Unequal opportunity in the sciences reduces scientific contributions from the most talented individuals and limits the rate of human progress. We study unequal opportunity by collecting data on the childhood SES of Nobel laureates in the sciences. The average laureate grew up in an 87–90th percentile household. Access to opportunity doubled from 1901–2023, but remains highly unequal. Barriers are higher for women, but lower for Americans. Access to opportunity across countries is much less equal, and has barely improved at all. Cities with more intergenerational mobility produce more laureates from non-elite families, and more laureates overall.
Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. We are all losing out because of this
The world needs ideas and innovation to make progress. Creative and talented people are everywhere, but the opportunity to develop is limited to only a small number of well-off children. The world loses out as a result.
Shifting the Level of Selection in Science
Criteria for recognizing and rewarding scientists primarily focus on individual contributions. This creates a conflict between what is best for scientists’ careers and what is best for science. In this article, we show how the theory of multilevel selection provides conceptual tools for modifying incentives to better align individual and collective interests. A core principle is the need to account for indirect effects by shifting the level at which selection operates from individuals to the groups in which individuals are embedded. This principle is used in several fields to improve collective outcomes, including animal husbandry, team sports, and professional organizations. Shifting the level of selection has the potential to ameliorate several problems in contemporary science, including accounting for scientists’ diverse contributions to knowledge generation, reducing individual-level competition, and promoting specialization and team science. We discuss the difficulties associated with shifting the level of selection and outline directions for future development in this domain.
annotations: Institutions et prospérité : zoom sur les travaux des lauréats du Nobel 2024
Blog de sciences économiques et sociales de Martin Anota. Traductions, revues de presse.
Unequal Scientific Recognition in the Age of LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how scientific knowledge is accessed and represented. This study evaluates the extent to which popular and frontier LLMs including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro recognize scientists, benchmarking their outputs against OpenAlex and Wikipedia. Using a dataset focusing on 100,000 physicists from OpenAlex to evaluate LLM recognition, we uncover substantial disparities: LLMs exhibit selective and inconsistent recognition patterns. Recognition correlates strongly with scholarly impact such as citations, and remains uneven across gender and geography. Women researchers, and researchers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are significantly underrecognized. We further examine the role of training data provenance, identifying Wikipedia as a potential sources that contributes to recognition gaps. Our findings highlight how LLMs can reflect, and potentially amplify existing disparities in science, underscoring the need for more transparent and inclusive knowledge systems.
How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers
We argue that contemporary scientific systems progressively constrain high-risk and conceptually innovative research while being increasingly structured around short funding cycles, productivity-based evaluation criteria and risk-averse frameworks that favour predictable and non-transformative research outputs. Drawing on recent empirical literature, we show how such systems can place disproportionate pressure on early-career researchers by incentivizing safe, tractable and easily evaluated outputs. Structural academic mechanisms such as peer review and funding, escalating publication costs and institutional inequalities interact with precarious employment and hierarchical dependencies. In this environment, we contend that strategic conformity becomes a rational career path. This risks suppressing creativity and critical thinking precisely at the stage when scientific independence could otherwise emerge. Consequently, the probability of substantive contributions by early-career researchers is declining, while talent may increasingly abandon academia or cluster within a limited number of well-resourced institutions and national systems. By adopting a systems-level perspective, we argue that scientific creativity is not merely an individual trait but an emerging property of a supportive academic landscape and that maintaining or restoring it may require substantial structural reforms. These include promoting stable research pathways, decentralized decision-making and evaluation frameworks that better recognize collaboration, originality, persistence and nonlinear career trajectories. Without systemic change, we risk stifling the potential of early-career researchers to go beyond the confines of existing methods and approaches and deliver transformative advances. This would limit their capacity to meaningfully change our understanding of the world or benefit society, with impacts that fall short of their potential.
This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists
The rise of randomised controlled trials looks to some like a retreat from the biggest questions
Meet the Big if True Science Accelerator Americas Cohort — Renaissance Philanthropy – A brighter future for all through science, technology, and innovation
Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big if True Science (BiTS) Accelerator has launched our Americas cohort, with support from Coefficient Giving . After a highly competitive international selection process, we're delighted to introduce the 14 exceptional scientists and innovators in this cohort. Selecte
Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We review published papers and synthesize developmental ...
The Nobel for Econsplaining
Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson won a prize for applying economics to the very things economics is inherently bad at figuring out
The Human Infrastructure of Open Science: Why Mentorship Matters More Than Ever
The transformation of academia into a more open and inclusive ecosystem depends not only on new policies or technologies but also on a fundamental shift in how we nurture early-career researchers through mentorship. This values resilience and integrity as much as productivity. Introduction In the vast, often complex, competitive, and
Beyond Articles: Rethinking Diamond Open Access for a Data-Driven Research Future | CODATA Blog
What would it take for Diamond OA to evolve into a holistic, equitable, and data-rich scholarly ecosystem — one that meaningfully includes early-career researchers?
Welcome To Science in the News a Graduate Student Group at Harvard GSAS.
There are no events matching your query to show. Deep Dives into Topics that Matter Our contributing authors present well researched articles on scientific topics…
Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality | Jo Littler
From Theresa May to Donald Trump, our leaders sell it as a utopian system of fairness – but ‘merit’ has been manipulated to privilege the wealthy
The long-run effects of affirmative action bans
Recent national affirmative action ban could worsen earnings inequality across racial and ethnic groups among women, while having relatively little impact on men
A large gender gap persists in STEM disciplines across the world that is bad for innovation, talent attraction & against fairness principles. On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, @ansolassen.bsky.social @cairosofie.bsky.social @valentinatartari.bsky.social are sharing our findings ⬇️
