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William Watson: Maybe America’s golden age is really a thing

A new study suggests the U.S. accounts for more than 60 per cent of the world's technological innovations, with no other country even close

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That was quite a TV extravaganza that U.S. President Donald Trump put on Tuesday night at what for some reason is still called the “state of the union” address. “Come on down, gold-medal goaltender Connor Hellebuyck and get your Presidential Medal of Freedom! Alejandra Gonzalez, your uncle Enrique has been a prisoner of Venezuela’s Maduro regime, but now not only has he just been released, he’s here right now: turn around and give him a hug!”

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If you made it all the way to the end — tens of millions didn’t but we at FP persevere — you heard a peroration that climaxed with “the golden age of America is upon us,” a reference not to Trump’s Oval Office decorating style but to American thriving.

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In fairness, the peroration was better-than-average political boilerplate (see nearby Nota Bene). From such a zany president, consecutive paragraphs of such traditional fare are a welcome relief. And Trump delivered them energetically and effectively, without his usual self-interruptions and running reviews — impressive for a 79-year-old man at the end of the longest state of the union speech ever: 107 minutes and 10,500 words, enough for a dozen of these columns.

Reasonable people’s instinct on hearing “golden age” from Trump is to put it down to his innate braggadocio — or boast-adocio or BS-adocio, however you want to put it. On the other hand, after reading a gargantuan new artificial intelligence-assisted study of the last couple of centuries of technological innovation, I’m not so sure.

Written by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard, Hemanth Asirvatham of OpenAI and Elliott Mokski, who doesn’t provide an affiliation, it’s actually an attempt to show that, fitted out with extra software named “GABRIEL” — for “Generalized Attribute-Based Ratings Information Extraction Library” (do you think they asked the AI to come up with its own acronym?) — OpenAI’s GPT can be used to quantify attributes in qualitative data and do so up to different explicit standards.

How the researchers demonstrate this is by asking interesting questions of a number of qualitative databases — school curricula across U.S. counties (more politically liberal counties have more politically liberal history curricula), social media debate, congressional remarks (identity-based speech by Democrats exploded around 2010) and, of golden interest here, the invention and adoption of new technologies.

To do this last bit the researchers used GABRIEL to pose questions that get GPT to sift through the 18 million entries in Wikipedia, looking for technologies invented in the last two centuries. (They do consider whether using Wikipedia biases the data western but in fact only 15 per cent of Wikipedia authors are American. By the way: There aren’t that many genuinely public goods — your use of it doesn’t reduce mine — but Wikipedia is one. I hope if you do use it you give it a few dollars every year.)

After some winnowing the researchers get down to roughly 25,000 technologies invented between 1800 and 2010 that are in wide use today. Then they start asking questions of the entries.

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What’s the average lag between prototype to widespread adoption? About 60 years in 1800 but the gap has declined pretty steadily since and is now only five years or so. Maybe the world really is speeding up.

Though developing new products still typically involves high fixed costs, that effect peaked in the mid-20th century, and is now down a bit on average. Possibly, that’s because inventions are much less likely to be as “large and bulky” as they used to be.

Though academic research is important in invention, it’s also not as important as it was last century. Network effects count more now than they did, while the eccentricity of inventors, though still there, has been declining.

How about productivity? Everyone knows innovation is at the heart of productivity growth. In fact, the big data suggest that effect has fallen in half. Some people say the era of really big inventions — the railway, electricity, the telegraph and telephone — is over, though it’s hard to believe computers and the internet weren’t also big, or AI won’t be.

Finally, regarding the golden age of America, where does stuff get invented? More than 60 per cent of it in the U.S. And that’s not a case of a big early lead. Through much of the 19th century U.S. innovation was at best middle of the pack. And though “America reached its peak percentage of global GDP in the early 20th century, its total dominance in innovation is a more recent phenomenon.” China doesn’t actually make the chart, though you’ve got to think it will soon.

Trump won’t like this next bit but within the U.S., California (yes, the Golden State) “is responsible for over a quarter of new technologies,” while it, New York and Massachusetts “account for more inventions than the other 47 (states) combined.” More than half of American inventions means more than 30 per cent of the world’s.

Who drives innovation? Up until 1875, independent inventors. Since then corporations, who today account for almost 70 per cent. Which institutions have been most innovative? The top five are: AT&T (formerly Bell Labs), IBM, MIT, Microsoft and the U.S. Navy.

Innovation-wise, it seems the U.S. has been in a golden age for many decades now. It’s surprising to see such a success story turn inward. But, as its president would be the first to tell you, best not bet against it.

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