from the Centre for European Reform.

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Well, hello everybody. Welcome back from your lunch break.

I hope everybody's not feeling too sleepy because

this session is going to be, is certainly going to wake you up a little bit, I think.

I want to start by doing something which is completely analogous and not only relevant in this sort of sideways kind of way,

which is to talk about a quite interesting paper which some economists at MIT put together.

And I'm sure you've all heard of Moore's Law, which is the principle that computing power embedded in microchips

grows exponentially over time.

And, you know, this was the theory that more put together

and the data that we've seen since is absolutely right.

You know, so you just see a lovely curve that goes up like this.

And just that's why your iPhone has more computing power than the lunar module.

The paper that the MIT economists put together said,

OK, well, let's just look at what sort of inputs and how many inputs we have to put in

in order to achieve that exponential rate of growth in computing power.

And they found that the amount of man hours, woman hours, researcher hours necessary to achieve that rate,

was also growing exponentially.

And it makes intuitive sense that innovation, once you've got the low-hanging fruits becomes

harder and harder and harder and then you need more and more and more labour inputs essentially

to make it work so I just start off with that because we had a lot of discussions about

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