Discussion: Misallocation and Social Costs

Nobel laureates in the sciences overwhelmingly originate from the top tiers of national income and education distributions, and are even more elite in the global income distribution. This is most concerning if it implies a misallocation of talent, where people who could be making valuable scientific discoveries are instead employed in lower-value occupations, due to a lack of access career pathways in the sciences. Unfortunately, determining the extent of misallocation is difficult from the results presented here alone. In this section, we discuss several factors that influence our priors on the extent of misallocation implied by our results.

Could 'missing' scientists be producing equally valuable outcomes in non-scientific domains, such as business or medical practice? There are three reasons to think their social contributions in other fields are smaller than they would be in the sciences. First, the social benefits of research in the basic sciences are plausibly among the highest out of all activities, because the externalities of research are so large (Jones and Williams, 1998; Bloom et al., 2013; Gross and Sampat, 2023) . Second, talent is multidimensional; individuals with the strongest relative aptitude for science may not be equally well-matched to alternative careers (Murphy et al., 1991) . Third, the unequal barriers that prevent advancement in the sciences also exist in other domains. Authors of highly cited patents are ten times more likely to come from the top 5% of the father income distribution than from the bottom 50% (Bell et al., 2019) ; nationality and gender play roles here as well. Results are similar for doctors, CEOs of large companies, and politicians (Dal Bó et al., 2017; Thompson et al., 2019; Bell et al., 2019) . Talented individuals who face social barriers to success in the sciences are likely to find barriers in other domains as well.

Are 'missing scientists' in fact generating important scientific discoveries, but simply not being recognized for their work? The physicist Lise Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize more than 40 times for her work on nuclear fission but was overlooked when the prize was given to her colleague Otto Hahn. We are doubtful that stories like this can explain a large share of our missing scientists, because gatekeeping in the sciences begins long before Nobel Prizes are being considered. To reach the top of the sciences, an individual must pass through many filters, each of which may disadvantage people from less affluent backgrounds. Entry into elite PhD programs and postdocs, grants, and early career awards are all key ingredients of success, and all of these are based on evaluation by peer scientists, like the Nobel Prize itself (Merton, 1968; Stephan, 2012) . It is doubtful that the unequal outcomes we describe here are driven entirely by unequal selection only at the final stage of one's scientific career; they more likely result from an accumulation of inequalities over the life cycle.

Could the children of elites simply be the people in their generation with the most latent scientific potential? Children born into high-income families can receive many more human capital investments than less privileged children.1 To the extent that genes play a role in human capability, some amount of the correlation between parent income and child scientific output comes from heritable traits. But the extent to which genetic factors can explain the unequal distribution of laureate childhoods depends on too many unknown parameters to calibrate precisely; the nature vs. nurture debate remains unresolved.2

Complementary evidence suggests unequal access to opportunity remains an important factor behind our results. The exclusionary mechanisms that have prevented access to scientific opportunity for women and minorities are widely known and were likely even larger in the era covered by our analysis; barriers facing low-income students in the sciences are well-documented. Second, the cross-country differences in scientific outputs make up a large share of the total inequality—here and in Agarwal et al. (2023) —and are not plausibly explained by genetic differences. Third, our time series results demonstrate substantial improvement in equitable access to scientific opportunity. Past justifications of inequality based on arguments from genetics (including by Galton, the first to study the childhoods of scientists) make us cautious about accepting these arguments without clearer evidence today.3

The welfare consequences of our findings also depend on the extent to which scientists are born versus made, and the extent to which scientific discoveries depend on any individual scientist. The literature is mixed on this subject. Star scientists have causal effects on scientific output (Mindruta et al., 2025; Azoulay et al., 2010) , but patent/discovery races are also widespread, suggesting some substitutability (e.g. (Hill and Stein, 2025; Hill and Stein, 2025) ). Azoulay et al. (2019) find that deaths of eminent scientists result in more creative output by competitors, providing further evidence that some stars' work is substitutable and that intellectual diversity can be scientifically valuable.

Social and economic changes over the 20th century made it possible for talented people from a growing share of the socioeconomic distribution (especially in developed countries) to make it to the top of the sciences and contribute their talents to humanity. Progress at bridging global opportunity gaps has been much smaller. Our results are consistent with the existence of substantial untapped scientific talent—in lower-income countries especially—that is missing the complementary inputs for success, which could limit human progress. Improving access to those complementary inputs is desirable for the sake of fairness alone, but could also unleash new avenues of innovation, growth, and advancement for humankind.