Has economics run out of big new ideas?

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, held this year in New Orleans, wonks discussed everything from inflation and technological progress to the economics of crime and the energy transition. Yet those looking for big breakthroughs would have left unsatisfied. Most new work focused on rigorous analysis of data or painstaking theoretical modelling. As one attendee noted, such modelling often fails to produce surprising results, since it tends to reflect the assumptions that go into it.Evidence for this downsizing of ambition is not purely anecdotal. A in analyses citation data from 1945 to 2010 to assess the disruptiveness of papers and patents. The authors consider new work to be disruptive if later work that cites it is less likely to also mention its predecessors. The paper concludes that the share of disruptive research in the social sciences has fallen precipitously, even more so than in the actual sciences. As Tyler Cowen of George Mason University puts it: “In the last 30 years the reliability of empirical work and estimations has risen dramatically. Which is good. But few new important ideas have really been generated.”