Lost Einsteins and the lab down the hall

A team of economists linked the patent records of 1.2 million American inventors to their tax records and their childhood test scores. They wanted to know who becomes an inventor.¹

Family income came first. Children from families in the top 1 percent were ten times as likely to hold a patent as children from families below the median. The researchers checked whether ability explained it. It explained little. Among children with the same high math scores in third grade, the children from rich families went on to invent far more often.¹

What did explain it was exposure. Children who grew up around inventors, in their family or their neighborhood, became inventors at higher rates, and in the same fields as the adults around them. The authors call the children who never got that exposure "lost Einsteins."¹

The same pattern in college

College repeats the pattern. At the twelve Ivy-Plus colleges, more students come from the top 1 percent of family income than from the entire bottom half.² But the same data holds a second finding. Low-income and high-income students who attend the same college end up earning about the same.² The college works for a student who can use what it offers.

Where a lab comes in

For a student, a research lab is the closest thing to growing up around inventors. It is where a student sees how a question becomes an experiment and how an experiment becomes a paper. It is exposure, delivered late, and it is still open at nineteen.

It is also mostly unpaid. The students who most need the exposure are the ones least able to work for free. That is the gap we fund. Read about research and economic opportunity.

Sources

1. Bell A, Chetty R, Jaravel X, Petkova N, Van Reenen J. Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2019;134(2):647-713. Free version: NBER Working Paper 24062. nber.org
2. Chetty R, Friedman JN, Saez E, Turner N, Yagan D. Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility. NBER Working Paper 23618, 2017. Published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020. nber.org

Sources checked September 21, 2026. See every source we cite.