Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong?

Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck. Patrick Collison, Michael Nielsen. The Atlantic, Nov 16, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/

Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong?

https://scientificreturns.org/diminishing-returns

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to spending on science are contributing to a genuine productivity slowdown.

We aren’t the first to suggest that scientific discovery is showing diminishing returns. In 1971, the distinguished biologist Bentley Glass wrote an article in Science arguing that the glory days of science were over, and the most important discoveries had already been made:

It’s hard to believe, for me, anyway, that anything as comprehensive and earthshaking as Darwin’s view of the evolution of life or Mendel’s understanding of the nature of heredity will be easy to come by again. After all, these have been discovered!

In his 1996 book The End of Science, the science writer John Horgan interviewed many leading scientists and asked them about prospects for progress in their own fields. What he found was not encouraging. Here, for instance, is Leo Kadanoff, a leading theoretical physicist, on recent progress in science:

The truth is, there is nothing—there is nothing—of the same order of magnitude as the accomplishments of the invention of quantum mechanics or of the double helix or of relativity. Just nothing like that has happened in the last few decades.

Horgan asked Kadanoff whether that state of affairs was permanent. Kadanoff was silent, before sighing and replying: “Once you have proven that the world is lawful to the satisfaction of many human beings, you can’t do that again.”

But while many individuals have raised concerns about diminishing returns to science, there has been little institutional response. The meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, the current nominee to be President Donald Trump’s science adviser, claimed in 2016 that “the pace of discovery is accelerating” in remarks to a U.S. Senate committee. The problem of diminishing returns is mentioned nowhere in the 2018 report of the National Science Foundation, which instead talks optimistically of “potentially transformative research that will generate pioneering discoveries and advance exciting new frontiers in science.” Of course, many scientific institutions—particularly new institutions—do aim to find improved ways of operating in their own fields. But that’s not the same as an organized institutional response to diminishing returns.

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Check also Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. NBER Working Paper No. 23782. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/are-ideas-getting-harder-to-find.html