I attribute this to something else, something that’s operating across many different sectors.

Technologically, we’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit of various scientific and engineering disciplines. Energy, transportation, construction, computing devices, software, medicine, surgery and more - all these things rode enormous waves of potential in the postwar era that have now ebbed.

The iPhone was a low hanging fruit made possible by developments in compute, connectivity, and software.

The next set of fruit is much higher up the tree: see avp, development costs of.