8 ms·

Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

84 points by arikr 9y ago

djrobstep 9y ago
Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept. Even if we somehow solve it, it would just be shuffling people up and down the ladder of an unfair system. Instead, we should be dismantling the ladder. Real equality means equality of outcomes. Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to avoid talking about real equality and its implications.
- miketery 9y ago
  Can you expand on what you mean but real equality?
- Rainymood 9y ago
  >Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept. What? So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born poor due to mere chance? >Real equality means equality of outcomes. I completely disagree. Real equality does NOT mean equality of outcomes. People have opportunities. People have choices. People make choices and these choices have real consequences. I personally do not think it's fair to force the same outcome on some college kid that binge drinks and smokes weed all day versus some college kid that studies his bum off. Imagine what this does to incentives!? >Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to avoid talking about real equality and its implications. Would you elaborate on this? I'll be honest here that I'm not too well-versed in this topic but I think it's interesting to talk about nonetheless. Full disclosure: I'm from the Netherlands where I feel there is quite some equal opportunity. Nearly every kid can go to a good primary school, high school, and any university if they try hard enough. There are little financial barriers as tuition is only 2.000/year. Contrast this to US universities if you do not have a scholarship, etc. However, the fact that everyone can go to the same university doesnt mean that everyone will end up exactly at the same place. People make choices and these choices have consequences.
  - js8 9y ago
    > So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born poor due to mere chance? He explicitly wrote that no, he favors equality of outcomes.
  - minipci1321 9y ago
    This educational system you describe is great, no doubt, but are you sure it offers __equal opportunity__ to every kid? In my opinion, according to family history, background etc (roughly boiling down to the income history in past 1-2-3 generations), kids won't be able to extract the same possibilities from the same conditions offered to each one: studies will be harder for some more than for others, simply because of the background, logistics etc, which will require not only working harder from someone who already does, but doing something they might not even know about: aiming higher, not compromising where others would be allowed to, having more confidence than an average kid their age, etc. I don't really know how to solve this (I think this part incumbs to family, but is that equal opportunity still?). The best thing about the system you describe that they carefully detect and extract the "nuggets" we sometimes get here. But I should thinks all educational systems nowadays do that more or less well.
- yorwba 9y ago
  How do you propose to measure whether two outcomes are equal? Not everyone wants the same things. How many soccer games are equivalent to a guitar?
  - Radim 9y ago
    When people talk about the equality of outcomes, I am always reminded of Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. [0]: "THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal..." [0] https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
- sewer_bird 9y ago
  Equality of outcome's implication is a culture engaging in an authoritarian and quixotic pursuit of perfect human misery. It is hard enough to ensure a specific outcome for yourself, let alone another, and even less so to make two people come out exactly the same. Equality of opportunity at least acknowledges that culture produces winners and losers.
  - djrobstep 9y ago
    Dying in the gutter because you can't afford health insurance seems pretty miserable to me. Working at Walmart for minimum wage to make Sam Walton's useless children richer seems pretty miserable to me. There are many well proven ways to make people more equal, strong government welfare programs being one. They are very straightforward. Culture doesn't make people winners and losers, a brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism does.
    - ozy 9y ago
      You are saying one thing, but describing another. We want people to always have good opportunities to bootstrap themselves out of a terrible situation (your gutter and wallmart situations). But we don't want to remove all the rewards from turning time into value. "brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism" think you have a few opinions there that are deeply rooted in feelings ... When you are alone on an island, the world rewards you when you spend time changing things for the better (eg hunt for food). If in that situation you have the opportunity to trade you will be even better off. Things only go south when free markets also create a free labor market. Then the power of markets pushes strongly on those wages. Even if there is no evil intent by anyone, companies not ignoring this push will not be around for long ...
      - fudgepack99 9y ago
        You're pretty clueless as to the history of capitalism. From war is a racket: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10] "War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23] "The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24] General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home. http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/ http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/... Blum: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 US distribution of wealth https://imgur.com/a/FShfb https://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html The Centre for Investigative Journalism http://www.tcij.org/ http://www.tcij.org/ Some history on US imperialism by us corporations. https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/ https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-histor...
- eksemplar 9y ago
  People aren’t equal. When we invest our resources in the wrong people out society suffers because of it. We’re extremely good at investing in the wrong people. Neither way is fair, but maybe we’d be better at being unfair if we invested in the right people to lead us.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    We culturally have a problem with the inability to accurately judge, much less even tell parents what their children are capable of, or not capable of. In the end even with the best education, some people will grow up to be tow truck drivers, low skill factory workers, or service industry personal - its just how the split works out - not everyone is going to be super smart, some will be average, some will be below average, and some will give a wet bucket of sand a run for its money.
- Aloha 9y ago
  How do you ensure equal outcomes?
  - arkona 9y ago
    Keeping everyone equally poor and miserable is an easy way to achieve this
    - njarboe 9y ago
      Only way?
    - tzahola 9y ago
      Communists have been consistently achieving this in the past 100 years, so at least we know it’s possible!
- astr0n0m3r 9y ago
  Why is equality of outcomes desirable? And how is it measurable? Or sustainable?
- js8 9y ago
  I agree with you. Equality of opportunity is equality in probability. But people have only one life, and if you have only one shot, then probability of it is somewhat a useless concept.
- sidibe 9y ago
  The best goal is to have a steadily increasing minimum outcome.
kiliantics 9y ago
I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them. > "We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet," We do a good job of this now, but if you look back, there was a time not long ago when a black person playing the trumpet, no matter how well, was not seen as valuable. It took time for jazz and other cultural things to enter the mainstream and become valued by the group of people who are in power. There are already plenty of "Einsteins" out there, who got access to at least enough resources to explore their passions and express their creativity. However, they still fail to be recognised when they are invisible to people in positions of power, who may be too stuck inside their cultural framework to acknowledge them.
- bsder 9y ago
  > We do a good job of this now Actually, we don't. The fact that the best hockey players are bunched around certain birth months shows that we create these kinds of differentials.
- eighthnate 9y ago
  > I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them. Beyond the cultural disconnect and more importantly, there is a disconnect in self-interest. It isn't in the interest of those in power to level the playing field. Humans are selfish creatures. We all want our family, friends, etc to have the advantage. We want ours to always have an advantage over others. This isn't a conservative or liberal issue. It isn't bigots vs non-bigots. It's an innate human concern. Liberal parents/people want to advantage their children, families, etc over the others just as much as conservatives.
bsder 9y ago
This is unsurprising. Simply look at what it takes to win the Regeneron (nee Intel nee Westinghouse) Science Talent Search. If you don't have a lot of adult support, you aren't getting anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Searc...
thisisit 9y ago
Here's the link for original research and presentation: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_slides.pdf http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve... http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve... To use Occam's razor - this is an income inequality issue.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
What's interesting is that the great innovations of the early 20th century, weren't by a diverse group of people. Eastern European Jews (of which Einstein was a member) produced a disproportionate amount of those discoveries. This was despite the fact that they were among the most persecuted groups in history. Because of this, I don't think that US government policy is the major reason for the differences in the article.
- patkai 9y ago
  "Eastern European Jews" should be more like "motivated, liberal, hardworking and a terrific high school identifying talent early". There is a related thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684785
- vowelless 9y ago
  They were among the most repressed human being on Earth. The entire Jewish population is still recovering from the Holocaust (based on global population level). I often fear when researchers like the NYT author start conditioning on unchangeable characteristics like ethnicity and gender. It invariably implies a villain based on unchangeable characteristics like ethnicity and gender. The classification of "Jews" has been the most innovative. Should we start making laws conditioned on someone being a Jew so that's non jews can become more innovative ? Does this not sound like a bad idea? (I am trying to dodge godwins law)
- musage 9y ago
  Einstein was born in Southern Germany, with ancestors that had been there for centuries. German Wikipedia describes his family as "assimilated, non-orthodox, Jewish-German middleclass" and quotes him as being grateful to his town of birth, Ulm, for part of his character. English WP says "The Einsteins were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews", and he got the arguable most important part of his education in Switzerland where he moved to early on. He was already traveling the world and giving lectures well before the rise of the Nazis, and he "simply" didn't return to Germany when they were in power. I can't speak for him, but I would assume he would consider himself as having had a good life with ample opportunities. The Nazis simply didn't even have a chance to persecute him, if anything the FBI made a huge dossier on him for his socialist views, though even that wasn't really persecution of the kind you ascribe to him by mere association. He had plenty opportunities, he wasn't born poor and certainly not Eastern European. I can't even begin to guess where you have any of that from, but it's not from the actual life of the actual person. And if that's the only reason you think the article is mistaken, then you don't have a (valid) reason.
tpfour 9y ago
One tangential point is that earning a scholarship seems to increase your chances of winning another. I recently heard on the local news that X student had earned a prestigious scholarship, and that he had previously won multiple others. What's the use of giving away a lot of money and recognition to someone? When is is "too much"? Scholarship resources being limited, you should maybe get less chances to win another scholarship after winning one. Then you'd get more people with scholarships, and maybe some of them would get the confidence boost they need to actually perform instead of work stupid jobs. One particular case I always thought was especially unethical is for some people to win scholarships and then change branches entirely. I.e. to use the scholarship for an application to med school, or law school, or whatever other program they didn't get into.
jerkstate 9y ago
How does this jive with the Silicon Valley trope that ideas aren't worth very much in and of themselves, but the people and teams who can execute on them are?
- api 9y ago
  That trope is sort of bullshit. Both matter. It does apply when the idea is some kitschy social media thing but not so much when it's a real key innovation.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    The problem is we don't have much of a theory of innovation. Google beat AltaVista etc because of execution, not because page ranking was the most amazing invention in history. But to get to Google you need a trail of gamechanger innovations in science, physics, and math. All those innovations were created by individual geniuses armed with a pen, some paper, a brain, and maybe some discussion with other geniuses. At that level, ideas don't need to be executed with a commercial strategy and a website, because they're more abstract and far more powerful than a startup. In fact they create an envelope in which new kinds of execution become possible.
    - api 9y ago
      I'm skeptical of whether there can be a theory of innovation. Innovation means a novel movement in state space toward some new maximum in the fitness landscape. Each movement is going to be different. Each innovation is a unique thing. A theory of innovation would be like a theory of adaptation. You can say vague general things like "adaptations occur because of natural selection" but you could never formulate a theory specifying the exact sequence of concrete changes or events leading to an adaptation.
- baxtr 9y ago
  I think it’s quite dangerous to rely on such simple logic. Great ideas are not worthless and it’s not only execution that matters.
- 9y ago
lordnacho 9y ago
> We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet The number of kids who are trained in sports yet never reach the professional level is absolutely enormous, and it has far-reaching consequences for them. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-biggest-issue-boys-rejected-academies https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-bi...
- watwut 9y ago
  Those boys are all good, really. It is mostly that the number of top positions is very limited, not that they would be bad at football or lazy.
vowelless 9y ago
> I encourage you to take a moment to absorb the size of these gaps. Women, African-Americans, Latinos, Southerners, and low- and middle-income children are far less likely to grow up to become patent holders and inventors. I know the author uses patents as a proxy for innovation. But is it really a valid proxy? Do we want to maximize innovation or do we want to maximize patent holdings? Why not remove patents and construct a modern understandig of "innovation". Did Einstein even patent anything in his own name? What about his contemporaries: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger?
- john_minsk 9y ago
  While this is a great suggestion, it doesn't defeat the idea of the article.
- musage 9y ago
  Einstein did patent inventions, around 50 are known. He also worked at a patent office for 7 years. I think you still have a point, I also don't think patents necessarily equal innovation, but Einstein simply is not the best example for it.
afpx 9y ago
I didn’t even begin to understand the patent system or even the business side of innovation until I was in my late 30s. Yet, I have noticed that the most financially successful innovators that I know have had many family advisors and connections throughout their life. But, inequality is just a small piece. First, you need real education reform - educating kids on how the system operates. The current education system is broken and harmful. It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system. And, after many years, they grow up to believe that being a cog is all there is. Instead, they need to learn how the system works and how to pull its levers and press its buttons to make it work for them. But, who is going to fund that? But, even that’s not enough. Smart kids also need access to capital (‘other people’s money’ as my very rich friends call it) and connections. Having those things makes a huge difference.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  > It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system. working as intended then ?
  - fudgepack99 9y ago
    >working as intended then ? Yes... the whole of education is to make society ignorant of reality. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI Then below... Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 Manufacturing consent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM https://vimeo.com/39566117 https://vimeo.com/39566117 "Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role." Crisis of democracy http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf Education as ignorance https://chomsky.info/warfare02/ https://chomsky.info/warfare02/ Testing theories of representative government https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
tensor 9y ago
My main problem with this article and associate research is using patents as an indicator of invention. Patents are only an indicator of money, sometimes innovation, but certainly not invention. For reference, innovation is taking existing ideas and implementing or combining them well, invention is creating wholly new works. Invention is still mostly the domain of academia. Some of the big corporations can afford to fund research into true invention, but generally the risks don't make good business sense because the rate of return is so low. Innovation happens frequently in startups, but patents are still a poor measure of it. Patents mainly measure whether someone can afford the lawyers to write the applications. In my experience in software, the patents themselves are only a loose approximation of any real technology. Perhaps in mechanical sciences they are more concrete.
- guelo 9y ago
  Patents are obviously a poor proxy, even inventions are a poor proxy for social impact. But there's no reason to believe that the data would look significantly different if we were able to measure it directly.
camillomiller 9y ago
I’m a bit bothered by how society == USA, and that’s it. There’s a world outside of USA, with people inventing things and helping society. Maybe it’s time we start thinking more globally, instead we’re just at globalized thinking.
- tudorw 9y ago
  I can understand that feeling, when I clicked I thought it was going to be about somewhere else, the Sudan, or Congo maybe, those places where genius is snuffed out hour by hour.
- drewmate 9y ago
  There is certainly a place for a discussion of issues at a national level. While the Times certainly covers issues of international import, it is most likely to affect policy (or influence individuals) at the US level. In addition, while the statistics and research reflect the situation in the US, the principles are still relevant to other countries and the world as a whole. There is work to be done in strengthening social networks and role models for people everywhere. Might as well start at home (wherever that may be.)
pipio21 9y ago
Well, given that most people in the world by far live outside the U.S.A, and that people that do not have opportunities are outside the US, in my opinion the low hanging fruit for innovation is in Africa, South America and China,and India not the USA. In Africa you have kids that are not well fed and after 2 hours of intellectual work they can't continue because of the low nutrition of food!! In equatorial Africa I can't even think clearly myself because of the intense heat all year long. In India and South Asia it is worse half a year because of humidity. I seriously believe that climate has a lot to do with intellectual output, specially math is very sensitive to outside temperature. China probably has the brightest near future, but for this it has to change their culture. Innovating is breaking and changing the rules, something China is very bad at.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Intellectual Property needs to be abolished. Google: "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
cableshaft 9y ago
I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they should be working on and what is worth their time in this modern world with all sorts of crap, and most of the sciences having had a lot of the more obvious or low hanging fruit and what's left is a lot of the smaller, much harder and more expensive to prove, and potentially less interesting aspects of it (Particle Theory, String Theory, etc). Meanwhile some of the best minds of this generation are probably getting sucked into Silicon Valley or the financial industry, a lot of them to work on "yet another social network app" or a better way to trick people into giving you pennies (ads or microtransactions), or in making a slightly better trading algorithm, because that's what pays and academia doesn't come anywhere close to that (plus has all sorts of issues itself besides that). Granted we don't have nearly as much war as we've had in the past, which I'm sure did a great job of killing off all sorts of brilliant minds, so maybe it's balanced out by that a bit. I am not a genius, but I am pretty smart. I consistently scored extremely well growing up, and got put into a lot of accelerated or "gifted" programs, but once I hit the real world I stumbled and spent a lot of my career working for companies or on software that ultimately didn't go anywhere (I did a pretty good job and got paid for them, but the impact they made ended up being minimal). I've got all sorts of ideas of things I could be working on in my spare time, but nothing really stands out as being really worthwhile for society. And anyways the thing that I enjoy doing most right now is designing board and card games, something that the world probably doesn't need more of, honestly (Over a thousand games get released every single year right now, and there are a ton of really great games that come out every year, it's crazy).
lucozade 9y ago
Good God this is infuriating. The single most anomalous figure in the whole article and not one word about it. Surely, the over representation of people of Asian descent in this, and similar findings, is worthy of some analysis? I appreciate it spoils the narrative but, if people actually cared, it must make sense to look at the systemic cases that buck the trend. At the very least acknowledge it. Completely ignoring whole racial groups strikes me as somewhere between blatantly rude and racist.
- owlmirror 9y ago
  It's social science, where theories don't need to be falsifiable and data is only used to support you ideology and adapted to fit your narrative but never used to challenge some sacred a priori believes.

84 points by arikr 9y ago

Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept. Even if we somehow solve it, it would just be shuffling people up and down the ladder of an unfair system. Instead, we should be dismantling the ladder. Real equality means equality of outcomes. Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to avoid talking about real equality and its implications.

miketery 9y ago
Can you expand on what you mean but real equality?
Rainymood 9y ago
>Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept. What? So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born poor due to mere chance? >Real equality means equality of outcomes. I completely disagree. Real equality does NOT mean equality of outcomes. People have opportunities. People have choices. People make choices and these choices have real consequences. I personally do not think it's fair to force the same outcome on some college kid that binge drinks and smokes weed all day versus some college kid that studies his bum off. Imagine what this does to incentives!? >Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to avoid talking about real equality and its implications. Would you elaborate on this? I'll be honest here that I'm not too well-versed in this topic but I think it's interesting to talk about nonetheless. Full disclosure: I'm from the Netherlands where I feel there is quite some equal opportunity. Nearly every kid can go to a good primary school, high school, and any university if they try hard enough. There are little financial barriers as tuition is only 2.000/year. Contrast this to US universities if you do not have a scholarship, etc. However, the fact that everyone can go to the same university doesnt mean that everyone will end up exactly at the same place. People make choices and these choices have consequences.
- js8 9y ago
  > So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born poor due to mere chance? He explicitly wrote that no, he favors equality of outcomes.
- minipci1321 9y ago
  This educational system you describe is great, no doubt, but are you sure it offers __equal opportunity__ to every kid? In my opinion, according to family history, background etc (roughly boiling down to the income history in past 1-2-3 generations), kids won't be able to extract the same possibilities from the same conditions offered to each one: studies will be harder for some more than for others, simply because of the background, logistics etc, which will require not only working harder from someone who already does, but doing something they might not even know about: aiming higher, not compromising where others would be allowed to, having more confidence than an average kid their age, etc. I don't really know how to solve this (I think this part incumbs to family, but is that equal opportunity still?). The best thing about the system you describe that they carefully detect and extract the "nuggets" we sometimes get here. But I should thinks all educational systems nowadays do that more or less well.
yorwba 9y ago
How do you propose to measure whether two outcomes are equal? Not everyone wants the same things. How many soccer games are equivalent to a guitar?
- Radim 9y ago
  When people talk about the equality of outcomes, I am always reminded of Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. [0]: "THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal..." [0] https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
sewer_bird 9y ago
Equality of outcome's implication is a culture engaging in an authoritarian and quixotic pursuit of perfect human misery. It is hard enough to ensure a specific outcome for yourself, let alone another, and even less so to make two people come out exactly the same. Equality of opportunity at least acknowledges that culture produces winners and losers.
- djrobstep 9y ago
  Dying in the gutter because you can't afford health insurance seems pretty miserable to me. Working at Walmart for minimum wage to make Sam Walton's useless children richer seems pretty miserable to me. There are many well proven ways to make people more equal, strong government welfare programs being one. They are very straightforward. Culture doesn't make people winners and losers, a brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism does.
  - ozy 9y ago
    You are saying one thing, but describing another. We want people to always have good opportunities to bootstrap themselves out of a terrible situation (your gutter and wallmart situations). But we don't want to remove all the rewards from turning time into value. "brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism" think you have a few opinions there that are deeply rooted in feelings ... When you are alone on an island, the world rewards you when you spend time changing things for the better (eg hunt for food). If in that situation you have the opportunity to trade you will be even better off. Things only go south when free markets also create a free labor market. Then the power of markets pushes strongly on those wages. Even if there is no evil intent by anyone, companies not ignoring this push will not be around for long ...
    - fudgepack99 9y ago
      You're pretty clueless as to the history of capitalism. From war is a racket: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10] "War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23] "The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24] General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home. http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/ http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/... Blum: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 US distribution of wealth https://imgur.com/a/FShfb https://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html The Centre for Investigative Journalism http://www.tcij.org/ http://www.tcij.org/ Some history on US imperialism by us corporations. https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/ https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-histor...
eksemplar 9y ago
People aren’t equal. When we invest our resources in the wrong people out society suffers because of it. We’re extremely good at investing in the wrong people. Neither way is fair, but maybe we’d be better at being unfair if we invested in the right people to lead us.
- Aloha 9y ago
  We culturally have a problem with the inability to accurately judge, much less even tell parents what their children are capable of, or not capable of. In the end even with the best education, some people will grow up to be tow truck drivers, low skill factory workers, or service industry personal - its just how the split works out - not everyone is going to be super smart, some will be average, some will be below average, and some will give a wet bucket of sand a run for its money.
Aloha 9y ago
How do you ensure equal outcomes?
- arkona 9y ago
  Keeping everyone equally poor and miserable is an easy way to achieve this
  - njarboe 9y ago
    Only way?
  - tzahola 9y ago
    Communists have been consistently achieving this in the past 100 years, so at least we know it’s possible!
astr0n0m3r 9y ago
Why is equality of outcomes desirable? And how is it measurable? Or sustainable?
js8 9y ago
I agree with you. Equality of opportunity is equality in probability. But people have only one life, and if you have only one shot, then probability of it is somewhat a useless concept.
sidibe 9y ago
The best goal is to have a steadily increasing minimum outcome.

kiliantics 9y ago

I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them. > "We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet," We do a good job of this now, but if you look back, there was a time not long ago when a black person playing the trumpet, no matter how well, was not seen as valuable. It took time for jazz and other cultural things to enter the mainstream and become valued by the group of people who are in power. There are already plenty of "Einsteins" out there, who got access to at least enough resources to explore their passions and express their creativity. However, they still fail to be recognised when they are invisible to people in positions of power, who may be too stuck inside their cultural framework to acknowledge them.

bsder 9y ago
> We do a good job of this now Actually, we don't. The fact that the best hockey players are bunched around certain birth months shows that we create these kinds of differentials.
eighthnate 9y ago
> I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them. Beyond the cultural disconnect and more importantly, there is a disconnect in self-interest. It isn't in the interest of those in power to level the playing field. Humans are selfish creatures. We all want our family, friends, etc to have the advantage. We want ours to always have an advantage over others. This isn't a conservative or liberal issue. It isn't bigots vs non-bigots. It's an innate human concern. Liberal parents/people want to advantage their children, families, etc over the others just as much as conservatives.

bsder 9y ago

This is unsurprising. Simply look at what it takes to win the Regeneron (nee Intel nee Westinghouse) Science Talent Search. If you don't have a lot of adult support, you aren't getting anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Searc...

thisisit 9y ago

Here's the link for original research and presentation: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_slides.pdf http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve... http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve... To use Occam's razor - this is an income inequality issue.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

What's interesting is that the great innovations of the early 20th century, weren't by a diverse group of people. Eastern European Jews (of which Einstein was a member) produced a disproportionate amount of those discoveries. This was despite the fact that they were among the most persecuted groups in history. Because of this, I don't think that US government policy is the major reason for the differences in the article.

patkai 9y ago
"Eastern European Jews" should be more like "motivated, liberal, hardworking and a terrific high school identifying talent early". There is a related thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684785
vowelless 9y ago
They were among the most repressed human being on Earth. The entire Jewish population is still recovering from the Holocaust (based on global population level). I often fear when researchers like the NYT author start conditioning on unchangeable characteristics like ethnicity and gender. It invariably implies a villain based on unchangeable characteristics like ethnicity and gender. The classification of "Jews" has been the most innovative. Should we start making laws conditioned on someone being a Jew so that's non jews can become more innovative ? Does this not sound like a bad idea? (I am trying to dodge godwins law)
musage 9y ago
Einstein was born in Southern Germany, with ancestors that had been there for centuries. German Wikipedia describes his family as "assimilated, non-orthodox, Jewish-German middleclass" and quotes him as being grateful to his town of birth, Ulm, for part of his character. English WP says "The Einsteins were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews", and he got the arguable most important part of his education in Switzerland where he moved to early on. He was already traveling the world and giving lectures well before the rise of the Nazis, and he "simply" didn't return to Germany when they were in power. I can't speak for him, but I would assume he would consider himself as having had a good life with ample opportunities. The Nazis simply didn't even have a chance to persecute him, if anything the FBI made a huge dossier on him for his socialist views, though even that wasn't really persecution of the kind you ascribe to him by mere association. He had plenty opportunities, he wasn't born poor and certainly not Eastern European. I can't even begin to guess where you have any of that from, but it's not from the actual life of the actual person. And if that's the only reason you think the article is mistaken, then you don't have a (valid) reason.

tpfour 9y ago

One tangential point is that earning a scholarship seems to increase your chances of winning another. I recently heard on the local news that X student had earned a prestigious scholarship, and that he had previously won multiple others. What's the use of giving away a lot of money and recognition to someone? When is is "too much"? Scholarship resources being limited, you should maybe get less chances to win another scholarship after winning one. Then you'd get more people with scholarships, and maybe some of them would get the confidence boost they need to actually perform instead of work stupid jobs. One particular case I always thought was especially unethical is for some people to win scholarships and then change branches entirely. I.e. to use the scholarship for an application to med school, or law school, or whatever other program they didn't get into.

jerkstate 9y ago

How does this jive with the Silicon Valley trope that ideas aren't worth very much in and of themselves, but the people and teams who can execute on them are?

api 9y ago
That trope is sort of bullshit. Both matter. It does apply when the idea is some kitschy social media thing but not so much when it's a real key innovation.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  The problem is we don't have much of a theory of innovation. Google beat AltaVista etc because of execution, not because page ranking was the most amazing invention in history. But to get to Google you need a trail of gamechanger innovations in science, physics, and math. All those innovations were created by individual geniuses armed with a pen, some paper, a brain, and maybe some discussion with other geniuses. At that level, ideas don't need to be executed with a commercial strategy and a website, because they're more abstract and far more powerful than a startup. In fact they create an envelope in which new kinds of execution become possible.
  - api 9y ago
    I'm skeptical of whether there can be a theory of innovation. Innovation means a novel movement in state space toward some new maximum in the fitness landscape. Each movement is going to be different. Each innovation is a unique thing. A theory of innovation would be like a theory of adaptation. You can say vague general things like "adaptations occur because of natural selection" but you could never formulate a theory specifying the exact sequence of concrete changes or events leading to an adaptation.
baxtr 9y ago
I think it’s quite dangerous to rely on such simple logic. Great ideas are not worthless and it’s not only execution that matters.
9y ago

lordnacho 9y ago

> We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet The number of kids who are trained in sports yet never reach the professional level is absolutely enormous, and it has far-reaching consequences for them. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-biggest-issue-boys-rejected-academies https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-bi...

watwut 9y ago
Those boys are all good, really. It is mostly that the number of top positions is very limited, not that they would be bad at football or lazy.

vowelless 9y ago

> I encourage you to take a moment to absorb the size of these gaps. Women, African-Americans, Latinos, Southerners, and low- and middle-income children are far less likely to grow up to become patent holders and inventors. I know the author uses patents as a proxy for innovation. But is it really a valid proxy? Do we want to maximize innovation or do we want to maximize patent holdings? Why not remove patents and construct a modern understandig of "innovation". Did Einstein even patent anything in his own name? What about his contemporaries: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger?

john_minsk 9y ago
While this is a great suggestion, it doesn't defeat the idea of the article.
musage 9y ago
Einstein did patent inventions, around 50 are known. He also worked at a patent office for 7 years. I think you still have a point, I also don't think patents necessarily equal innovation, but Einstein simply is not the best example for it.

afpx 9y ago

I didn’t even begin to understand the patent system or even the business side of innovation until I was in my late 30s. Yet, I have noticed that the most financially successful innovators that I know have had many family advisors and connections throughout their life. But, inequality is just a small piece. First, you need real education reform - educating kids on how the system operates. The current education system is broken and harmful. It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system. And, after many years, they grow up to believe that being a cog is all there is. Instead, they need to learn how the system works and how to pull its levers and press its buttons to make it work for them. But, who is going to fund that? But, even that’s not enough. Smart kids also need access to capital (‘other people’s money’ as my very rich friends call it) and connections. Having those things makes a huge difference.

jcelerier 9y ago
> It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system. working as intended then ?
- fudgepack99 9y ago
  >working as intended then ? Yes... the whole of education is to make society ignorant of reality. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI Then below... Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349 Manufacturing consent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM https://vimeo.com/39566117 https://vimeo.com/39566117 "Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role." Crisis of democracy http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf Education as ignorance https://chomsky.info/warfare02/ https://chomsky.info/warfare02/ Testing theories of representative government https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

tensor 9y ago

My main problem with this article and associate research is using patents as an indicator of invention. Patents are only an indicator of money, sometimes innovation, but certainly not invention. For reference, innovation is taking existing ideas and implementing or combining them well, invention is creating wholly new works. Invention is still mostly the domain of academia. Some of the big corporations can afford to fund research into true invention, but generally the risks don't make good business sense because the rate of return is so low. Innovation happens frequently in startups, but patents are still a poor measure of it. Patents mainly measure whether someone can afford the lawyers to write the applications. In my experience in software, the patents themselves are only a loose approximation of any real technology. Perhaps in mechanical sciences they are more concrete.

guelo 9y ago
Patents are obviously a poor proxy, even inventions are a poor proxy for social impact. But there's no reason to believe that the data would look significantly different if we were able to measure it directly.

camillomiller 9y ago

I’m a bit bothered by how society == USA, and that’s it. There’s a world outside of USA, with people inventing things and helping society. Maybe it’s time we start thinking more globally, instead we’re just at globalized thinking.

tudorw 9y ago
I can understand that feeling, when I clicked I thought it was going to be about somewhere else, the Sudan, or Congo maybe, those places where genius is snuffed out hour by hour.
drewmate 9y ago
There is certainly a place for a discussion of issues at a national level. While the Times certainly covers issues of international import, it is most likely to affect policy (or influence individuals) at the US level. In addition, while the statistics and research reflect the situation in the US, the principles are still relevant to other countries and the world as a whole. There is work to be done in strengthening social networks and role models for people everywhere. Might as well start at home (wherever that may be.)

pipio21 9y ago

Well, given that most people in the world by far live outside the U.S.A, and that people that do not have opportunities are outside the US, in my opinion the low hanging fruit for innovation is in Africa, South America and China,and India not the USA. In Africa you have kids that are not well fed and after 2 hours of intellectual work they can't continue because of the low nutrition of food!! In equatorial Africa I can't even think clearly myself because of the intense heat all year long. In India and South Asia it is worse half a year because of humidity. I seriously believe that climate has a lot to do with intellectual output, specially math is very sensitive to outside temperature. China probably has the brightest near future, but for this it has to change their culture. Innovating is breaking and changing the rules, something China is very bad at.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

Intellectual Property needs to be abolished. Google: "Against Intellectual Monopoly"

cableshaft 9y ago

I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they should be working on and what is worth their time in this modern world with all sorts of crap, and most of the sciences having had a lot of the more obvious or low hanging fruit and what's left is a lot of the smaller, much harder and more expensive to prove, and potentially less interesting aspects of it (Particle Theory, String Theory, etc). Meanwhile some of the best minds of this generation are probably getting sucked into Silicon Valley or the financial industry, a lot of them to work on "yet another social network app" or a better way to trick people into giving you pennies (ads or microtransactions), or in making a slightly better trading algorithm, because that's what pays and academia doesn't come anywhere close to that (plus has all sorts of issues itself besides that). Granted we don't have nearly as much war as we've had in the past, which I'm sure did a great job of killing off all sorts of brilliant minds, so maybe it's balanced out by that a bit. I am not a genius, but I am pretty smart. I consistently scored extremely well growing up, and got put into a lot of accelerated or "gifted" programs, but once I hit the real world I stumbled and spent a lot of my career working for companies or on software that ultimately didn't go anywhere (I did a pretty good job and got paid for them, but the impact they made ended up being minimal). I've got all sorts of ideas of things I could be working on in my spare time, but nothing really stands out as being really worthwhile for society. And anyways the thing that I enjoy doing most right now is designing board and card games, something that the world probably doesn't need more of, honestly (Over a thousand games get released every single year right now, and there are a ton of really great games that come out every year, it's crazy).

lucozade 9y ago

Good God this is infuriating. The single most anomalous figure in the whole article and not one word about it. Surely, the over representation of people of Asian descent in this, and similar findings, is worthy of some analysis? I appreciate it spoils the narrative but, if people actually cared, it must make sense to look at the systemic cases that buck the trend. At the very least acknowledge it. Completely ignoring whole racial groups strikes me as somewhere between blatantly rude and racist.

owlmirror 9y ago
It's social science, where theories don't need to be falsifiable and data is only used to support you ideology and adapted to fit your narrative but never used to challenge some sacred a priori believes.