PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel’s recent work on measuring innovation was featured in the Wall Street Journal:
In a new study, Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute notes that previous innovation waves straddled numerous disciplines: information processing, transportation, medicine, energy and materials. There’s a reason why, in the 1967 film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman’s character is told “there’s a great future in plastics.” The development of thermoplastics in the 1930s and 1940s made possible products that are now ubiquitous in business and household life.
Where are the comparable advances in materials today? The Nobel prize was awarded in 1987 for the discovery of high-temperature superconductors—material that can carry electric current without resistance at temperatures above extreme cold. But as Mr. Mandel notes, few commercial superconductor applications are on the market. Nanotechnology—building materials out of microscopic particles—has found its way into tennis balls and odor-resistant fabrics but hardly measures up to steel or plastic in its breadth of uses.
The staggering sums invested in biosciences haven’t yielded breakthroughs comparable to antibiotics in the 1930s and 1940s. The human genome was sequenced more than a decade ago. Yet as Mr. Mandel notes, there is still no approved gene therapy for sale.
Quantifying innovation is difficult: Government statistics don’t adequately measure activities that only recently came into existence. Mr. Mandel circumvents this problem by surmising that innovation leaves its mark in the sorts of skills employers demand. For example, the shale oil and gas revolution is apparent in the soaring numbers of mining, geological and petroleum engineers, whereas the ranks of biological, medical, chemical, and materials scientists have slipped since 2006-07.
Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal.
