To me, the most natural fit here for both art and science is the "innovation-as-mining" hypothesis. In that hypothesis:The basic dynamic is that innovation in a given area is mostly a function of how many people are trying to innovate, but "ideas get harder to find" over time.

Productivity statistics over the last few decades apparently offer hope. Productivity is quite slow from 1973 to the mid-1990s, but after then, we see some spurts. For instance, measured productivity rises at 2.8 percent a year from 1996 to 2000. From 2000 to 2004, there is a second surge, with an even higher average of 3.8 percent productivity gro

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Productivity growth was much higher from, call it, the 1920s to the 1970s than it was from the 1970s until today. Generally speaking, the rate of technological change in the economy has been decelerating for the last four years, not accelerating.

The picture this survey paints is bleak: Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement, 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.