A new study supports the idea that youth and innovation are less interlinked than we believe.
In India, even as we prize the wisdom presumably accumulated by those with years of life experience, we simultaneously valorise youth for its own sake. Especially in politics, both political parties and commentators embrace the increasingly fashionable fiction that a young country necessarily needs younger leaders, and that our politicians’ advancing years are to blame for the system’s real and imagined lack of dynamism.
In this context, a recent US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study of the nexus between age and scientific insight supports the hypothesis that the exuberance and energy that is required by innovation is not, in fact, the sole province of youth.
The NBER paper finds that though the dominant accounting of genius and creativity believes both to bear the imprimatur of youth, most pioneering contributions are made when scientists are in their late 30s and 40s and decidedly middle-aged, not as precocious teenagers or upstart 20-somethings.
The study also suggests that as the 20th century progressed, innovators actually peaked somewhat later in life, partly because there is so much more for them to learn. The sweet spot for genius also apparently varies depending on the field of work: creativity tends to peak earlier in abstract fields like art or physics, while it is much later for fields with greater context, such as history.
The paper also substantiates economist David Galenson’s work distinguishing between conceptual and experimental innovators. Conceptual innovators make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines and produce their breakthrough work when younger, while experimental innovators embark on a life of trial and error, accumulating knowledge while tinkering with established ideas. If anything, great politicians, to return to the earlier example, would belong in the latter category.
For them, age really is just a number.
