The Empirics of Age, Entrepreneurship, and Creativity

Over at Conglomerate, Gordon Smith briefly discusses and links to a blog entry by Marc Andreessen that takes up the query: "Is entrepreneurship more like poetry, pure mathematics, and theoretical physics -- which exhibit a peak age in one's late 20s or early 30s -- or novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship -- which exhibit a peak age in one's late 40s or early 50s?"  The Andreessen post includes snippets from a 1988 paper by Dean Simonton (UC Davis, Psych). Evidently, Prof. Simontron has conducted "extensive research on age and creativity across many other fields, including science, literature, music, chess, film, politics, and military combat."

Replace the term "entrepreneurship" with "legal scholarship" and you'll see why such research might interest legal scholars (of all ages).

Comments

[C. Zorn]

Also, Bruce Weinberg (OSU Economics) has done some fascinating work in this area; see his homepage, or http://www.innovationcreativityscience.net/ .

[Katie Porter]

Another recent paper on the "empirics of age" is "The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions Over the Lifecycle" by Sumit Agarwal, John Driscoll, Xavier Gabaix, and David Laibson. They find pronounced U-shaped age effects in the incidence of financial "mistakes" such as paying credit card late fees, or making suboptimal balance transfer decisions and conclude that for complex financial products like credit cards, decisionmaking peaks in the late 40s/early 50s. The paper is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=973790