填空题 With the pace of technological change making heads spin, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. We have smart phones and supercomputers, big data and stem-cell transplants. Governments, universities and firms together spend around $1.4 trillion a year on R&D, more than ever before.
Yet nobody recently has come up with an invention half as useful as toilet. With its clean lines and intuitive user interface, the humble toilet transformed the lives of billions of people. (1) .
Modem science has failed to make anything like the same impact, and this is why a growing band of thinkers claim that the pace of innovation has slowed. (2) . If the rate at which we innovate, and spread, slows down, so too, other things being equal, will our growth rate.
Ever since Malthus forecast that we would all starve, human ingenuity has proved the prophets of doom wrong. But these days the impact of innovation does indeed seem to be tailing off. (3) . Productivity also supports the pessimists' case: it took off in the mid-19th century, accelerated in the early 20th century and held up pretty well until the early 1970s. It then dipped sharply, ticked up in late 1990s with computerization and dipped again in the mid-2000s.
Yet that pattern is not as conclusively gloomy as the doomsayers claim. Life expectancy is still improving, even in the rich world. (4) . Moreover, it is too early to write off the innovative impact of the present age.
This generation's contribution to technological progress lies mostly in information technology (IT). (5) . But as with electricity, companies will take time to learn how to use them, so it will probably be many decades before their full impact is felt.
Computing power is already contributing to dramatic advances far beyond the field of IT. Three-dimensional printing may cause a new industrial revolution. Autonomous vehicles, like the driverless cars produced by Google, could be common on streets within a decade. And although it is too soon to judge how big a deal these inventions will turn out to be, globalization should make this a fruitful period for innovation.
A. The productivity gains after electrification came not smoothly, but in spurts; and the drop-off since 2004 probably has more to do with the economic crisis than with underlying lack of invention.
B. Economic growth is a modem invention: 20th-century growth rates were far higher than those in the 19th century, and pre-1750 growth rates were almost imperceptible by modem standards.
C. Rather as electrification changed everything by allowing energy to be used far from where it was generated, computing and communications technologies transform lives and businesses by allowing people to make calculations and connections far beyond their unaided capacity.
D. And it wasn't just modem sanitation that sprang from late-19th and early-20th-century brains: they produced cars, planes, the telephone, radio and antibiotics.
E. Many more brains are at work now than were 100 years ago: American and European inventors have been joined in the race to produce cool new stuff by those from many other countries.
F. If the pessimists are right, the implications are huge. Economies can generate growth by adding more stuff: more workers, investment and education. But sustained increases in output per person, which are necessary to raise incomes and welfare, entail using the stuff we already have in better ways— innovating, in other words.
G. Life expectancy in America, for instance, has risen more slowly since 1980 than in the early 20th century. The speed of travel, in the rich world at least, is often slower now than it was a generation earlier, after rocketing a century or so ago.