The Rise and Fall of Productivity in the 1970s

There's a lot of technological change, yet at the same time it doesn't feel like our lives have become materially better than our parents or our grandparents. One notion is just that as you get close to the frontier, you need to throw more and more person power at it to keep on moving. So we have continued to see Moore's law in effect, the doubling of computing power every 18 months. But if you look at the number of people in research labs that are required to continue to get that doubling every 18 months, it's increasing massively. We're allowing them to lock up that pretty straightforward business process patent for two decades impeded innovation rather than enhancing it.