Preprint of a new paper examining the material conditions that give rise to internationally recognized scientists just came out. The authors argue that if we were actually recognizing and nurturing scientific talent, we’d expect the family income distribution of Nobel laureates to be roughly normal (i.e. most Nobel winners would come from families with incomes around the 50th percentile). Their results very much do not bear this out: the average Nobel winner grew up in a household in the about the 90th percentile of income no matter where they grew up, with disproportionately large numbers coming from the 95th percentile and up. This strongly suggests that academic achievement, especially at the highest levels, is not a meritocracy, but rather limited by the material conditions of birth.
I know, but the size of the effect is really staggering.
Insert quote about countless potential geniuses dying in toil and poverty here.
It’s the epigraph to the paper itself, to their credit.
Honestly one of the most fundamental grievances I have with the world, human potential is so so so so much more than what exists now
Just look at the richest and most powerful men in the world (yes, it’s pretty much all men at the top of the top) and what fucking ignorant manchildren most of them are. That’s supposedly our most meritous and productive bunch.
Kings Midas rule over us all, the telos of every system they touch is reoriented towards gold
“Reality Distortion Field” was first used (outside of a science fiction show, anyway) for one employee to describe the effect that Steve Jobs had when he showed up and was being a gaslighting asshole in any given Apple office. He was definitely a particularly smelly dirty-fingernailed
“I cannot stink, as I never eat meat and am enlightened. Showering actually makes you stink. I think you smell bad because you ate a hamburger and took a shower. Please excuse me while I scream at this 9 year old.”
- Rev. Stephan Jobes, Esq.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
- Stephen Jay Gould
This reminded me of an exception to this which is the portuguese communist writer Jose Saramago, he grew up very poor and won the nobel prize in literature 25 years ago TODAY!
Here’s a quote from when he visited Palestine
During the Second Intifada, while visiting Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago said that “what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz … A sense of impunity characterizes the Israeli people and its army. They have turned into rentiers of the Holocaust.” In an essay he wrote expanding on his views, Saramago wrote of Jews: “educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted . . . on everyone else . . . will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.”
You’re telling me that those who were born into a headstart and didn’t have to live through the struggle of their parents, did better than others? Wow, what a find!
I think this is significant for two reasons. First, the size of the effect: I think we’d all have guessed that it would skew pretty heavily toward the top of the income distribution, but the degree to which it is skewed to the very, very top is still pretty staggering. Second, I think there’s still a popular perception–both among the general public and parts of the scientific establishment itself–that science is the ultimate meritocracy: it doesn’t care about who you are or where you come from so long as you’re smart and interested in The Truth. This blows that narrative out of the water, which is a good thing.
Anyone who believes that narrative is a complete rube
roughly normal
Roughly uniform you mean? Most people aren’t near the 50th percentile, there’s the same number of people in the 45th to 55th percentiles as the 0th to 10th and 90th to 100th.
I know, but the size of the effect is really staggering.
Honestly, not really. I think it’s less about wealth directly as it is about the overly particular academic path. I think there is high heritibility among professors because their kids get a much better idea of how to become a professor, and have a built-in network. There’s probably a similar trend with lawyers and doctors.
I hope the person who did this study gets an ig nobel.
Also I would love to see this same study done on ig nobel winners
To be honest, you could replicate this same graph for everything and anything in life. To me personally, it really isn’t news, neither is the size of the effect. Social mobility in western society is insanely low (and honestly not amazing anywhere). :same-graph:
However, this fact really does need to be hammered into peoples’ heads: Even if you only care about meritocracy, capitalism is an awful system as we’re clearly denying ~90% of potential achievers from achieving by allowing this kind of inequality. The wealth you’re born into is the biggest indicator of success in life, to such an insane degree that it’s borderline the ONLY indicator of your chance of success in life.
Even revolutionary leaders are most typically bourgeoisie-born class traitors. Turns out having food, education, stable family, reliable shelter and healthcare, and opportunities in life really, really helps.
I would like to see the same graph for The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Holy shit. This is supposed to be a bell curve, and it looks like this. Grim.
It is actually supposed to look like a uniform distribution as percentile-to-percentile diagram.
