Via Tyler Cowen, comes this graph of demographic shifts in NIH grants, which show a clear trend: older scientists are getting more money.
Cowen also cites the eminent economist Paul Romer, who worries about the effect of this shift on innovation:
Instead of young scientists getting grant funding to go off and do whatever they want in their twenties, they're working in a lab where somebody in his forties or fifties is the principal investigator in charge of the grant. They're working as apprentices, almost, under the senior person. If we're not careful, we could let our institutions, things like tenure and hierarchical structures and peer review, slowly morph over time so that old guys control more and more of what's going on and the young people have a harder and harder time doing something really different, and that would be would be a bad thing for these processes of growth and change. I'd like to see us keep thinking about how we could tweak our institutions to give power and control and opportunity to young people.The bad news is that Romer is right, at least in part: young scientists, in general, tend to be a bit more innovative. (If you noticed all the conditionals and hedges in that sentence, please keep on reading.) The ingenuity of youth is perhaps best demonstrated by the inverted U curve of creative output, a well-studied phenomenon in which creativity rapidly increases at the start of a career before it crests and declines. Here's Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC-Davis who has painstakingly quantified this demographic data:
Original Article: Funding Innovation : The Frontal Cortex
