and 28 years old respectively when they stumbled upon cosmic microwave background radiation.
Notably, structured PhD programmes are a relatively recent phenomenon and might feed into the university bureaucracy you mention - maybe if budding science PhD students could do sufficient work in one or two years, rather than having to stick to a four-year PhD track, they might be more likely to do frontier defining work.
A flaw in my reasoning here is that it has become more time consuming to understand a subfield given the breadth of knowledge that now exists, which means it takes longer to gain the expertise a PhD graduate is expected to have in their area, so feel free to critique my thoughts on this.
I really enjoyed reading this piece so thanks again for sharing it.
Thanks for putting your thoughts regarding the Great Stagnation out there, Sam. It would be great to hear more about your thoughts on demography and economic growth, as you know we were promised flying cars during a baby boom! One thing I have noticed is that there seems to have been an 'ageing' of the typical science PhD graduate, the same goes for the humanities, though I will restrict my question to science to make responding less time consuming.
Controlling for cultural factors, to what extent do you think demographics might feed into the TFP data? Internet and universities aside, the great leaps in science you mention were made by comparatively young people: Penzias and Wilson were just 31 and 28 years old respectively when they stumbled upon cosmic microwave background radiation.
Notably, structured PhD programmes are a relatively recent phenomenon and might feed into the university bureaucracy you mention - maybe if budding science PhD students could do sufficient work in one or two years, rather than having to stick to a four-year PhD track, they might be more likely to do frontier defining work.
A flaw in my reasoning here is that it has become more time consuming to understand a subfield given the breadth of knowledge that now exists, which means it takes longer to gain the expertise a PhD graduate is expected to have in their area, so feel free to critique my thoughts on this.
I really enjoyed reading this piece so thanks again for sharing it.