Wasted talent:
The evils of systemic racism and gender bias are not only hugely
destructive to individuals and to society, they’re crippling the US’s
capacity to innovate, harming its prosperity. We’re missing out on
countless valuable inventions.
Lisa Cook, an economist at Michigan State, has done
ground-breaking work in documenting and explaining the damage.
Here’s her recent testimony to Congress (pdf) on the topic. It’s also well worth listening to
a talk she gave last week
(video) as she asks: “what are we missing out on?” The answer,
according to her research, is that US GDP per capita would be 0.6% to
4.4% higher if more women and African Americans were part of the
innovation economy.
Particularly disturbing are the findings from Cook’s historical look at
inventions by African Americans from 1870 to 1940 (pdf); in it, she details how the rising ethnic and political violence of the early 20
th
century, including the Tulsa race massacre in 1921, destroyed the
fledging patent activity in the Black community after 1900. To me, her
most shocking finding is this: 1899 is still the peak year for African
American patents per capita.
NPR’s Planet Money did a great interview with Cook earlier this month in which
she explains both the motivation and challenges of the
research (let’s just say, the patent data was hard to find) and the
years it took to get the research accepted and published by an economic
journal despite the support of several leading economists.
Cook’s findings are consistent with other recent research quantifying
how a lack of opportunities for women, minorities, and children from
low-income families is hurting innovation. MIT economist John Van Reenen
and his colleagues call the possible inventors that never had a chance
to fulfill their potential the “lost Einsteins.” They calculate that US
innovation could
quadruple if people from these groups became inventors at the same rate as men from high-income families. Van Reenen and his colleagues published the findings a couple years ago, but it’s worth going back
to the 2018 paper (pdf), as well as watching
this presentation Van Reenen gave, which was posted just last week.
Despite the evidence that it’s important to cast a wide, inclusive net
for talented and brilliant innovators, the US seems to be going in
exactly the opposite direction with the government’s ongoing effort to
block immigration, including high-skilled workers. There has been plenty written on the personal and economic pain that policy is producing, but it’s also worth noting
the destruction it will cause to the country’s ability to innovate.
One of the clearest examples of the kind of damage we’re talking about
comes from the think-tank MacroPolo, at the Paulson Institute in
Chicago. Its data breaks down where
top-tier AI researchers come from and where they work:
29% are Chinese while just 20% are American, but 59% of these top AI
researchers work in the US. Immigration is plainly the lifeblood of AI
research in America.
It really doesn’t matter how you do the math, a healthy innovation
system depends on recruiting the most talented people. Whether you call
them lost Einsteins—or, as Lisa Cook likes to refer to them, lost
Katherine Johnsons—excluding
people because they’re female or Black or from China or from Guatemala
for that matter is not only stupid and wrong, it’s limiting the
country’s prosperity and economic growth.
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