It’s a combination of factors but all with the same theme.

Basically nobody is willing to take any risk for anything.

This is on every level, from being wrong about a simple decision all the way up to not taking any personal risk with your life.

And it’s impossible to argue against it because at any point you can always make an argument for reduction of risk, and anyone arguing against it is demonized.

How can you argue against more health and safety standards after all? More rigourous engineering standards? More environmental protection standards? More consultation with the public?

But it’s not just a government thing, it’s on a societal level. In large companies it’s the same exact phenomenon of buck passing and responsibility dodging.

Each thing only has a tiny multiplicative cost, but the sum total of all of it is the inability to make any progress.

Because it’s not worth it. People built all the low hanging fruit of cool shit already. A plane would have been “cool shit” 100 years ago, today it’s just a glorified bus.

What else is there to build? Spaceships? For what? We’ve seen Mars and the Moon. More military crap? USA already won now it’s just showing off. AI stuff? Turns out people think it’s creepy and they like to keep their jobs anyway because it makes them money. Mega structures and arcologies? NIMBY!

We’re in the long tail of cool shit now. Each generation gets harder and harder to impress.

Necessity is the mother of invention. In the mid 40s a very large urgent necessity, the war effort, went away. There were some residuals after that as motivations and industries shifted.

Maybe check out Ross Douthat's recent book about "decadence" as a place to start. Not sure I buy the argument, but this is part of what he's talking about.

For me personally, I think it's just the point we're at in the current technological revolution (in the Carlota Perez sense). We're due for a new one (maybe biotech, eg. driven by crispr, mrna, etc.) so things feel stale.

I mean, it's kinda well known that war is the mother of all innovation right?

That explains it right there if you take the theory as true. WW2, Cold War. I mean even the moon landing was part of that cold war era technology advancement.

So now instead of governments/military pushing for needs, it's now companies trying to innovate for money. Which can work, but you need CEOs to take risks like Musk or even Jobs.

1940s-1950s two big factors - necessity to win a war.

But also opportunity. Even widespread mains electricity is fairly new back then, there were a lot of fairly obvious opportunities to quickly exploit.

We don't have a government anymore... it started breaking down with the death of FDR. The only thing that kept it going was the cold war.

We don't invest in research like we should.

My pet theory is we rely too much on computers.