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gwern comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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As for your claim that old is as good as new - it's not.
Yes, about half of them. Not all were actually good, IMDB has some systemic biases. Good movies are much less common than you claim.
Also you cannot just decide to skip making mediocre movies (or anything else) and only do the good ones. At best by halving number of movies made, you'll halve number of great movies made. Due to expected positive externalities (directors and so on learning from previous movies how to make better ones), it might lower number of great movies even more.
If you make the list of best movies tend to be more recent. Looking at IMDB, which I consider very strongly biased towards old movies, top 250 are from:
Which is quite strongly indicative that movie making industry is improving (and this effect is underestimated by IMDB quite considerably). On list of movies I rated 10/10 on imdb, only 1 out of 28 is not from 1990s or 2000s.
It's also true for books - progress is not that fast, but I can think of very few really great books earlier than mid 20th century. Or highly enjoyable music earlier than the last quarter of 20th century. No solid data here, it might be due to progress of technology in case of music, and better cultural match with me in case of books.
As Technologos points out, # of movies made per year seems to have increased considerably, so the fraction of good movies made could have dropped but your numbers be accurate. (eg. the 1930s saw 15, so 15 * 3 = 45, not too far from the 2000s's 56)
Average doesn't seem important at all. Also systemic bias - would you seriously argue that if a top rated movie from 1930s came out today (with just refurbished technology and such trivia) it would still be a hit? I find this nearly impossible.
A dropping average suggests (massively) diminishing returns.
And as far as remakes and sequels go? Well, you tell me...
I doubt computational power of an average chip is much higher than in 1970s. Ones on the top are ridiculously better, but at the same time we had explosion in number of really simple chips, so quite likely average isn't much better. Or at least median isn't much better. Does it imply lack of progress? (don't try to find numbers, I might be very well proven wrong, it's just a hypothetical scenario)
I think that analogy would be more insightful if you replaced the entries with 'supercomputers' and 'the TOP500'.