Metascience
Eleven million US patents are drifting farther apart in idea space, and the collisions that once marked crowded invention have almost disappeared.
Patent claims from 1836 through 2023 become increasingly dissimilar when measured with a validated modern text embedding. The average patent-interference rate fell from 2.71 percent in 1864 to 1901 to 0.05 percent in 1998 to 2014, a decline above 98 percent. Inventors appear to spread across a growing space of ideas, which reduces duplication while also weakening the knowledge spillovers created by nearby work. A calibrated model assigns 42 percent of the long-run decline in research productivity to these spatial forces, with sensitivity estimates from 33 to 58 percent. The paper reframes scientific crowding as a problem of distance between researchers as well as the number of researchers.
If inventors are spreading apart faster than research teams are growing, the productivity problem just shifted from headcount toward the distance between ideas.