Creative Careers: The Life Cycles of Nobel Laureates in Economics

Abstract

The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Age dynamics in scientific creativity

“…One line of age-creativity research has emphasized that abstract/ deductive contributions tend to come at earlier ages than inductive contributions, which draw more heavily on accumulated knowledge (11,12). Kuhn (14) points to the role of theoretical contributions like Heisenberg's in this episode.…”

“…Further work is needed to assess causal mechanisms underlying these empirical relationships and consider alternative forces, possibly emanating from the norms and institutions of science or the scale of the scientific enterprise (20,21). Notably, the dynamics in age at great achievement, prevalence of theory, PhD age, and mean citation age are especially pronounced in physics and are coincident with the development quantum mechanics, which Kuhn placed at the center of his analysis of scientific revolutions (12,22). The findings thus may provide candidate, quantitative markers to help identify such revolutionary events, providing an intriguing direction for future research.…”

“…Second, this article shows that these age dynamics are closely associated with several observable metrics. This analysis draws together two strands of work on the age-creativity relationship, which have only been studied separately in prior work, including our own: (i) how the training requirements related to acquiring foundational knowledge may explain the age at which scientific careers begin (9,10), and (ii) the distinction between conceptual and experimental work in explaining creative peaks across the life cycle (11,12). Although we do not identify causal mechanisms, we show that measures drawn from this prior work, in addition to a measure of foundational knowledge based on backward citation ages, all move in a striking and intuitive way with shifts in the tendency for scientific contributions by the young.…”

Mortality and immortality: The Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity

“…First, the longer a scientist lives, the greater the chance of stumbling upon a major discovery. Weinberg and Galenson (2005) Cox (1972). This allows us to control for heterogeneities between the two Prizes and across countries, as well as for possible sources of status other than winning a Nobel Prize.…”

Mortality and Immortality

“…Even if scientists are thought to sequentially explore new ideas, some of which turn out to be good and others less so, the longer this process is allowed to continue the more chance any scientist has of stumbling upon a major discovery. Weinberg & Galenson (2005) suggest that this is especially the case for scientists who work inductively, accumulating knowledge from experience, for they tend to write their best works later in their careers than do scientists who work deductively from abstract principles. Second, there is a variable lag, in some cases large, between the award of a Nobel Prize and the completion of the work for which it is awarded.…”