Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?

Where does talent come from? Trying to answer this question, I looked at the backgrounds of all Nobel laureates in Physics in years 1901-1925 and 2000-2009.

1901-1925 Nobel laureates in Physics

2000-2009 Nobel laureates in Physics

Do remember that most parents of 2000-2009 laureates were born in early and mid-20th century, when being a high school teacher or a civil servant were completely different professions from today, in terms of prestige.

Conclusion

Where does talent come from?

I hope to have gone though enough laureates to alleviate any concerns about cherry-picking.

• Out of 30 Nobel laureates in Physics between 1901 and 1925 only one laureate’s father did something manual for a living
  • Johannes Diderik van der Waals’ father was a carpenter
• Out of 28 Nobel laureates in Physics between 2000 and 2009 only one laureate’s father did something manual for a living
  • Carl Edwin Wieman’s father was a sawyer. Even in this case, this job was only for a number of years and Carl’s grandfather was a famous theologian at the University of Chicago

Here are possible conclusions you can take from this data:

• The problem is access: money and resources give vastly better access to education and opportunity
• The problem is ability: intelligence is largely inherited and smart parents will have smart children

I’m glad to have confirmed whichever of these you believed prior to reading this post.

Appendix: my ancestry

I don’t claim to be a genius but I’m always curious about other people’s relatives and my own family tree is rather interesting:

• My paternal grandparents were both PhDs in Chemistry and accomplished scientists: grandfather was a professor at Moscow State University and held many patents; grandmother worked in the Academy of Sciences, developing alloys for spacecrafts
  • My dad holds a PhD in Math from Moscow State University
• My maternal grandparents were both born in small villages, hundreds of kilometers away from Moscow; grandmother was an electrician; grandfather was a construction worker
  • My mom finished a no-name Moscow university with a degree in Statistics
• A second degree relative of mine (relatedness of 1/4) has schizophrenia; another second degree relative has a generalized anxiety disorder

Appendix: Sam Walton, J. K. Rowling, and John D. Rockefeller

Sam Walton

• His father worked as a banker, a farmer, a farm-loan appraiser, an agent for both insurance and real estate and then worked for his brother’s Walton Mortgage Company, which was an agent for Metropolitan Life Insurance
  • i.e. their close relatives were affluent
• His mother started college and then dropped out to start a family. Sam Walton was born in 1918. This means that his mother started college no later than 1917. The earliest statistics I could find shows that in 1940, 3.8% of women completed four years of college or more. In 1910s-20s this figure was probably 1-2%. Walton’s mother would have been in this group, had she not met his father

J. K. Rowling

• Her father was a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer
• Her mother was a a science technician

John D. Rockefeller

• His grandfather was a farmer and businessman
• His grandmother was a former schoolteacher (how many schoolteachers were around in early 19th century?)
• His father “loaned money to farmers at twelve percent, but tried to lend to farmers who could not pay so as to foreclose and take the farms” and also “was known to buy and sell horses”, which seems to require to have some money around

Further reading

When winning a Nobel Prize seems to run in the family:

… there are at least seven parent–child pairs of Nobel laureates.

Four of these were in physics: the Thomsons (J. J. in 1906 and George in 1937), Braggs (William and Lawrence together in 1915), Bohrs (Niels in 1922 and his son Aage in 1975) and Siegbahns (Manne in 1924 and his son Kai in 1981). Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie both won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911 and 1935), after Marie and her husband, Pierre, had won the physics Nobel in 1903.

The Kornbergs branched out more (Arthur, physiology or medicine, 1959; Roger, chemistry, 2006), as did Hans von Euler-Chelpin (chemistry, 1929) and his son Ulf von Euler (physiology or medicine, 1970).

Compound Interest Is The Least Powerful Force In The Universe:

The descendants of rich people tend to stay rich even three hundred years later. For example, Gregory Clark looked at social mobility in Sweden. A famously mobile society, Sweden is also a good place to study social mobility since nobles and commoners had different last names back when the feudal system was in place around 1700. Non-nobles are forbidden to change to noble-sounding surnames even today, so names should be a fossil record of who’s descended from the really rich people.

Clark found that among highly-educated well-paying professions like doctors and lawyers, people with aristocratic surnames are represented around four to six times the level expected by chance. He uses this to describe a statistic “b” signifying the rate of regression to the mean with each generation.

Bernoulli family (a)