How to reverse the West’s creativity crisis

Societies can suffer from famines of the mind as well as famines of the belly. Ideas wither on the vine; plants turn into husks; fields lie fallow; and before long the economic growth that ultimately feeds on the imagination stalls. This is what is happening to the world’s imaginative life, most notably in the West, which since the days of the Enlightenment has prided itself on the creative power of ideas.
The movie of the moment, in both box office and critical terms, is Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel to a 1986 blockbuster. Publishers are forever looking for the next Malcolm Gladwell. Politicians are caught up in yesterday’s battles — over abortion in America or imperial measures in Britain. The 17th-century sage Francis Bacon was once called the “buccinator novi temporis” — the trumpeter of new times. Nowadays, many of the loudest trumpeters are of old times.
If that sounds impressionistic, consider the quantitative evidence on the productivity of ideas. One study found that research productivity has declined sharply in software, agriculture and medicine. A second study found that the average age of Nobel Prize-winners has risen steadily and the size of teams involved in science has increased. A third study — there is no shortage of studies — found that the average age at which academics publish their first article in a prestigious publication has risen — from 30 in mathematics in 1950 to 35 in 2013.
American researchers have been running something called the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking since the mid-1960s. A study of the data by Kyung Hee Kim found that, although various measures of creativity and originality had risen in line with average IQ until 1990, ever since then they have been falling. “The results indicate creative thinking is declining over time among Americans of all ages, especially in kindergarten through third grade. The decline is steady and persistent.”
How can we explain this withering of the imagination? More people than ever before live in cities, the supposed engines of creativity, and more people attend universities. Giant companies such as Google and Facebook devote untold billions to inventing the future. Every PC contains all the tools you need to write a book.
One explanation lies in the sheer burden of knowledge and the consequent dictatorship of specialisation. Academics take longer than ever to reach the frontiers of knowledge — and when they finally get there they tend to crawl along with a magnifying glass rather than standing up and looking through a telescope.
Academic metrics play their malign part: Research bureaucrats look for safe ideas that fit into their pre-defined metrics rather than genuinely path-breaking ideas. So does Brandolini’s law, which states that it takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than it does to produce it.

—Bloomberg