
The Social Origins of Inventors [pdf] - lainon
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/aghion/files/social_origins_of_inventors.pdf
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pjc50
I'm disappointed that people are getting their "agenda" retaliation in early,
disregarding most of the content of the paper.

Rather surprisingly this is limited to male (!) inventors in Finland (!),
seemingly because that was the easiest place to get a whole-population IQ
dataset in an otherwise fairly equal country. One of their conclusions is that
involvement of the father is a positive and that divorce is a negative. If
you're going to dismiss this as lefty nonsense then that is not the kind of
conclusion to expect from it.

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mathattack
Interesting paper, but they're very open about their limitations of just
running this on Finnish data. From the conclusion:

 _We plan to extend our current analysis in several directions. A first
extension is to replicate our analysis for other countries_

There are many things unique to Finland, which makes this hard to generalize.

Also - they mention the interaction between father's income and child's IQ as
a misallocation of resources. Is the implication that the parent is
misallocating resources, or that Finnish society is misallocating resources by
not funding the potential innovators who don't have wealthy dads?

~~~
fuzzfactor
Looks to me like the authors are lamenting the lack of society's resources
devoted to enabling the pursuit of innovation for those intellectually capable
whose personal resources fall below the level needed for unbroken progress
toward achievement of patents. And that's a very high level now arrived at
seemingly decently with the data they had to work with.

The paper is fascinating but to me it just confirms what should have been
obvious to any natural innovator since childhood.

Once I found out about Edison (and patents) I didn't see much purpose in
patents until after I would happen to have solid support for my efforts to
begin with. Employers and others have made millions due to my innovations, but
that was not truly solid support as long as I am still tasked with diverting
so much of my time and effort to survival activites.

If I had patented some of my most promising inventions they would have expired
by now anyway, as it is I can maintain readiness indefinitely.

It takes a great individual to overcome the kind of adversity that Edison did,
and somebody like that does not come along every day, so I am with
WalterBright on this one.

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nabla9
Economists Hyytinen, Toivanen, have been publishing some good papers with good
methodology and interesting results.

Some examples:

Public Employees as Politicians: Evidence from Close Elections, American
Political Science Review, forthcoming [with J. Meriläinen, T. Saarimaa, O.
Toivanen and J. Tukiainen]. [http://aalto-
econ.fi/toivanen/Hyytinen_Meril%C3%A4inen_Saari...](http://aalto-
econ.fi/toivanen/Hyytinen_Meril%C3%A4inen_Saarimaa_Toivanen_Tukiainen_ASPR2017.pdf)

Cartels uncovered (2017) with Ari Hyytinen and Frode Steen. American Economic
Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming. [http://aalto-
econ.fi/toivanen/HST_2017_07_07.pdf](http://aalto-
econ.fi/toivanen/HST_2017_07_07.pdf)

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cocktailpeanuts
Researchers should stop producing this type of misleading content that clearly
started out with a hypothesis driven by an agenda.

There are so many things that drive people to become what they become. Even
using the "inventor" example, not everyone whose parents are rich has desire
to invent something. If anything, it's the opposite. Most rich people are
satisfied with the world around them so they just "fit in" to the world.
There's not enough motivation for them.

The ones that do come up with world changing inventions in many cases are
outsiders. These people are not satisfied with the world around them, that's
why they invent something to fix what they think is broken.

So while I do agree that if you're too poor, you probably don't get enough
education to know what you can or cannot fix, and you probably don't have the
money to sustain yourself, I do not like what this "research" will be actually
used for--it will be used for people who want to use it as an excuse not to
invent something.

"See some Harvard researchers proved that you can't become an inventor if your
parents are not rich, my parents are not rich and look what i have become.
it's all my parent's fault! (while doing nothing but sitting around living a
pathetic life)"

If you look at a lot of people who actually achieved things that made a
difference, a lot of them were at the bottom of their lives before they
created their masterpiece. J.K. Rowling was broke when she was writing Harry
Potter. Van Gogh died before any of his art became famous. Nikola Tesla had a
sad life. Howard Schultz grew up in a housing complex before going to build
the Starbucks empire. Larry Ellison grew up in a poor family under adoptive
mother.

I don't see any value this type of research adds to society. If anything, it
will only make one more person give up her/his dream because "some Harvard
researcher said you won't become an inventor because your parents are poor."

~~~
csomar
> Researchers should stop producing this type of misleading content that
> clearly started out with a hypothesis driven by an agenda.

Don't you find that your comment is, eh, just as like the research but without
any statistical data. Anyone can have an opinion. It is very dangerous to
censor people because we disagree with them.

More dangerous to shame them for it.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Like you said, anyone should have an opinion. I shared my opinion that "they
should stop printing out this type of propaganda material disguised as
research", and that's my opinion.

When it comes to social stuff like this, I believe "statistical data" is the
weapon. Most people don't truly understand statistics so it's easy to fool the
general public just by using percentage numbers.

My point was NOT that they should have provided more statistical proof.

Instead it was that they started out with an agenda so the research was flawed
from the beginning. Just like how most research funded by cigarette companies
to prove that cigarette was OK was flawed from the beginning.

Of course, you can't get away from social agenda when it comes to social
science research, but all the real valuable social science research results
come from genuine curiosity whereas a lot of bad research results come from a
clear goal to convey their existing message.

I just can't imagine how one could have come up with the underlying hypothesis
of this paper WITHOUT starting from an agenda. If you disagree with me, please
share your thought on why you think there was absolutely no social agenda when
these people started their research.

