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Age and Great Invention
- teuobk 17y agoDirect free link to the paper from the author's site: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/AgeAndGreatInvention.pdf http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Ag...
- frossie 17y agoHey thanks for the free link, I wasn't going to pay $5 to read it, but now that I have, it would have been worth it. It is definitely an interesting analysis and the author has taken some pains to isolate confounding variables. The one thing I would have liked to see is some cross-cultural data. For example his theory is that the interval available for innovation is being reduced due to upward pressure at the low end (people take longer to get academically qualified to start "real" work) but no corresponding expansion of the upper end (just because people are starting 8 years later than they used to does not mean they keep being innovative 8 years after they used to stop). He attributes some of this to the extended training period, which means PhDs don't really get going until 31 whereas a century ago they started research at 23. But their is a large cultural diffence in this value right now. Back when I was getting my academic training, the typical age of a US PhD was 30, whereas in the UK it seemed to be 24-25 [I do not know whether this is still the case]. So if his point is that the squeeze in "fertile years" is linked with a social drop in scientific innovation, he should be able to show that in countries were the academic qualifications happen faster, those countries are more scientifically productive. But without looking up his secondary references, I have to admit to being very surprised at the thought that R&D is less productive now than it used to be (per person involved, I guess). If anybody can figure out how they measure that and in what areas of endeavour and can explain it in a few words, please do so.