How to escape scientific stagnation

In 2008 ben jones of Northwestern University formalised a simple yet powerful observation. The more knowledge humans have, the longer it takes a budding researcher to get to the frontier, and thus to push things forward. In a paper provocatively titled, “The burden of knowledge and the death of the Renaissance man”, Mr Jones argued humanity’s growing knowledge would slow scientific progress and thus economic growth. More recent research has solidified this view. In 2020 economists at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) published another provocatively titled paper, “Are ideas getting harder to find?” which concluded that in areas from crop yields to microchip density, new ideas were indeed getting harder to find.