Q. Your blog for Psychology Today is called Finding the Next Einstein. Describe your quest.
I wanted to explore the idea that the quest for another Einstein—someone who would forever alter our society in the way that he did— is incredibly important, because of the potential implications. Through my blog, I connect the latest findings in the fields of Psychology and Education to what is going on in the world. I also advocate for gifted kids—especially financially-disadvantaged ones—who, to a large degree, are currently ignored in the American school system.
I’m continually amazed at how the study of talent crosses so many boundaries. For example, my conversation with David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, highlights the amazing similarities between talent development in sports and in the realms of education and work. I credit my blogging and writing with helping me connect and learn from groups well outside of academia, especially from the business world. So much incredible thinking and innovation occurs outside of each narrow discipline.
Q. In your research you recently investigated, ‘Who becomes a member of the global elite?’ What were your key findings?
I focused on three groups of people: billionaires, the most powerful people according to Forbes magazine, and World Economic Forum attendees. This most recent paper built on my previous work on the U.S. elite, which looked at billionaires, Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, senators, and House members, and expanded the investigation to global elite groups. My sample included over 4,000 people, and my goal was to determine the degree to which educational selectivity and brainpower factored in the backgrounds of people who have attained positions of leadership in society.
One key finding was that the people who control our society are extremely smart, and many of them went to elite schools all over the world. Within the U.S., for example, individuals in the top 1% with respect to ability were highly overrepresented at 45 times base-rate expectations among billionaires, 56 times among powerful females, 85 times among powerful males, and 65 times among Davos participants. And overall, even within self-made billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs, higher education and brainpower was connected to higher wealth and compensation.
These findings indicate many things, but I’ll just highlight a couple of them here. We still see news stories glamourizing college dropouts who end up highly successful—with standouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. But what these articles tend to leave out is that Gates and Zuckerberg had already been accepted to and attended Harvard, so they had access to those networks.
In addition, it’s not clear whether personal traits such as their phenomenal brainpower and personal drive—which existed well before they started college—were the key reason they became so successful. So, on the one hand, you have people like Peter Thiel saying ‘college is not that important’, but on the other hand, it turns out that Thiel himself—who has more than one Stanford degree—as well as the majority of the global elite attended highly selective schools.
At least for the people who currently control and lead the world, an elite college education seems very likely to have been a part of their trajectories. Maybe this will change in the future, but this data should give pause to anyone who wants to join the global elite who thinks not going to college is a good idea.
More generally, in today’s society there is a clustering of brains, wealth and power. And as [Rotman Professor] Richard Florida has pointed out, this ‘creative class’ is clustering geographically. So, the people who influence our society are largely drawn from the academically gifted, have remarkable brainpower, and are probably outliers on a lot of other traits, as well. Consider Stanford graduate Marissa Mayer, a busy mom who has noted she doesn’t need much sleep yet has no problem running a major company. She’s an extraordinary person, and most of us probably aren’t going to be like her, no matter how hard we try.
When a tiny handful of select people control a disproportionate share of the world’s money and power, that is something worth deeply thinking about. For example, Gates has a grand plan to improve our world, Zuckerberg wants to connect the entire globe to the Internet, Elon Musk wants to create a Martian colony of 80,000 people, Larry Page has huge ambitions for Google that will likely dictate our future, and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, owns the store that sells everything, wants to explore space, and has dreams of saving humanity. The decisions these people make are going to influence all of us, for better or worse.
Q. Were there differences between the men and women you studied?
Your readers won’t be surprised to hear that females were underrepresented among the global elite groups: the Davos ratio of males to females was 5.4 to 1; for billionaires it was 9.4 to 1; for CEOs it was 9.6 to 1; for powerful people it ranged from 7.2 and 13.2 to 1; and for self-made billionaires it was 47.7 to 1. In my earlier study of Fortune 500 CEOs, females had higher educational selectivity and brainpower than their male counterparts, which I found fascinating, because it suggests that female CEOs have to be even more outstanding to reach the top of a Fortune 500 company.
Q. Amongst billionaires and Davos participants, what were the most popular college majors?
Overall, the most popular major was business, including Economics, Accounting and attending an MBA program. For the billionaires and Davos group, over half of the individuals majored in business. However, 29.9 per cent of the billionaires and 23.8 per cent of Davos attendees majored in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In her book Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland discusses what she calls ‘the rise of the alpha geeks’, or those who have a facility with numbers and a STEM background increasingly joining the ranks of the super rich. This appears to be confirmed by my data. It also shows that if you want to be rich and powerful, majoring in either STEM or business will not hurt your chances.
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