From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
by Steve Sailer
December 06, 2017
Should white men be blamed or thanked for inventing most of the technology that makes our lives better?A new study by Stanford economist Raj Chetty exploiting his unique access to your old 1040 tax returns argues that the massive gaps in inventiveness (as measured by patents) seen among the races, the sexes, and the regions of the country represent a tragic case of what he calls “Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing”:
High-scoring black kids and Hispanic kids go into innovation at incredibly low rates…. There must be many “lost Einsteins” in those groups—children who appear to have been similarly able at a young age to their white and Asian peers but who never got a chance to deploy their skills.
By the way, it’s unclear why Chetty’s study of inventors is entitled “Lost Einsteins” rather than “Lost Edisons.” Chetty, who sometimes seems not all that familiar with his adoptive country, appears to have gotten the European scientific theorist Albert Einstein (who, although he once worked in a patent office, was not much of an inventor) confused with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (whose name is on 1,093 U.S. patents).
Read the whole thing there.
Here, by the way, are Chetty’s slides, his paper, and an NYT article.
[Comment at Unz.com]
