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| Gordon Moore |
In an article that can be downloaded from the Stanford University
website, entitled Are ideas getting harder to
find?, the authors raise the following situation:
In many models,
economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate
is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their
research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence... showing that
research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is
declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers
required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of
computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the
early 1970s... [W]e find that ideas — and the exponential growth they imply —
are getting harder to find. Exponential growth results from large increases in
research effort that offset its declining productivity.
