Is technological progress a thing of the past?

In recent years, there have been growing expressions of pessimism about our long-term economic future, and specifically about the ability of the developed and industrialized world to maintain a rapid rate of economic growth. The concerns about “headwinds” and the return of the concept of “secular stagnation” have become the stage for a lively debate. At the core of the pessimist case is a prediction that technological progress will slow down and not have the power to overcome other sources of economic adversity. To this debate, I bring a historical argument: I identify the deep economic and intellectual sources of innovation in past centuries, and then use this model to predict what the rate of innovation will be in the coming decades. I examine specifically the context of the two centuries before the European Industrial Revolution and identify the forces that helped launch the innovations that eventually led to the Great Enrichment and the end of a Malthusian world of poverty. Specifically I examine the interaction between the economic and political environment and the intellectual forces that drove successful innovation. While acknowledging that using history to make predictions is hazardous, I argue that at least on technological grounds alone, our future looks a lot more rosy than the prophets of gloom and doom predict and that in all likelihood the rate of innovation will refute any resurrected arguments in the tradition of the belief that the low-hanging fruits in innovation have all been picked. On the other hand, much as in the past, such optimistic scenarios can be easily derailed by political and institutional failures