A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm).

Un articolo pubblicato il 21 dicembre scorso su Dallas News parla della crescita delle disuguaglianze nella metropoli texana e di come queste costituiscano un pericolo per l’economia dell’area e quindi un problema anche per la fetta più ricca della popolazione. Di particolare interesse – a parte l’analisi di Sean Reardon, professore della Stanford Univeristy – i risultati di una ricerca condotta da un team di studiosi guidato dall’economista dell’Università di Harvard Alex Bell:

Consider the research by Harvard economist Alex Bell and his team. This month, they published a massive study of more than a million patent-holders in America, trying to find out what conditions the nation’s innovators and inventors had in common as children. Unsurprisingly, children of the very rich were much more likely to produce patents. But they also found that poverty in general worked against an area’s overall likelihood that kids grow up to be inventors. In Dallas County, for instance, there are a lot of very wealthy parents. But the county ranks 16th among the 20 largest when it comes to producing kids who would go on to be highly cited patent-holders.

The researchers have called these kids America’s “Lost Einsteins.”

“We find that bright kids — who have the talent to innovate — are not doing so because of barriers related to family background,” Bell said in an interview. “That is a problem society at large should care about because innovation is viewed as a driver of economic growth.”