The missing pandemic innovation boom

trials and tribulations of the plague years, there was a silver lining. In late 2020, with the approval of covid-19 vaccines, and into 2021, as the jabs worked their magic, techno-optimism began to spread. If people could develop life-saving inoculations in months, why couldn’t the world move out of its low-growth, low-productivity slumber? Firms could embrace digitisation as never before; the shift to working from home could allow people, free of office gossip and draining , to ; before long there would be vaccines for every disease imaginable. Governments promised to spend big on science; companies outlined juicy plans. It was quite a change of mood. In the years before the pandemic, the rich world’s growth rate had drastically slowed. In the 2010s American labour productivity—output per hour of work—grew at half the pace of the decade before. Societies had become worse at finding new ideas, translating them into innovations and promulgating these innovations. Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, published in 2016, argued that there were fewer life-changing discoveries to be made. In early 2020 a paper in the , a leading journal, made the case that, even where there were ideas to be discovered, they were getting .