Techno-utopians got it wrong: their tireless search for new technologies must start in the past. Most new technologies are just a rehash of past ones and most resources are devoted to maintaining existing technological infrastructure or towards incremental advances in old technologies: the new and innovative is extraordinarily rare. A fact so ignored but so intuitive, since most human needs have always been the same.
Mandelbrot’s “[amazon_link id=“0716711869” target=“_blank” ]The fractal geometry of nature[/amazon_link]” summarizes this line of thinking as the Lindy effect: the future survival of any Broadway show is best predicted by how long it has been running already. Itself based on a much older assertion that the “the future career expectation of a television comedian is proportional to his past exposure” (The New Republic, June 13th 1964). Thus, a statistical distribution that extends beyond the arts to other phenomena like the survival of technologies: the longer a technology has been in use, the longer we shall expect it to last, or more empirically, we shall conclude that every year that a technology survives may even double its additional life expectancy, contrary to the life expectancy of any living being. An insight that warns us against miracles when introducing new technologies without any precedent.
This next paper is the only one I could find that combines this effect with other power laws to try to ascertain the economic returns of basic research, and so the optimal level of investment: