Category: Science policy

It’s been an interesting week in UK politics. On Wednesday the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered a budget against the backdrop of an economic situation much worse than it seemed last November, at the time of his Autumn Statement. At the heart of the bleak economic news was disappointment about productivity – the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (the OBR) downgraded its forecasts for future productivity growth; as a result their forecasts for tax income went down, so to meet the government’s self-imposed targets on deficit reduction further spending cuts had to be pencilled in. Among those spending cuts were cuts to the allowances to disabled people – the political fall-out from which we’re still seeing.

Labour productivity according to the successive Office of Budgetary Responsibility’s Economic and Fiscal Assessments for the years indicated, showing estimates of productivity up to the time of publication of each report (solid lines), and predictions for the future (dotted lines). The dotted line is best fit to the post 2009 trend, representing 0.6% annual growth. Data for 2010-2014 from the October 2015 OBR Forecast Evaluation Report, for 2015 and 2016 from the March 2016 OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

The media focus has shifted to the political soap-opera of ministerial resignations and recriminations, but we shouldn’t forget the story of the productivity disappointment, because that’s at the heart of what’s happened. To see why, take a look at my graph, which shows how the government’s optimistic predictions for productivity growth have repeatedly been dashed. Continue reading “The political fallout of the UK’s productivity problem”

What’s happening to the economy of the USA? Is change accelerating, are we entering a new industrial revolution based on artificial intelligence and robotics, as the techno-optimists would have it it? Or is the USA settling down into a future of slow economic growth, with technological innovation declining in pace and impact compared to the innovations of the twentieth century? The last is the thesis of economist Robert Gordon, set out in a weighty new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

The case he sets out for the phenomenon of stagnation is compelling, but I don’t think his analysis of the changing character of technological innovation is convincing, which makes him unable to offer any substantive remedies for the problem.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth. The average annual growth of total factor productivity – that part of economic growth not accounted for by increased inputs of labour and capital – over each decade leading up to the given date (14 years in the case of 2014). Data from R.J. Gordon, replotted from figure 16-5 of his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

The basis of the stagnation argument lies in the economic growth statistics. Put simply, the greatest period of economic growth in US history was in the mid-20th century. Continue reading “Institutions of innovation, ecologies of invention: what’s missing from the stagnation debate”

The World Economic Forum at Davos provides a reliable barometer of conventional wisdom amongst the globalised elite, so it’s interesting this year that, amidst all the sage thoughts on refugee crises, collapsing commodity prices and world stock market gyrations, there’s concern about the economic potential and possible dislocations from the fourth industrial revolution we are currently, it seems widely agreed, at the cusp of. This is believed to arise from the coupling of the digital and material worlds, through robotics, the “Internet of Things”, 3-d printing, and so on, together with the development of artificial intelligence to the point where it can replace the skill and judgement of highly educated and trained workers.

A report from the FT’s Izabella Kaminska of one session – Davos: Historians dream of fourth industrial revolutions – captures the flavour nicely. I’m struck by her summary of the views of the historian Niall Ferguson – “The fourth industrial revolution, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson notes, is distinctive because of its exponential rather than linear pace, not only changing what and how we do things but also potentially who we are.”

This succinctly summarises conventional wisdom, but almost every word of this statement is questionable or wrong.

Why do we talk of a fourth industrial revolution? Continue reading “The fourth industrial revolution – this time it’s exponential!”

This post appears on the blog of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, as part of a series in the run-up to the UK government’s comprehensive spending review arguing for the value of science spending. As with my earlier pieces, supporting statistics and references can be found in my submission to the BIS select committee productivity inquiry, Innovation, research, and the UK’s productivity crisis (PDF)

Stagnating productivity is one of the biggest problems the UK faces, and it’s the most compelling reason why, despite a tight fiscal climate, the science and innovation budget should be preserved (and ideally, increased).

It’s clear that the government regards deficit reduction as its highest priority, and in pursuit of that, all areas of public spending, including the science budget, are under huge pressure. But the biggest threat to the government’s commitments on deficit reduction may not be the difficulty in achieving departmental spending cuts – it is the possibility that the current slowdown in productivity growth, unprecedented in recent history, continues.

Over many decades, labour productivity in the UK (the amount of GDP produced per hour of labour input) has increased at a steady rate. After the financial crisis in 2008, that steady increase came to an abrupt halt, since when it has flat-lined, and is now at least 15% below the pre-crisis trend. The UK’s productivity performance was already weaker than competitors like the USA, and since the crisis this gap with competitors has opened up yet further. If productivity growth does not improve, the government will miss all its fiscal targets and living standards will continue to stagnate.

Productivity growth, fundamentally, arises from innovation in its broadest sense. The technological innovation that arises from research and development is a part of this, so in searching for the reasons for our weak productivity growth we should look at the UK’s weak R&D investment. This is not the only contributory factor – in recent years, the decline in North Sea oil and a decline in productivity in the financial services sector following the financial crisis provide a headwind that’s not going to go away. This means that we’ll have to boost innovation in other sectors of the economy – like manufacturing and ICT – even more, just to get back to where we were. R&D isn’t the only source of innovation in these and other sectors, but it’s the area in which the UK, compared to its competitors, has been the weakest.

The UK has, for many years, underinvested in R&D – both in the public and the private sectors – compared to traditional competitors like France, Germany and the USA. In recent years, Korea has emerged as the most R&D intensive economy in the world, while China overtook the UK in R&D intensity a few years ago. This is a global race that we’re not merely lagging behind in, we’re running in the wrong direction.

In the short term of an election cycle, it’s probably private sector R&D that has the most direct impact on productivity growth. The UK’s private sector R&D base is not only proportionately smaller than our competitors; more than half of it is done by overseas owned companies – a uniquely high proportion for such a large economy. It is a very positive sign of the perceived strength of the UK’s research base, that overseas companies are so willing to invest in R&D here. But such R&D is footloose.

Much evidence shows that public sector R&D spending “crowds in” substantial further private sector R&D. The other side of that coin is that continuing – or accelerating – the erosion of public investment in R&D that we’ve seen in recent years will lead to a loss of private sector R&D, further undermining our productivity performance. The timescale over which these changes could unfold could be uncomfortably fast.

These are the short-term consequences of the neglect of research, but the long-term effects are potentially even more important, and this is something that politicians concerned about their legacy might want to reflect on. The big problems that society faces, and that future governments will have to grapple with – running a health service with a rapidly ageing population, ensuring an affordable supply of sustainable, low carbon energy, to give just two examples – will need all the creativity and ingenuity that science, research and innovation can bring to bear.

The future is unpredictable, so there’ll undoubtedly be new problems to face, and new possibilities to exploit. A strong and diverse science base will give our society the resilience to handle these. So a government that was serious about building the long-term foundations for the continuing health and prosperity of the nation would be careful to ensure the health of the research base that will underpin those necessary innovations.

One way of thinking of our current predicament is that we’re doing an experiment to see what happens if you try to run a large economy at the technology frontier with an R&D intensity about a third smaller than key competitors. The outcome of that experiment seems to be clear. We have seen a slowdown in productivity growth that has persisted far longer than economists and the government expected, and this in turn has led to stagnating living standards and disappointing public finances. Our weak R&D performance isn’t the only cause of these problems, but it is perhaps one of the easiest factors to put right. This is an experiment we should stop now.

A recent blogpost by the economist Diane Coyle quoted JK Galbraith as saying in 1952: “The modern industry of a few large firms is an excellent instrument for inducing technical change. It is admirably equipped for financing technical development and for putting it into use. The competition of the competitive world, by contrast, almost completely precludes technical development.” Coyle describes this as “complete nonsense” –“ big firms tend to do incremental innovation, while radical innovation tends to come from small entrants.” This is certainly conventional wisdom now – but it needs to be challenged.

As a point of historical fact, what Galbraith wrote in 1952 was correct – the great, world-changing innovations of the postwar years were indeed the products, not of lone entrepreneurs, but of the giant R&D departments of big corporations. What is true is that in recent years we’ve seen radical innovations in IT which have arisen from small entrants, of which Google’s search algorithm is the best known example. But we must remember two things. Digital innovations like these don’t exist in isolation – they only have an impact because they can operate on a technological substrate which isn’t digital, but physical. The fast, small and powerful computers, the world-wide communications infrastructure that digital innovations rely on were developed, not in small start-ups, but in large, capital intensive firms. And many of the innovations we urgently need – in areas like affordable low carbon energy, grid-scale energy storage, and healthcare for ageing populations – will not be wholly digital in character. Technologies don’t all proceed at the same pace (as I discussed in an earlier post – Accelerating change or innovation stagnation). In focusing on the digital domain, in which small entrants can indeed achieve radical innovations (as well as some rather trivial ones), we’re in danger of failing to support the innovation in the material and biological domains, which needs the long-term, well-resourced development efforts that only big organisations can mobilise. The outcome will be a further slowing of economic growth in the developed world, as innovation slows down and productivity growth stalls.

So what were the innovations that the sluggish big corporations of the post-war world delivered? Jet aircraft, antibiotics, oral contraceptives, transistors, microprocessors, Unix, optical fibre communications and mobile phones are just a few examples. Continue reading “Does radical innovation best get done by big firms or little ones?”

The biggest current issue in the UK’s economic situation is the continuing slump in productivity. It’s this poor productivity performance that underlies slow or no real wage growth, and that also contributes to disappointing government revenues and consequent slow progress reducing the government deficit. Yet the causes of this poor productivity performance are barely discussed, let alone understood. In the long-term, productivity growth is associated with innovation and technological progress – have we stopped being able to innovate? The ONS has recently released a set of statistics which potentially throw some light on the issue. These estimates of total factor productivity – productivity controlled for inputs of labour and capital – make clear the seriousness of the problem.

Here are the figures for the whole economy. They show that, up to 2008, total factor productivity grew steadily at around 1% a year. Then it precipitously fell, losing more than a decade’s worth of growth, and it continues to fall. This means that each year since the financial crisis, on average we have had to work harder or put in more capital to achieve the same level of economic output. A simple-minded interpretation of this would be that, rather than seeing technological progress being reflected in economic growth, we’re going backwards, we’re technologically regressing, and the only economic growth we’re seeing is because we have a larger population working longer hours.

Of course, things are more complicated than this. Many different sectors contribute to the economy – in some, we see substantial innovation and technological progress, while in others the situation is not so good. It’s the overall shape of the economy, the balance between growing and stagnating sectors, that contributes to the whole picture. The ONS figures do begin to break down total factor productivity growth into different sectors, and this begins to give some real insight into what’s wrong with the UK’s economy and what needs to be done to right it. Before I come to those details, I need to say something more about what’s being estimated here.

Where does sustainable, long term economic growth come from? Continue reading “Growth, technological innovation, and the British productivity crisis”