In reality, innovation and progress is happening, and in fact it's at breakneck speed. Comparing the modern economy to something even as recent as the 90's is barely recognisable. Cheap and fast broadband has spurred innovation in pretty much all industries, including non-IT related fields. Even the industrial revolution doesn't compare to that much progress that quickly.
However a lot of that "innovation" never reaches market or is deemed "not economical" and is shot down, look at pharmaceutical/medical industry for instance: Often times cures are created (innovation), but are either blockaded or outright never released to the public because it's more economical to treat, rather than to cure. So in essence, a lot of that innovation is done just as PR stunts to get attention. Notice how often "We have a cure for ...." gets thrown around but often that stuff is never heard from again.
We may have all sorts of different stuff we _want_, but a lot of what we _need_ isn't economical:
Look at how expensive nutritious food is compared to snack foods or fast food, then the question gets asked "Why is $COUNTRY having obesity problems?". It's the state of the economy that's driving that obesity as it's cheaper to eat crap than to eat good and that status quo is not changing.
We want cheaper food, but we need healthier choices
Look at how unhealthy we are as a society, when we're required to work insane hours to feed the economy, then we come home tired, ill, stressed to illness and not really wanting to do much more where we allow our own health to degrade and we need to pay more to make ourselves healthy again. It isn't economical in the numbers to cut back work hours so that people can live life less stressfully. Everything these days is about being "productive" not healthy. It makes economical sense for this to continue as it pays for the medical treatments, etc needed.
We want productivity, but we need health and less stress.
Look at how often environmentally unfriendly things are done in spite of people living around those things, Oil fracking is one significant example. It makes complete economic sense to take the shortcuts necessary to have that operation running with wanton disregard for the environment. From any other perspective other than economics, it is insane.
We want the oil, but the actual need is retaining the environment and people's health.
There are many other examples but frankly the current economy doesn't focus on needs, but rather wants alone. "The market wants this product" is uttered far too often in various forms, but never is said "The people need...". Frankly I think the state of the economy is driving people to living unhealthy lifestyles because any other alternative is too expensive and discouraged.
While I guess you can call old computers "unique" and "artforms" if you will, but I say that was fucking horrible. All software and peripherals being locked to a certain platform, which itself was an unchangable hardware configuration (aside from maybe a seller-approved RAM or hard drive upgrade). Hardware being standardised and Windows becoming an open platform is easily the best things to happen in computing, since now you can custom build pretty much any machine you could ever want, provided the tech is there. Then again, if you really like computers being closed platforms, you could always get a Mac.
What I was moreso pointing out is that these days everything is cheap plastic. Laptop computers even as late as the early 00's for instance used to have good casing that didn't crack or degrade over time. These days many laptop models suffer defects with the plastic that overuse of the screen hinge can cause cracking due to cheap construction and poor engineering. And most laptop models are still in fact proprietary.
Desktop computers however have universal parts, but the industry is trying to push them out of the picture claiming "Nobody uses desktops anymore, everyone uses laptops, tablets or phones", so in essence, those computers you have indicated to be "open platforms" aren't economical and the industry is trying to get rid of them. Too, many "all in one" desktop computer systems use laptop parts which are again proprietary.
The late 90's was the peak of open hardware computing, but these days we're getting back into the proprietary hardware and this time it is cheap and made of faulty plastic, faulty solder (ever since there was a move away from lead in the solder, its quality has dropped and made circuit boards way more susceptible to failure), and cheap faulty capacitors that fail after ~3 years.
I don't see how that's really a bad thing. What differences are you looking for in a car that you can't get? Honestly, I'm really struggling to come up with any differentiations a car manufacturer could put out that would both conform to road laws and government regulations and be actually useful. I guess if you just want to be different for the sake of being different, you can slap a giant spoiler, neon lights and those stationary hubcaps on your car. Personally, I think it's a waste of money and just makes you look like some rich kid who's compensating for a small penis, but hey, your life.
Look beyond the appearance and more toward the operation of the vehicles: Electric cars are innovation have largely been suffering the oil industry trying to keep them out of the picture because they "aren't economical" for the said industry. Many promising technologies get bought out by the oil industry, patented by them and stuffed under the rug because they "aren't workable".
That's really nothing new. Buildings are hugely expensive, so unless you have a lot of money to throw around, splashing out just to make it look fancy is kind of hard to justify. This is especially true for skyscrapers, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to complete. The rank and file commercial and residential buildings have always been about function and price over form since buildings were first a thing.
While this is economically correct, when it comes down to it, are we leaving our next generations buildings that can weather the test of time or is tearing down buildings every 10-15 years going to become a new norm because it isn't economical in the short term to make better buildings?
In some Asian regions, buildings get torn down every 5-10 years on the dot these days because the buildings were never built with the future in mind, only their immediate use. That's not very economical in the longterm, but given my carrot on a stick metaphor, everybody's busy looking in the short term, so buildings get built to last long enough until it can be replaced.
Buildings have become disposable.
Maybe in the very short term, since fast food is one of the very few sectors that tends to do well during a recession, but that'll change once things improve.
Perhaps, but when everybody's working for fast food these days, nobody has any money to start up any such business. Hell, those working fast food are lucky to make it month to month and given that job creation is always slower than job destruction, we will not fully recover to the pre-2008 job levels for at least another 5-10 years I'd wager and even then, jobs for what people went to post-secondary (post-high) education for would continue to be abysmal and people will be redirected to the "economical jobs" (fast food, retail, sales)
Unemployment rates are under-estimated and often are done in the form of any statistics: there's always omissions or those not counted.
As I said though, your visionary mindset needs some grounding in reality. Not only that, if you intend to carry it out by actively changing the economy, you absolutely need to know what you're doing and understand the full ramifications of your actions. If you fuck it up, you can destroy millions of people's livelihoods.
This is why those economic think-tanks need to get out of their ongoing busywork and start realizing there's a future to be formed. The economy is a system of wants, and while it does overlap with needs on the occasion, there are so very many needs that go unanswered for because there is no conscious effort for anyone with enough economic clout to want those needs to be fulfilled, often times those needs are "uneconomical" to fulfil. What needs to happen is more brainpower being put toward how to close the gap between what the economy is encouraging and what needs there are in humanity.
The problem however is that those with that economic clout don't want to have those needs fulfilled, they're just interested in the carrot that is dangling in their face because their parents taught them that way is the only way to live, and
ad-naseum up the generations to keep making money, profit and whatnot to keep the economy flowing as-is because nothing is seen as wrong with it because nobody knows anything any different.
At the moment I fear we're not going to leave the next generation much to speak of, just a bunch of cheap "economical" disposable crap that won't weather the test of time and any innovations we leave will be stifled and buried under insane amounts of bureaucracy.