One of the most troubling problems of our time is why intellectual progress is stalling. Governments and corporations throw vast resources at knowledge-creation and yet intellectual breakthroughs are getting rarer and innovations punier. A 2011 study of US data on creativity and originality came to a devastating conclusion: “The results indicate creative thinking is declining over time among Americans of all ages, especially in kindergarten through third grade. The decline is steady and persistent.”
Commentators have suggested various explanations for why this is happening, from rising inequality to the sheer accumulation of knowledge. None of them is convincing: The late 19th century combined high degrees of inequality with extraordinary intellectual creativity, while the accumulation of knowledge surely provides ingenious people with more material to play with. Here is a more straightforward explanation: We’re not producing enough geniuses.
Geniuses are the driving force of intellectual and cultural progress. They come up with the great ideas that improve productivity as well as the great cultural creations that make life worth living. Societies that treat geniuses well, such as 15th century Florence or 18th century England, forge ahead. Societies that treat them badly, like 18th century Spain or Mao Zedong’s China, stagnate. This is even more true in a knowledge-intensive society that depends on its ability to generate ideas rather than to produce things. Yet the modern world is increasingly falling into the latter category.
We like to think that we are better at cultivating and providing for geniuses than previous societies — we have constructed a universal school system to ensure that everybody can acquire the rudiments of education and a mass university system to push back the frontiers of knowledge.
Yet the educational system is doing a bad job of discovering and fostering geniuses. To start with, it misses potential stars from poorer backgrounds — a problem that the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Stanford University have dubbed the “lost Einstein” problem. America’s top universities are becoming finishing schools for the rich (modified by affirmative action for favored minorities) rather than intellectual powerhouses: Harvard is typical of elite universities in that it takes more students from the top 2% of income earners than from the bottom 50%.
The geniuses who decide to make academia their home are then crushed under the weight of academic and administrative tedium, forced to crawl along the frontier of knowledge with a magnifying glass in order to get a Ph.D. and then obliged to publish whatever they can in learned journals if they want to get tenure. (They also have to steer clear of controversial subjects if they don’t want their careers to go up in flames.)
If they get tenure, they are obliged to spend their most intellectually fertile years teaching basic courses, marking “quizzes” and dealing with missives from the ever-expanding army of bureaucrats that universities are hiring faster than they are hiring professors. If they fail to get tenure, they are condemned to become academic nomads, hopping from one-short term contract to another. We have inadvertently produced a formula for genius destruction: Ignore the numerous Einsteins from the lower classes and then take the Einsteins that you do discover and turn them into drudges.
Pre-modern societies with rudimentary education systems certainly missed even more hidden Einsteins — or Jude the Obscures — but they may have done a better job of providing the geniuses they discovered with no-strings-attached billets. Kings and aristocrats furnished favored intellectuals with comfortable sinecures. Frederick II, king of Denmark and Norway from 1559 to 1588, provided the astronomer Tycho Brahe with a guaranteed income for life, a 2,000-acre island and enough additional money to build a Uraniborg, or heavenly castle, to act as a home and an observatory. New men such as the Medicis established themselves on the social scene by acting as even greater friends to genius than blue bloods.
Churches provided favored intellectuals with perches that combined comfortable livings with minimum requirements: Jonathan Swift wrote his masterpieces while he was a dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. From the early-19th century onward, Oxbridge colleges offered prize or examination fellowships to brilliant young men without even imposing the obligation of residence. This genius-first attitude survived well into the 20th century: Cambridge gave Ludwig Wittgenstein a professorship even though he published little and refused to do any administration or teach anybody but a few chosen pupils. It is impossible to imagine him getting tenure today.
There have been several innovative attempts to deal with the growing genius problem, particularly in the United States. In 1933, Harvard University created a Society of Fellows to provide its most brilliant graduate students with a chance to escape from the Ph.D. grind and give them the freedom to think — “ Freedom from Harvard at Harvard ” in the words of one of its beneficiaries, Edward Tenner. In 1981, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation introduced “genius awards” which provided 20 to 30 outstanding individuals with no-strings attached payments (currently $800,000 over five years) so that they can devote themselves to their work. In 2011, Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire, invented “stop out” grants whereby 20 to 25 high-school graduates are paid to delay going to university for a couple of years and instead focus on starting a business, doing independent research or solving a social problem.
These ideas have all had a positive impact. Harvard Fellows include such intellectual luminaries as B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky. MacArthur award winners are objects of jealousy and awe across the American elite. The combined market capitalization of firms created by Thiel fellows is already more than $ 45 billion.