Patrick Collison on why progress slowed
Collison argues that measured progress has slowed: US productivity growth has fallen from roughly 1.9% to about 0.4%, and vastly more researchers produce significant discoveries at only a constant rate. He suspects the cause is institutional and cultural (slow funding, accumulated veto points, unproductive capacity, lost organizational know-how) rather than ideas getting intrinsically harder to find, and argues for experimenting with how science is funded. By 2026 he says the great stagnation seems to be over, pointing to accelerating entrepreneurship.
16 points · 5 appearances · 2019–2026
How the view evolved
TFP growth much lower since 1970 → The great stagnation seems to be over
In 2019 (EconTalk) Collison described total factor productivity growth as back to historically low levels since about 1970. By 2026 (Replit) he says 'the great stagnation seems to be over', citing a sharp acceleration in entrepreneurship, though his evidence is new-business formation, not the research-productivity measures he used in 2019.
Constant returns on exponentially rising inputs is unsustainable → Diminishing returns may come from adding unproductive capacity
In 2019 (Zuckerberg/Cowen conversation) Collison saw at best constant returns on exponentially rising inputs and framed the fork as intrinsic difficulty versus institutional causes. By 2024 (Dwarkesh) he offers a concrete mechanism for the institutional side: the same diminishing returns could arise from adding ever more unproductive capacity, which weakens the low-hanging-fruit explanation.
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2015–2026 · changed view
“Something we learned from YC was the importance of focusing on very concrete, easy to explain customer problems. Like it's very easy to hallucinate or to imagine some customer problem that's not actually something viscerally felt by a person who would pay money. And so over the course of, in part working on Octomattic together We encountered this issue of it being really annoying to deal with the movement of money or payments, whatever, on the Internet. And on the one hand, it seemed like an obviously good idea in the sense that nobody liked the existing ways of doing so, and they were broadly extremely unpopular and kind of antiquated and legacy. And yet to, like, fill out this paperwork and go to the bank in person and the paperwork was in Latin and just like, it was all bad. But then the flip side is it just seems kind of ridiculous the two kids would start a financial services business and Fintech didn't exist as a sector at the time. Like, the word literally didn't exist. And so it's just kind of, you know, we felt like the proverbial squirrels in a trench coat trying to masquerade as a sort of a real business or as serious adults, but obviously knowing nothing coming in about the space. And certainly a lot of people we met and pitched or banks or partners or whatever that we talked to, I mean, they didn't literally laugh us out of the room, but you kind of see them looking for the button to call security under the desk and have them haul us out, because it just seems so improbable. So anyway, I think it both seemed like an obviously good idea in that people. People really wanted this, but also a bad idea that nobody took it seriously. But I think the fact that it was ultimately, the fact that it was grounded in such a concrete, actual real user problem saved us.”
2019–2024
“Part of our hope you know it's not to kind of promote any specific solution any specific I don't know aspect of it but rather that you know even though this is not what's kind of focally central in the headlines today it should be and as we think of what the world is going to look like in 50 years or 100 years it plausibly more than anything else is going to determine the shape of that.”
2024–2026
“Looking at the stripe data, one thing I will say that I think is germane to people here. There are many more businesses getting started now than there were a year ago. Like as little as a year ago. Way, way more than we're getting started five years ago. And actually the relative change between last year and this year is pretty much the largest relative change we've seen in any given year. So for example, from 19, from 2019 to 2020, we saw a big jump, you know, understandable during COVID so February to April of 2020 or whatever, you know, I think the growth rate inflected to maybe 50% or thereabouts year over year. In terms of new businesses getting started. As I speak, the number of new business starting on stripe is up around, it's a bit under, but around 2x year over year, which again is the largest relative jump we've seen.”
2022–2024
“In many domains, I don't know. For example I have no facility with or experience with doing things in hardware, which is not a small domain. If you wanted to become a super skilled practitioner there, what's the best career path? I don't know. Maybe it's to drop out and join SpaceX or something. I'm not necessarily endorsing pursuing the most establishment and credential oriented path. People should try to find the gradient of maximal learning in whatever it is they care most about. The question then is what that is. For biology, not that I'm a biologist, but it is very clear that in order to do really good work, there are a lot of "bench" skills one has to acquire and there is a lot of actual specific knowledge. Any kind of life wasn't designed with neat fundamental principles the way that maybe physics was. A lot of it is obviously evolved and contingent and messy and complicated and all the rest. So there is a lot of specific factual stuff to learn. For those two reasons, there are very few successful pure autodidacts in biology. In virtually every case that I'm aware of, at some point, you have to get direct experience in and with a top lab, where you're seeing how people actually do it in practice.”