Not wrong, and I wouldn't want to 'regress', but compared that to going from using gas lighting and candles to the incandescent light, the introduction of LED lighting isn't as much of a step change.
Also remember that there was a noticeable improvement in efficiency with fluorescent lamps pre-1970s:
Except that the book isn't taking about "proto-inventions" but items that could be purchased and used by the general public, from transportation (planes, trains, automobiles), food-related (refrigeration, microwaves, even induction cooking), radios, television, medicine (penicillin/anti-biotics).
All the major inventions (except the Internet) that we would association with 'modern civilization' were invented pre-1980.
True to a certain extent:
> Research on rechargeable Li-ion batteries dates to the 1960s; one of the earliest examples is a CuF2/Li battery developed by NASA in 1965. The breakthrough that produced the earliest form of the modern Li-ion battery was made by British chemist M. Stanley Whittingham in 1974, who first used titanium disulfide (TiS2) as a cathode material, which has a layered structure that can take in lithium ions without significant changes to its crystal structure.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...
But even if we grant that Li-ion batteries were a post-1970s innovation/invention—as opposed to a refinement of something that came before—it would still be one of the few that occurred, as the referenced book argues.
Today, any average person can do video calls across the world.
The "invention > refinement" idea would call these the same thing.
Yes, the book makes the point that computers and the Internet was one of the inventions that were and an improvement post-1970s.
But the productivity bump of those seem to have peaked around 2004 (the book has numbers up to 2014, as it was published in 2016). Apple's iSight was released in 2003:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISight
The first webcam was in 1993:
You know those pregnancy tests one can buy in the drug store? Based on MABs. Ditto those COVID tests. The Nobel-prize winning work that first created MABs occurred in the 1970s, but no product was available to consumers then.
MABs are ubiquitous in medicine now.
The problem with that is there will be proto-inventions all around us that will later be improved and made economical, but we can't see them yet. So this approach is inherently biased, treating past and current innovation differently.