From the
NY Times.
Not surprisingly, children who excelled in math were far more likely to become inventors. But being a math standout wasn’t enough. Only the top students who also came from high-income families had a decent chance to become an inventor.
This fact may be the starkest: Low-income students who are among the very best math students — those who score in the top 5 percent of all third graders — are no more likely to become inventors than below-average math students from affluent families: (see chart)
“There are great differences in innovation rates,” Chetty said. “Those differences don’t seem to be due to innate ability to innovate.” Or as Steve Case — the entrepreneur who’s now investing in regions that venture capital tends to ignore — told me when I called him to discuss the findings: “Creativity is broadly distributed. Opportunity is not.”
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(Val's opinion) If anything, I think the study understates the problem because it doesn't touch on an educational environment that measures "learning outcomes" with industrial metrics (high-stakes bubble tests), or on risk aversion in funding, and other problems that come into play at universities.
