Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled?

Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. The US economist Tyler Cowen, in his essay The Great Stagnation (2011), argues that, in the US at least, a technological plateau has been reached. Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox. As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’

  • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    As well, the height of government funded pure chemistry experimentation was from 1920-1970, where they were just doing some wild, dangerous stuff. While the Chinese are still dicking around with new theoretical chemical compounds, most the West doesn't bother unless it has to do with plastics, medical, lasers, or bio-technology, basically only things that further industrial application. I think the one thing I have heard of is that concrete development has come pretty far in the last 30 years, but it's literally just rediscovering and replicating how the Romans made their "self-healing" concrete and then trying to bring that process to scale. We'll see if there are any real breakthroughs in applied chemistry, but it's a tough row to hoe.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The news megathread had a small one on Chinese explosives research, but there are other compounds that China has apparently been fucking around with in partnership with I think Finland for better metallurgy yields. I'll try to find the article if I can, its been like a year since I read it. China and Chinese companies sponsor an absolute shit-load of research at engineering schools across the world. Most of the time they are taking chemicals that were discovered in the late 70's and then trying to figure out how to stabilize and use them productively.

        I think the biggest problem is that most of them have to be made in incredibly stable environments, like at vacuum or under an H3 pressurized area. Just really slow and deliberate processes that have to be replicated hundreds of times with small experimental variations.