Smithsonian.com:
Expose talented kids from low-income families to inventors and they're more likely to invent
25 January 2018
...Our first finding is that there are large differences in innovation rates by socioeconomic class, race and gender. Using new de-identified data that allows us to track 1.2 million inventors from birth to adulthood, we found that children born to parents in the top 1 percent of the income distribution are 10 times as likely to become inventors as those born to parents in the bottom half. Similarly, white children are three times as likely to become inventors as are black children. Only 18 percent of the youngest generation of inventors are female. Although the gender gap narrows somewhat each year, at the current rate of convergence, we won’t see gender balance until next century.
Good (magazine)
How smart kids from low-income families become America's 'lost Einsteins'
by Xavier Jaravel, Raj Chetty, John Van Reenen and Alexander Bell
Innovation is widely viewed as the engine of economic growth.
To maximize innovation and growth, all our brightest youth should have the opportunity to become inventors. But a study we recently conducted, jointly with Neviana Petkova of the U.S. Treasury, paints a different picture. We found that a child’s potential for future innovation seems to have as much to do with the circumstances of their family background as it does with their talent.
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How talented kids from low-income families become America's 'lost Einsteins'
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How smart kids from low-income families become America's 'lost Einsteins'
Related publications
‘Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation’, Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen, mimeo, December 2017
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf