Of course, there are some new technologies and disruptive innovations. But there always are. If we look at the macroeconomic evidence, what's odd is that there seem to be fewer of them than normal.
Put it this way. If the economy did have high levels of rapid and disruptive change - what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction - what sort of things would we see?
We'd expect there to be many corporate failures, as incumbent firms are driven to the wall by competition from more efficient upstarts. Latest figures, however, show the opposite. In the second quarter there were 3,617 corporate insolvencies. That compares to an average of 4,168 per quarter in 2006-07 (a time when the economy was doing well and so there should have been few failures on cyclical grounds).
We'd also expect to see people move jobs as new or expanding companies poach staff. But they are not doing so at an unusually high rate. The ONS estimates that 777,000 people changed job in Q2 - 2.5 per cent of those in work. This is slightly less than the average of 2.7 per cent per quarter between 2001 (when data began) and 2007.
We'd also expect to see lots of job losses as incumbent firms decline, and lots of job creation as new firms grow. But again, this is not happening on an unusual scale. In Q2, 875,000 people moved out of employment into unemployment or inactivity. This was 3 per cent of those in work, which is slightly lower than the average of 3.3 per cent per quarter between 2001 and 2007. And 1.04m moved into work in Q2, equivalent to 3.5 per cent of all employees. This was in line with the 2001-07 average.
We'd also expect to see rapid productivity growth as inefficient firms fail or decline while more efficient ones enter markets and expand; productivity growth traditionally comes from firms entering and leaving more than from incumbents upping their game. And again, we're not seeing this. Labour productivity has in fact been stagnant since 2007.
The facts, therefore, show that there is in fact less creative destruction now than there was before the financial crisis.
If you find this surprising, it could be because the belief to the contrary is based upon cognitive bias and ideology.
The bias is the availability heuristic: a few new disruptive companies get lots of attention while we take for granted the hundreds of thousands of businesses which just pootle along as normal.
The ideology is bosses' self-aggrandisement. CEOs want to pretend they are heroes battling against fierce competition, uncertainty and rapid change rather than comfortable bureaucrats making an easy living.
This poses the question: why, then, is there comparatively little creative destruction?
One reason is that the wheels of competition do not grind finely. Nick Bloom and John van Reenen, two US-based economists, have found that there's a "long tail of extremely badly managed firms". Inefficient companies can remain in business. Anybody who has dealt with a broadband provider, utility or bank will know this.
This longstanding fact has been accompanied by some others recently:
■ World trade growth has slowed. According to the Dutch statistical office CPB it grew by just 0.1 per cent in the past 12 months, compared with growth of 6.9 per cent per year between 1992 and 2007. This means firms face weaker competition from abroad, which means that weaker ones can stay in business.
■ Low interest rates allow inefficient indebted firms to linger on, resulting in fewer corporate bankruptcies now than we saw when interest rates were higher.
■ Robert Gordon at Northwestern University argues that there are fewer great innovations now than there used to be.
■ It could be that the fear of future creative destruction is stopping companies from innovating and expanding today. Nobody would invest £10m in robots if they fear that a rival firm will be able to buy better ones for £5m in a few months' time.
Given that creative destruction is unusually low now, what does this mean for equities? It's ambiguous.
The bad news is that it points to GDP growth remaining weak, as growth traditionally has often come from new firms. This suggests that investor sentiment will stay relatively depressed, implying low overall returns on equities. It's no accident that the last great stock market bubble - that of the late 90s - came at a time of high creative destruction.
On the other hand, though, a lack of creative destruction has an upside. It means that incumbent stock market-listed firms are less likely to be brought down by competition from new rivals. Until quite recently - and certainly during the dynamic phase of US capitalism - returns on French stocks often exceeded those on US ones even though the French economy was considered more sclerotic and less entrepreneurial. This tells us that stagnation has its advantages. Yes, it means fewer Googles or Apples. But it also means fewer Kodaks and Polaroids.
This throws into question the long-standing tendency for defensives to do well. Warren Buffett famously said that he wanted his companies to have economic "moats" - things that protect them from competition. Defensives have traditionally had these, such as high capital requirements or big brands. If, however, there is less competition, the premium put upon these moats should diminish, which might mean lower returns.
Does this mean we should ditch defensives? Not necessarily. For one thing, they have another advantage pointed out by economists at AQR Capital Management: they tend to be under-priced because some investors avoid them in favour of higher-beta shares.
And for another, we should not bet on creative destruction staying depressed.
Paul Ormerod at Volterra Consulting has pointed out something odd about the pattern of corporate failures: its statistical distribution looks a lot like the distribution of biological species' extinction. Of course, species don't foresee their own demise, so perhaps the same is true of companies. "Firms have very limited capacities to acquire knowledge about the likely impact of their strategies," he says.
If companies cannot see where potentially fatal disruptive threats come from - at least not sufficiently to prevent them - then perhaps the pace and direction of technical change are inherently unpredictable; as the late Humphrey Lyttleton said, "if I knew where jazz were heading, I'd be there already." Creative destruction might be unusually low now. But it might not remain so.
