By Tirthankar Mukherjee
As one moves around in Ulaanbaatar, one is struck by how young most of the Mongolians around one are. The balance of global economic power is widely perceived as shifting to Asia (though power has many secreted and secret levers and the presently developed countries will not give up their preeminence without a fight) but inside most societies, decision making is rapidly becoming the prerogative of the young. It appears that Mongolia has accepted that a brave new world demands and deserves a brave new generation to run it.
However, spring encourages a certain fickleness and my faith in Mongolia’s future being safe in the hands of its young was dented by a study in a largely, if not totally, unrelated field. Two economists in the US have shown that Albert Einstein was wrong about one thing: the age at which scientists perform their greatest feats. The man chosen by TIME magazine in 1999 as Person of the Century once famously said, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” He was curious and intellectually active until his death at the age of 76 in 1955 but his own pioneering Nobel Prize-winning work had been published 50 years earlier, when he was age 26. He once said a scientist who hasn’t made a great contribution to science before 30 will never do so.
Now things seem to have changed and what was accepted as oracular truth and vindicated by empirical evidence in the 20th century, especially its initial decades, have been shown by a report in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to be no longer valid. Economists Bruce Weinberg at the Ohio State University and Benjamin Jones at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University posit that peak scientific creativity at young ages has become increasingly rare. The two examined Nobel Prizes for science between 1900 and 2008, analysing the individual age at which each of 182 physicists, 153 chemists and 190 medical scientists achieved their award-winning feats.
Their study reveals how the age of most significant scientific creativity has changed over time. In the early years of the 20th century, about 20 per cent of scientists had done their prize-winning work before the age of 30 years. But by the early 21st century, none of the prize-winners had done their work before 30. The proportion of physicists and chemists who did prize-winning work before turning 40 also dropped over the past century.
They believe this is chiefly because scientists now require an increasingly longer time to build on already existing foundational knowledge to do ground-breaking work in the frontiers of their fields. “The shoulders of giants appear higher and higher as the volume of foundational knowledge expands. So climbing the backs of giants is taking longer and longer,” Jones has said in a newspaper interview following publication of the paper. That is somewhat similar to what Enrico Fermi (I think it was him but I am not absolutely sure) once said. “I studied pre-Fermi physics which was easier,” he is believed to have said. It is true that one has to learn so much more now than was the case 100 years ago. “So much stuff has accumulated in (scientific) fields that it takes an increasingly longer time (for a scientist) to learn all that knowledge and then make an important contribution to the field,” said Weinberg.
The changing age of peak creativity also appears to be influenced by the domain and nature of work. The study suggests that ground-breaking theoretical work is associated with relatively younger scientists, while great experimental work is achieved at older ages.
The researchers point out that a distinct shift towards youthful achievements in physics occurred during the early decades of the 20th century in the field of quantum mechanics, a largely theoretical branch of physics that brought in novel, revolutionary ideas that broke away from existing foundations. Among pioneers in the field were the physicists Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, each of whom made his greatest contributions in his mid-20s. “Quantum mechanics back then was a new and highly conceptual area and its development required relatively few pieces of existing foundational knowledge,” Jones said.
The researchers say the observed changes in age of peak creativity appear consistent with the idea that abstract contributions are more likely to emerge at a younger age than experimental contributions, which rely more heavily on accumulated knowledge. “In the United States and other countries where the research workforce is ageing, the concept that great scientific achievements may occur even at older ages will be reassuring,” Weinberg said.
So, does this mean the young in Mongolia are not as good as their elders? Moving from the scientific to the general world, it is clear that as populations age, chances are opening up for younger nations, with a younger workforce in every sphere. In an apparent paradox, the globalization of the economy is accelerating because the world is rapidly aging, and at the same time the pace of global aging is quickened by the speed and scope of globalization. These intertwined dynamics also bear on the international competition for wealth and power. The high costs of keeping their aging population healthy and out of poverty has been one of the causes behind the rich democracies losing their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise amass wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older countries lose work to younger countries.
To see this process at work, look at China. In its march to prosperity, the country has encouraged hundreds of millions of its young people to move into cities, where the factories are. But China’s young and footloose global identity hides a grayer reality. By and large, older workers have been excluded from its remade, globalized economy. They are left behind in their rural villages, or they are pushed from their urban homes into the ghettos of dour apartment blocks on the urban edge to make room for the new apartments and offices occupied by younger urbanites and the companies eager to hire them.
In a 2006 analysis of how aging work forces influence global flows of capital, Ronald Davies and Robert R. Reed noted that because “older” economies have smaller work forces and higher wages, they push investment to younger economies, which offer higher rates of return. China’s youthful labor force thus helps the country maintain its low-cost economic ecosystem and attract foreign investment that seeks the higher returns a “younger” economy offers, whether or not any particular pot of foreign money goes to employ young people.
China is not the only country in which a young labor force attracts global businesses and investors. Much of the developing world, particularly in Asia and Latin America, operates the same way. An outspoken champion of outsourcing, Nandan Nilekani, a former head of Infosys, the Indian technology giant, is well known for promoting India as a place to corral young workers in an otherwise aging world.
I fear I have strayed into ethics which was not my intention. But it is true that the rough adjustments that global aging imposes on populations can sound bleak. As Mongolia makes the best of its youth and as its youth make the best of their chances, we must not forget that a demographic denouement is inevitable everywhere.