In a recent article called “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” economists from Stanford and LSE analysed this phenomenon quantitatively. Across a range of industries, across firms, and in the aggregate economic data they found the same thing: progress becomes harder and harder. Based on their numbers, in order to double our overall level of technological advancement, we need to put in, conservatively, four times as much research effort as we did for the previous doubling. To illustrate, suppose (simplistically) that initially it took 10 person-years of “research” to double the world’s level of technological advancement: to move from knowing only how to make a stone axe to knowing how to make both an axe and a spear. In order to get the next doubling of technological progress, it would take 40 person-years of research. The next doubling would take 160 person-years, then 640 person-years, then 2,560 person-years, and so on.

Professor Sheena Iyengar from the Columbia Business School is a psycho- economist who specializes in decision making. Her famous “jam study” was done using specialty jams in a grocery store. One week, the researchers set up a table in the store showing off six different specialty jams (with snazzy flavors like kiwi-orange, strawberry-lavender...you get the idea). Then they watched how the shoppers behaved—who stopped to look and, of those who stopped, who actually bought some jam. The first week, with six jams on display, 40 percent of the shoppers stopped to check out the six jams and about a third of them bought one—about 13 percent of the shoppers.

A few weeks later, in the same store, with the same time frame, the researchers came back with twenty-four jams. This time, 60 percent of the shoppers in the store stopped by—a 50 percent increase over the six-jam display! But with twenty-four jams on display, only 3 percent of the shoppers bought one.

Academic publishing is extremely profitable. The foundations of Robert Maxwell’s media empire were built on Pergamon Press, which was one of the first companies to realize that the business model has two incredibly favourable properties. Firstly, the customer base is captive and highly vulnerable to price gouging. A university library has to have access to the best journals, without which the members of the university can’t keep up with their field or do their own research.

Secondly, although the publishers who bought the titles took over the responsibility for their administration and distribution, this is a small part of the effort involved in producing an academic journal, compared to the actual work of writing the articles and peer-reviewing them. This service is provided to the publishers by academics, for free or for a nominal payment (often paid in books or subscriptions to journals). So not only does the industry have both a captive customer base and a captive source of free labour, these two commercial assets are for the most part the same group of people.

A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profit-making company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices. It is, as you’d expect from that description, highly profitable – and passionately hated by the academics.

However, the model persists because somewhere along the way, the journal industry managed to insert itself into the staff promotion and recruitment function of universities all over the world. In doing so, it created an extremely useful accountability sink for senior academics and managers of universities, while also solving an awkward and unpleasant interpersonal problem for them – how to judge the quality of scholarship without offending the scholars.

This is how the cybernetic problems of the post-war industrial state have been shaped by economics. There are three major blind spots: the belief in markets as computing fabric, the flattening of time and uncertainty and the commitment to Ricardianism.

The belief in markets as computing fabric is such an obvious source of blind spots as to hardly require explanation. Faith in the power of free markets to solve problems is so great as to support the reverse inference of economists that if something appears to be a market equilibrium, then it must be an optimal solution.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.