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The new measure shows breakthrough inventions speeding up recently instead of slowing down: 
As you might expect, recent top inventions have clustered heavily in computers and electronics...but also, weirdly, in food manufacturing.
The fact that breakthrough patents are so tightly clustered in time within each industry sort of supports my mental model of technological progress as "mining", and fields of technology as veins of ore that get discovered and mined out:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The authors make sure to show that their measure of high-quality patents (as opposed to total patents) predicts a bunch of good stuff like TFP, industry profitability, and whatnot.
Anyway, this evidence pushes back against the story that @patrickc and others tell about important discoveries slowing down.
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