Inventors Are More Likely to Come From High-Income Families

Aaron Hertzmann, who is now a principal scientist at Adobe Systems, has eight patents. He grew up in Palo Alto, where he had a computer before he was 10 years old. He had a lot of exposure to inventors as a child—his father was a “tinkerer,” Hertzmann told me, and his stepfather was an academic in the field of computer science. “He exposed me to approaching math as something to explore, rather than it just being a homework assignment,” Hertzmann said, about his stepfather. Hertzmann and his mother would tag along to his stepfather’s conferences in places like Greece, meeting other academics and hearing them talk about their work. From that, the idea bloomed in Hertzmann’s mind that academia, and specifically math and science, were areas where he could have an impact. When he graduated from college, his stepfather guided him along the process of applying to study for a Ph.D. Hertzmann, now 43, has a Ph.D. in computer science, and develops new ideas and algorithms at the intersection of art and computer science.

Indeed, exposure to certain specific fields makes children more likely to pursue a career, and a patent, in those fields, the researchers found. This is how they know that exposure, in addition to neighborhoods, is important to innovation: It would be unlikely that growing up in a good neighborhood would inspire many children to patent in the same small field. People who grew up in Minneapolis, where there are many medical-device manufacturers, were especially likely to get patents in medical devices, for instance. Among people living in Boston as adults, those who grew up in Silicon Valley were especially likely to patent in computers. Children whose parents have patents in a specific field—say, antennas—are also likely to patent in exactly the same field as their parents did.

Women who grew up in an area where women held a higher share of patents in a certain field were more likely to themselves get patents in that area when they grew up. Strikingly, it was especially important for children to see people who looked like them as innovators for them to pursue the same career path—girls in an area with a lot of male innovators wouldn’t necessarily envision themselves in the same career, while boys would. If girls were as exposed to female inventors as boys are to male inventors, the gender gap between male and female inventors would fall by half, the researchers estimate. (They find that 82 percent of 40-year-old inventors today are male.)

These findings have big implications for the state of the U.S. economy, which has seen innovation decline in recent decades. Innovation is often measured by what’s known as “total factor productivity,” which essentially tracks advances that have been made in using existing resources to increase output. Prior to 1973, total factor productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.9 percent—but since then, that growth rate has fallen to 0.7 percent, according to the Brookings Institution. Innovation is central to economic growth, Chetty says. About half of U.S. annual GDP growth is attributed to innovation. Innovation, says Chetty, is what allows people to live richer, healthier, and more productive lives.