Manny Mondays: Is Innovative Stagnation Upon Us?

Morning all! Had a very busy weekend and wasn't plugged into much of the happenings, but one article that caught my eye was this one written by Will Hutton at the Guardian:

Don't be blinded by the web. The world is actually stagnating

I'm not sure that I entirely agree with this premise, but it's an interesting one to ponder. Hutton states that real innovation over the past 50 years, in terms of it resulting in the true transformation of our lives and creating jobs and strong middle class, has in reality moved at a much slower pace relative to the previous 50 years. He also takes a look at Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better which argues that the promise of the innovation coming out of the internet creating jobs has been mostly a disappointment. Here are a couple of key excerpts:

My grandfather grew up in the 1900s in a world of horse-drawn carts and candle-lit houses. In the following 50 years he would live through a series of astonishing transformations – electricity, the motor car, television and radio, the telephone, the refrigerator, the vacuum-cleaner, penicillin and the aeroplane, just to name a few. It was not just these things that made the 20th century what it was. Their production was industrialised. They created huge employment and wealth.

Productivity advances are not being made in booming new industries; they are being made by laying people off or moving production to low-cost countries in Asia. One way or another, falling workforces in the west are producing broadly the same output. Nor is the internet a great job generator. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay may be changing the way we read and communicate – but in the US they have created fewer than 100,000 direct jobs. This, argues Cowen, is what lies behind America's increasingly jobless recoveries and the squeeze on the incomes of its middle-class workers. Our scientists and technologists have not been able to create inventions that can be industrialised at the same pace as they once did. This, argues Cowen, is what lies behind America's increasingly jobless recoveries and the squeeze on the incomes of its middle-class workers. Our scientists and technologists have not been able to create inventions that can be industrialised at the same pace as they once did.

Given some of the backgrounds and talents of the contributors at this blog, I thought that maybe many of you would have an informed opinion on this topic. So what does everyone think? Are we really innovating at a much slower pace than we used to or is our innovation merely no longer serving the middle class in this country, with enough meaningful jobs that create wealth for the many over the few? Or is this just the reality behind the global economy that we all now inhabit?