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In a 2009 paper,
The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?, Northwestern economist Benjamin Jones argued that “If innovation increases the stock of knowledge, then the educational burden on successive cohorts of innovators may increase.” His theory is based on two simple observations.
First, “innovators are not born at the frontier of knowledge.” They must undertake considerable education to reach the frontiers of knowledge where the majority of innovation takes place. Individuals can only absorb knowledge at a limited rate, so their education occupies considerable time and a significant portion of their lives.
Second, the stock of knowledge has been rapidly expanding across most disciplines, over the past 150 years, and particularly over the past several decades. If reaching the frontiers of knowledge requires standing on the shoulders of giants, “one must first climb up their backs, and the greater the body of knowledge, the harder this climb becomes.”
Innovators can compensate for this increasing knowledge burden in two key ways. They can choose to learn more, thus continuing to lengthen their education. Or they can become more specialized, narrowing their area of expertise and forcing them to work in teams of innovators with complementary specialized expertise.
Mr. Jones presented evidence that both, longer educational periods and greater specialization, are actually happening. PhD’s have been taking longer in most fields, and additional postdoctoral training is often required for leading-edge academic and research positions. Analysis of a rich patent data set shows that the age of first patent has been increasing over time at a substantial rate. A similar analysis also shows that more and more research is being conducted by teams, and the size of the teams has been going up over the years. He further shows that teamwork and specialization are greater in fields with deeper knowledge.
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