Wasted Youth
THE SOURCE: “Age and Great Invention” by Benjamin F. Jones, in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Feb. 2010.
THE SOURCE: “Age and Great Invention” by Benjamin F. Jones, in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Feb. 2010.
Albert Einstein was not yet 30 when he published a series of papers that forever changed what we know about matter, space, and time. Though Einstein was unusually young to be making career-capping discoveries, most of the last century’s great innovators weren’t much older when they made theirs, typically in their late thirties or early forties. “Great innovations are the [province] of the young,” writes Benjamin F. Jones of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. But perhaps not for long, Jones finds. Over the course of the 20th century, the mean age at which scientists made their great achievements rose by about six years.