I vote for innovation as mining. I’ve visualized an abstract version of that starting on p. 14 (“Stagnation, Redux: Like diamonds, good ideas are not evenly distributed”) of this working paper, What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world, piggy-backing on Romer’s 1992, Two Strategies for Economic Development.
I vote for innovation as mining. I’ve visualized an abstract version of that starting on p. 14 (“Stagnation, Redux: Like diamonds, good ideas are not evenly distributed”) of this working paper, What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world, piggy-backing on Romer’s 1992, Two Strategies for Economic Development.