I’m looking for a dad in finance

It’s Nobel Prize season. (Big dramatic sigh.)

Every year at this time, I scan the list and am disappointed to discover my name isn’t on it. Oh well, right? Well, yes and no, says Paul Novosad, an economics professor at Dartmouth and founder of the Development Data Lab.  
 
Novosad and research colleagues Sam Asher, Catriona Farquharson, and Eni Iljazi studied Nobel laureates in the sciences dating back to 1901 to discover what kind of childhood will likely produce a winner. Is it a magical combination of grit and genius, or is something else at play? “Here’s the core idea: If talent is uniformly distributed and opportunity is equal, then Nobelists will come out of the woodwork, from random families & places,” says Novosad, explaining his work on X.
 
It turns out that lots of future laureates are being overlooked. (And I do not mean me.)
 
As part of examining a wide array of variables, the team ranked the wealth and education levels of all the laureates’ fathers and found that about half of the winners came from the top 5% of educated earners. People who came from poverty were the rare outliers; most “geniuses” have businessmen for dads, with the occasional doctor, professor, or engineer in the mix. And while the laureate gender gap remains disappointing, a future female genius fared better if born into a wealthy family. And therein lies the problem. Overall, the cohort is worryingly homogenous. “If every laureate is born rich or in the West … it means a lot of our geniuses are being missed.”
 
The researchers also employed the Opportunity Atlas, a fascinating interactive database created by the United States Census Bureau. The tool uses reams of anonymous data to uncover economic mobility trends for any demographic in any city or county in the U.S. — allowing anyone, in their words, to “trace the roots of today’s opportunity back to the neighborhoods where people grew up.” (Fair warning: Only click the link if you’re prepared to disappear down a data rabbit hole for the foreseeable future. More on that below.)
 
It turns out that, at least in this instance, the U.S. is the land of opportunity.
 
All the American laureates came from less wealthy, or “non-elite,” families compared to winners from other countries. While plenty came from communities with upward economic mobility, as identified by the Opportunity Atlas, some came from communities experiencing downward mobility. This interesting wrinkle, Novosad says, is food for thought. “We get better allocation of talent where there is a lot of economic churn,” where kids, wealthy or not, can’t reliably predict a successful future. “People work harder when their outcomes aren’t guaranteed,” he posits.
 
So, are we closer to a world where genius can thrive anywhere? Again, the answer is yes and no.
 
“Since we have 125 years of prize data, we can ask whether we have gotten any better at creating access for brilliant people from less elite backgrounds,” says Novosad.

The needle has moved a bit: The average education rank of the dad of a future Nobel laureate moved from 95 in 1901 to a less lofty 88 in 2024. “For the optimists: we’re creating opportunity for twice as many people as we used to! For the pessimists: it will be another 688 years before we get to the benchmark equal opportunity rank of 50!”
 
I think we can do better than that, don’t you?
 
You can read the full research here.
 
And since we’re talking opportunity costs and equity, here’s a question for all my talent professionals, executives, and inclusive leaders within newsletter earshot.
 
What if, for example, you were to plug the home cities of an entire cohort of interns, front-line employees, high potentials, or even senior leaders into the Opportunity Alas? What pattern would you expect to emerge?
 
Following the train of thought: Would developing an “opportunity index” for your workforce — a snapshot of where opportunity has been present or missing for folks since birth — be a meaningful metric? How would opportunity-based benchmarks inform your recruiting strategy? Help you tailor your training and benefits offerings? Your community investment or scholarship strategies?
 
If you’re already doing this work, we’d love to learn from you. Drop us an email, and let’s crunch some numbers.

A version of this essay was originally published in the Equity Observer email newsletter. Catch up on past issues here. Sign up for insightful commentary, breaking news, and community shout-outs delivered twice weekly. Find your people.