In a fascinating article titled, Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure toInnovation, economists Alexander M. Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel,
Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen, argue that exposing children to
innovation may be more likely to lead to innovation than financial incentives
such as reducing tax rates. The authors
provocatively ask whether we are “losing Einsteins.”
Dywer Gunn’s explanation of the
article appears in The NBER’s Digest and states:
Children who grow up in particularly innovative geographic
areas, or who are exposed to inventors via family connections, are more likely
to become inventors.
American inventors are disproportionately likely to be white
men who grew up in financially successful families. In Who Becomes an
Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation (NBER Working
Paper No. 24062),
Alexander
M. Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier
Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John
Van Reenen find that children from families in the top 1 percent of
the income distribution are 10 times more likely to become inventors than those
from families in the bottom 50 percent, and that over 80 percent of 40-year-old
inventors are male.
The study examines three possible explanations for the
demographic disparities: differences in genetic ability, differences in career
preferences, and differences in the financial or human capital constraints
faced by different demographic groups.
The researchers find that neither innate ability nor financial constraints
fully explains the disparities. Using data from the New York City public
schools, they find that while third grade math test scores are predictive of
the probability of securing a patent as a young adult, test score differences
explain "less than one-third of the gap in innovation between children
from high- vs. low-income families." Among students who score well on
third grade math tests, students from low-income families are significantly
less likely to become inventors than their wealthier peers. While the
explanatory power of test scores grows over time, the researchers estimate that
only 5.7 percent of the demographic gap in who becomes an inventor can be
explained by differences in ability at birth. And they find financial
constraints faced during childhood likewise do not explain the gap, as students
from low- and high-income families who attend colleges with large numbers of inventors
become inventors at similar rates.
Instead, the researchers point to a powerful causal exposure effect. Using
nationwide data on where an individual grew up and patent awards in early
adulthood, they find that children who grow up in particularly innovative
geographic areas, or who are exposed to inventors via family connections, are
more likely to become inventors. This finding applies even among technology
categories. Among people living in Boston, those who grew up in Silicon Valley
are especially likely to patent in computers, while those who grew up in
Minneapolis — which has many medical device manufacturers — are especially
likely to patent in medical devices. Moreover, children whose parents hold
patents in a particular subclass, such as amplifiers, are more likely to obtain
a patent in that same subclass than in another. There is also a strong
gender-specific exposure effect: women are more likely to patent in a
technology class if they were exposed as children to female inventors who held
patents in that same type of technology.
The researchers estimate that if young girls were exposed to female inventors
at the same rate as young boys are currently exposed to male inventors, the
gender gap in invention rates would be halved. More broadly, if women,
minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same
rate as white men from high-income (top 20 percent) families, the rate of
innovation in America would quadruple.
I wonder if other countries have started offering innovation
classes to children at a young age. In the United States, there has been quite a bit of innovation in the primary and secondary school systems for several reasons, including the growing popularity of home schooling and charter schools as alternatives to the public school system. I do
know that there are field specific charter schools in California. For example, there is one in Sacramento that
is focused on the arts, relatively broadly defined. There is also one focused on law. And, even our public school system in
Sacramento has a School of Engineering and Sciences. [Hat Tip to Professor Paul Caron's TaxProf Blog.]
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Posted By Mike Mireles to
IP finance on 2/05/2018 09:57:00 pm