This piece kicks off a short series inspired by this question:

Say that Beethoven was the greatest musician of all time (at least in some particular significant sense – see below for some caveats). Why has there been no one better in the last ~200 years – despite a vastly larger world population, highly democratized technology for writing and producing music, and a higher share of the population with education, basic nutrition, and other preconditions for becoming a great musician? In brief, where’s today’s Beethoven?

A number of answers might spring to mind. For example, perhaps Beethoven’s music isn’t greater than Beyonce’s is, and it just has an unearned reputation for greatness among critics with various biases and eccentricities. (I personally lean toward thinking this is part of the picture, though I think it’s complicated and depends on what “great” means.¹)

But I think the puzzle gets more puzzling when one asks a number of related questions:

• Where’s today’s Darwin (for life sciences), Ramanujan (for mathematics), Shakespeare (for literature), etc.?
• Fifth-century Athens included three of the most renowned playwrights of all time (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides); two of the most renowned philosophers (Socrates and Plato); and a number of other historically important figures, despite having a population of a few hundred thousand people and an even smaller population of people who could read and write. What would the world look like if we could figure out what happened there, and replicate it across the many cities today with equal or larger populations?
• “Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgment, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.” (Source) Can we get that efficiency back?

I’ll be giving more systematic, data-based versions of these sorts of points below. The broad theme is that across a variety of areas in both art and science, we see a form of “innovation stagnation”: the best-regarded figures are disproportionately from long ago, and our era seems to “punch below its weight” when considering the rise in population, education, etc. Since the patterns look fairly similar for art and science, and both are forms of innovation, I think it’s worth thinking about potential common factors.

Below, I will:

• List the three main hypotheses people offer to answer “Where’s Today’s Beethoven?”: the “golden age” hypothesis (people in the past were better at innovation), the “bad taste” hypothesis (Beethoven and others don’t deserve their reputations), and the “innovation as mining” hypothesis (ideas naturally get harder to find over time, and we should expect art and science to keep slowing down by default). Importantly, I think each of these has interesting and not-widely-accepted implications of its own.
• Examine systematic data on trends in innovation in a number of domains, bringing together (a) long-run data on both art and science over hundreds of years and more; (b) recent data on technology and more modern art/entertainment genres (film, rock music, TV shows, video games). I think this is the first piece to look at this broad a set of trends of this form.
• Briefly explain why I favor the “innovation as mining” hypothesis as the main explanation for what we’re seeing across the board.
• Do some typical “more research needed” whining. Since any of the three hypotheses has important implications, I think “Where’s today’s Beethoven?” should be a topic of serious discussion and analysis, but I don’t think there is a field consistently dedicated to analyzing it (although there are some excellent one-off analyses out there).

Future pieces will elaborate on the plausibility of the “innovation as mining” hypothesis – and its implications.

Three hypotheses to answer “Where’s Today’s Beethoven?”

Say we accept – per the data I’ll present below – that we are seeing “innovation stagnation”: the best-regarded figures are disproportionately from long ago, and our era seems to “punch below its weight” when considering the rise in population, education, etc. What are the possible explanations?

The “golden age” hypothesis

The “golden age” hypothesis says there are one or more “golden ages” from the past that were superior at producing innovation compared to today. Perhaps understanding and restoring what worked about those “golden ages” would lead to an explosion in creativity today.

If true, this would imply that there should be a lot more effort to study past “golden ages” and how they worked, and how we could restore what they did well (without restoring other things about them, such as overall quality of life).

I generally encounter this hypothesis in informal contexts, with a nostalgic vibe – a sort of pining for the boldness and creativity of the past.²

Interestingly, I’ve never seen a detailed defense of this hypothesis against the two main alternatives (“bad taste” and “innovation as mining,” below). Some of the people who have written the most detailed pieces about “innovation stagnation” seem to believe something like the “golden age” hypothesis – but they seem to say so only in interviews and casual discussions, not their main works.³

As I’ll discuss below, I don’t think the “golden age” hypothesis fits the evidence we have as well as “innovation as mining.” But I don’t think that’s a slam dunk, and the “golden age” hypothesis seems very important if true.

The “bad taste” hypothesis

The “bad taste” hypothesis says that conventional wisdom on what art and science were “great” is consistently screwed up and biased toward the past.

If true, this means that we’re collectively deluded about what scientific breakthroughs were most significant, what art deserves its place in our culture, etc.

This hypothesis is often invoked to explain the “art” side of innovation stagnation, but it’s a more awkward fit with the “science” side, and I think a lot of people just have trouble swallowing it when considering music like Beethoven’s. I do think it’s an important part of the picture, but not the whole story.

The “innovation as mining” hypothesis

The “innovation as mining” hypothesis says that ideas naturally get harder to find over time, in both science and art. So we should expect that it takes more and more effort over time to maintain the same rate of innovation.

This hypothesis is commonly advanced to explain the “science and technology” aspect of innovation stagnation. It’s a more awkward fit with the “art” side.

That said, my view is that it is ultimately most of the story for both (and my next post will discuss just how I think it works for art). And this is important, because I think it has a number of underappreciated implications:

• We should expect further “innovation stagnation” by default, unless we can keep growing the number of innovators. As discussed here, population growth and artificial intelligence seem like the most likely ways to be able to sustain high rates of innovation over the long run (centuries or more), though other things might help in the shorter run.
• Hence, our prospects for more innovation in both science and art could depend more on things like population growth, artificial intelligence, and intellectual property law (more on this in a future post) than on creative individuals or even culture.
• Finally, this hypothesis implies that a literal duplicate of Beethoven, transplanted to today’s society, would be a lot less impressive. My own best guesses at what Beethoven and Shakespeare duplicates would accomplish today might show up in a future short post that will make lots of people mad.

Data on innovation stagnation

Below, I provide a number of charts looking at the “production of critically acclaimed ideas” over time.

I give details of my data sets, and link to my spreadsheets, in this supplement. Key points to make here are:

• In general, I am using data sets based on aggregating opinions from professional critics. (An exception is the technological innovation data from Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?) This is because I am trying to answer the “Where’s today’s Beethoven?” question on its own terms: I want data sets that reflect the basic idea of people like Beethoven and Shakespeare being exceptional. This comports with professional critical opinion, but not necessarily with wider popular opinion (or with my opinion!)
• As such, I think the charts I’m showing should be taken as showing trends in production of critically acclaimed ideas, with all of the biases (including Western bias) that implies, rather than as showing trends in production of “objectively good” ideas. In some cases, the creators of the data sets I’m using believe their data shows the latter; but I don’t. Even so, I think falling production of critically acclaimed ideas is a type of “innovation stagnation” that deserves to be examined and questioned, while being open to the idea that the explanation ends up being bad taste.
• I generally chart something like “the number of works/discoveries/people that were acclaimed enough to make the list I’m using, smoothed,⁴ by year.” As noted below, I’ve generally found that attempting to weight by just how acclaimed each one is (e.g., counting #1 as much more significant than #100) doesn’t change the picture much; to see this, you can check out the spreadsheets linked from my supplement.
• In this section, I’m keeping my interpretive commentary light. I am mostly just showing charts and explaining what you’re looking at, not heavily opining on what it all means. I’ll do that in the next section.

Science and art+literature+music, 1400-1950

First, here are the number of especially critically acclaimed figures in art, literature, music, philosophy, and science from 1400-1950. (This data set actually runs from 800 BCE until 1950; my supplement shows that the “critical acclaim scores” over this period are dominated by ancient Greece (which I discuss below) and by the 1400-1950 period in particular countries, and I’m charting the latter here.)

Blue = science, red = art + literature + music

And here is a similar chart, but weighted by how acclaimed each figure is (so Beethoven counts for more than Prokofiev or whoever, even though they’re both acclaimed enough to make the list):

A couple of initial observations that will be recurring throughout these charts:

First, as mentioned above, it doesn’t matter that much whether we weight by level of acclaim (e.g., count Beethoven about 10x as high as Prokofiev, and Prokofiev 10x higher than some others), or just graph the simpler idea of “How many of the top 100-1000 top people were in this period?” (which treats Beethoven and Prokofiev as equivalent). In general, I will be sticking to the latter throug