March 2, 2012

How can we measure innovation and creativity?

As long as I can remember, the Japanese have been poor-mouthing their lack of creativity and innovation (and, by vague extension, that of East Asians in general). Presumably, they are right, but I've always wondered if there wasn't an element of strategy in this proclivity: "Don't you creative Western geniuses worry about us poor imitative Nipponese. We could never come up with those amazing annual model year changes in sheet metal like Chevy does! We'll just work on our boring little just-in-time manufacturing thingie -- which we totally got from an American, Edward Deming, by the way -- while you Westerners do all your creative wonders."

When commenters get into long debates about whether Asians or Asian-Americans are less creative / innovative than others, I find myself impressed by the certainty with which opinions are offered because I have a hard time coming up with data for, say, this century.

Creativity is clearly something that's terribly important, but it's also extremely hard to measure without the benefit of a long lag time to give historical perspective. 

For example, who was the more significantly creative American information theorist of the 1940s: Claude Shannon or Norbert Wiener? These days, well-informed people would likely say Shannon, who has been getting more famous throughout my lifetime. But if in the 1950s you'd asked an intelligent generalist such as, say, Robert Heinlein, he likely would have said Wiener. (See James Gleick's 2011 book The Information for a current assessment of the Shannon-Wiener rivalry.) Wiener had been famous since his days as a child prodigy (getting his Harvard Ph.D. in math at age 17), and his cybernetic perspective was more immediately appealing to a mechanical engineering-minded era. 

This is not to downplay Wiener, who did lots of other stuff, just that Shannon's work has proven more enduringly influential.

Can historians measure creativity with some degree of objectivity? I think so, for a reason that I outlined in my review of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment:
Can we trust these data? The scholars upon whom Murray relies have their personal and professional biases, but, ultimately, their need to create coherent narratives explaining who influenced whom means that their books aren’t primarily based on their own opinions but rather on those of their subjects. For example, the best single confirmation of Beethoven’s greatness might be Brahms’s explanation of why he spent decades fussing before finally unveiling his First Symphony: “You have no idea how it feels for someone like me to hear behind him the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.” 
In Paul Johnson’s just-published and immensely readable book Art: A New History, you can see how even this most opinionated of historians must adapt himself to the judgments of artists. Much of the book’s entertainment value stems from Johnson’s heresies, such as his grumpy comment on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: “No one ever wished the ceiling larger.” Still, Johnson can’t really break free from conventional art history because he can’t avoid writing about those whom subsequent artists emulated. 
For example, Johnson finds Cézanne (who ranks 10th in Murray’s table of 479 significant artists) painfully incompetent at the basics of his craft. Yet, Johnson has to grit his teeth and write about Cézanne at length because he “was in some ways the most influential painter of the late nineteenth century because of his powerful (and to many mysterious) appeal to other painters …”

(Of course, it could all just be a giant conspiracy going on for generations ...)

Anyway, that raises the question of how can we measure trends in creativity and innovation without long lag times? Murray, for example, halted most of his analysis in 1950 to avoid recent fads that won't stand the test of time. 

But, looking back in history, we can see sudden upsurges or declines in particular societies. For example, the traditional English view is that victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 set off a great age of English cultural accomplishment, of which Shakespeare is only the most famous. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but that has long been the standard story.

So, for this problem of measuring 21st Century innovation, I would propose that as an approximation, somebody do a surname analysis of the founders of technology firms that succeeded with initial public offerings of at least some size. This lacks the historical perspective, but it has the advantage that investors put real money down on their bets on what would be a successful and enduring innovation. Anybody want to try this? Or is there something better to measure?

P.S. A commenter kindly points to two papers that provide data on this subject. One by Ola Bengtsson and David H. Hsu looks at 1780 pairs of tech start-up founders and venture capitalists over about a decade centering around about 1998-2007. These are start-ups that at least got VC funding. About 48% of the start-ups are in California and 18% in Massachusetts.

Among founders, a surname analysis shows 3% Chinese and 7% Indian. There may be some miscellaneous Asians that they didn't break out. (Among venture capitalists, they find 4% Chinese and 4% Indian.)

Another analysis came up with 87% of founders white, 12% Asian, 1% black. These are both national surveys. The percent Asian in California is higher according to the second study: 18%.

242 comments:

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Catperson said...

I want through the whole list carefully. There are two songs by a white and black team. Twelve by black songwriters. The rest by white songwriters.

I think you would find a higher representation of black composers on a more recent list of popular songs:

http://www.djintelligence.com/pages/mobilebeatprint.asp

As recently as the 1980s it was taboo to listen to black music or ply it on TV/radio so a sample of musical popularity after the removal of such stigmas would be more informative.

huh? said...

"As recently as the 1980s it was taboo to listen to black music or ply it on TV/radio so a sample of musical popularity after the removal of such stigmas would be more informative."

has this thread been invaded by 18 yr olds? Or just keepin' the victimology alive?
I have been around quite a while, and black music (at least the non-obviously-filthy stuff) was absolutely mainstream and everywhere. It was motown and the blues. White bands like the Stones referenced them. Everyone knew who they were, and what their music was and there was no taboo among the masses. None.
Not only was black music everywhere, many whites sang about black "victims" in one way or other. That did happen less as the century wore on.
What thread are these commenters coming from? Uncle Tim Wise?
It's really true, and I've seen it real life. Hard leftists lie to make a point, and have no problem totally revising and twisting history to fit their pov.
While I'm not conservative, conservatives at least let others speak for themselves. They just don't agree.

Hail said...

To Maya:
Thank you for your comments in this thread. Though they have not been responded to, I think they are valuable. I encourage those who skipped over them to return above and read them.

Catperson said...

On the one hand the logic seems to be that we have to describe everybody with a surname of"Cohen" or "Weinstien" as Jewish. On the other hand, Jewish law says that Jewishness passes through the mother, not the father.

So if we look up Harrison Ford (Irish father, Jewish mother) and Gwyneth Paltrow (Jewish father, German mother) we discover that Wikipedia has put them both into the category of "Jewish actors"! But not, of course, into "Irish actors" or "German actors".


This sort of grade inflation is why I take all clams of "Jewish" accomplishment with a grain of salt.


Categorizing people by race or ethnicity is always going to have a subjective component because populations blend into each other so where do you draw the line? What's relevant is that the criteria used to define which eminent people are Jewish is the same as the criteria for defining Jews in general. Only then can you calculate Jewish overrepresentation at the top in an unbiased way.

Hail said...

A battle of the Anonymouses yields the following:
"Leonardo da Vinci, to whom Jobs is often compared, was also a similar mix: his mother was a middle-eastern slave."

"Look at Leonardo's profile. Your racial facial traits become more pronounced with age. What do you see in his self-portraits that indicate anything other than White admixture?"

How many 1/2-Arabs look like the man below?

Portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci

If we accept that this painting authenitcally depicts Da Vinci, the claim that he had any non-European ancestry is extremely...dubious.

Anonymous said...

Now I can derail this sucker, if the British were truly on their game regarding air power then Repulse and Prince of Wales wouldn't be at the bottom of the ocean.

Yet knowing about Taranto, Pearl, Repulse & Prince of Wales the Japanese frittered away the Yamato.

Catperson said...

Time magazine named the 20 most influential artists of the 20th century.  Virtually all were American (the American century): 


• Louis Armstrong 
• Lucille Ball 
• The Beatles 
• Marlon Brando 
• Coco Chanel 
• Charlie Chaplin 
• Le Corbusier 
• Bob Dylan 
• T.S. Eliot 
• Aretha Franklin 
• Martha Graham 
• Jim Henson 
• James Joyce 
• Pablo Picasso 
• Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein 
• Bart Simpson (The only fictional character on the list.) 
• Frank Sinatra 
• Steven Spielberg 
• Igor Stravinsky 
• Oprah Winfrey

15% are African American.  Of the 6 artists who most influenced 20th century music (Armstrong, the Beatles, Franklin, Rodgers/hammerstein, Sinatra, Stravinsky) 33% are African American which is more than double their proportion of America.    

Anonymous said...

• Louis Armstrong
• Lucille Ball
• The Beatles
• Marlon Brando
• Coco Chanel
• Charlie Chaplin
• Le Corbusier
• Bob Dylan
• T.S. Eliot
• Aretha Franklin
• Martha Graham
• Jim Henson
• James Joyce
• Pablo Picasso
• Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
• Bart Simpson (The only fictional character on the list.)
• Frank Sinatra
• Steven Spielberg
• Igor Stravinsky
• Oprah Winfrey

-------

Jim Henson? Oprah Winfrey? Lucille Ball? Waaaaaah?

Anonymous said...

How did Bart Simpson beat Beavis and Butthead?

Anonymous said...

"Chinese engineering was vastly inferior to Roman engineering of the same period. That's no excuse for not knowing that, with or without the bloody internet."

That wasn't such a bad thing. Imagine if all roads led to Peking.

Anonymous said...

Brahms was black!

Anonymous said...

Bach was blach!

Anonymous said...

"Japan is fine. They're keeping their head down to avoid American (sic) pressure to allow their nation to be destroyed by opening the borders. When the American golem-construct collapses and is no longer a threat they'll bounce back."

Word. Seeing as how they are one of the three biggest economies in the world, at or near the top on almost any quality of life indicator, I'm always mystified at this "Japan is dying/irrelevant" stuff.

Anonymous said...

I wish Google was less creative with their comment format.

ben tillman said...

Someone mentioned that modern history wouldn't be drastically different had East Asians never existed. The same thing could've been said about the Jews in the year 1800.

Surely you're joking. You must have heard of Christianity. Jews founded it and continued to influence it thereafter. Read Richard Popkin, Louis Israel Newman, David Katz.

ben tillman said...

Someone mentioned that modern history wouldn't be drastically different had East Asians never existed. The same thing could've been said about the Jews in the year 1800.

And what about the Enlightenment? It was a European reaction to the Jewish presence in Europe. Read Jonathan Israel and Adam Sutcliffe.

And what about the New World? Columbus was descended from Jewish conversos.

ben tillman said...

It should be obvious that the overachieving Jews (a mixed race originally from the middle-east/west-asia) are grossly inflating the white contribution in Silicon Valley. Where are the German-Americans and Irish-Americans who are far far more numerous than Jews? Based on this narrow reasoning one could conclude that they are congenitally challenged in the creativity department.

There were no Jews among the pioneers of the computer revolution:

Lee DeForest, inventor of the first electronic device (the triode).

John Atanasoff, coinventor of the first electronic computer.

Clifford Berry, coinventor of the first electronic computer.

Walter Brattain, coinventor of the transistor.

John Bardeen, coinventor of the transistor.

William Shockley, coinventor of the transistor.

William Norris, founder of the first supercomputer company.

Seymour Cray, architect of the first supercomputer.

Jack Kilby, coinventor of the first integrated circuit and electronic hand-held calculator.

Robert Noyce, coinventor of the first planar integrated circuit, founder of Intel Corporation (which then developed the microprocessor).

Heliogabalus said...

Oh God, not the Beethoven thing again. Two debunkings:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2598/was-ludwig-van-beethoven-of-african-ancestry

http://myrtlehart.org/content/view/182/174/

It should be pointed out that "Beethoven was black" is only an Afrocentric fringe opinion. The main website devoted to black classical composers does not include Beethoven.

Svigor said...

By the way, do you know how many of the the white songwriters in that list were Jewish? Highly disproportional.

Not that I need to point this out again, but see what I mean? Jews are White when they want to be, and not when they don't.

In other words, not. They're a separate category that is counted as either, depending on what serves their interests.

Svigor said...

Anyone with a clue knows that, barring something unforeseen, China will be the colossus of the 21st century.

You mean, the country with the largest population will have the largest economy?

Astonishing!

Way to set a high bar there.

Svigor said...

It was only after the black death killed off a lot of poor people (thus raising europe's average IQ) did whites begin to catch up.

"Begin to catch up"? Just how crazy are you?

Anonymous said...

It seems like you accord a great deal of weight to phenotypic impressions -- do Ashkenazim "look White" to you, is that it? ... have a look at what the genomic data say about (various dark other people) -- and likewise about the European Jews.



The genomic data does not say that European Jews are genetically not European.

The major racial groupings - Asians, blacks, aboriginal Americans, Caucasians, and so on - are based on physical appearance. This has to be the case, since people have noticed the differences in the races - both physical and mental - since long before modern genetics came on the scene. Genetics simply assists us in explaining why people are different. It does not create new races.



Surely you'd say the same of the light-eyed blondes of the Chitral


The light-eyed blondes of the Chitral are Caucasians. As are the majority of the people in the same region with dark hair and dark eyes.



in meeting a Bougainville Islander I guess you'd think yourself face-to-face with someone obviously closely akin to Sub-Saharan blacks.


Perhaps you should refrain from guessing and attempt to engage in rational argument based on established facts.

Fair-skinned, fair haired, blue and hazel and green eyed European Jews have these characteristics because they have been genetically mixing with other people who possess these characteristics for the last thousand years.


Bougainville Islanders, and dot Indians, and other people who live near the Equator, all have dark skins because that is a necessary adaptation to the climate. Dark skin side, they display a wide range of other variation.

Nobody is going to look at Sendhil Ramamurthy and confuse him with a black African. On the other hand, it takes some pretty sophisticated modern science to detect the extremely subtle genetic differences between a Kate Bosworth and a Gwyneth Paltrow.

Anonymous said...

Time magazine named the 20 most influential artists of the 20th century. Virtually all were American (the American century):


I'm afraid I don't acknowledge the authority of the mighty Time magazine to make such pronouncements.

Anonymous said...

You're very very very young aren't you? For centuries china was the richest most powerful country on earth.


You've very very dumb aren't you? Because "for centuries China was the richest most powerful country on Earth" is the same thing as "for a few centuries between the fall of Rome and the recovery of civilization in Europe, it was more advanced than most European countries".

China invented the cumpus, the printing press, gun powder, money, paper, weights and measures


The Chinese did not invent money, paper, weights and measures.

the list goes on and on.


It's funny how this list which "goes on and on" always boils down to gunpowder and the printing press, both of which were discovered separately in Europe.

Anonymous said...

"Someone mentioned that modern history wouldn't be drastically different had East Asians never existed. The same thing could've been said about the Jews in the year 1800."


Surely you're joking. You must have heard of Christianity. Jews founded it.


Obviously the founding of Christianity does not count as "modern history". The history of Europe from 800 AD to 1800 AD would not have been drastically different had there been no Jews present in it.

Anonymous said...

"Claims of exceptional black musical genius are not supported."


As if song-writing defines musical genius.


As if song writing defines musical genius!

I just thought that remark was sufficiently astounding that it bore repeating. WIth this new innsight into the creative process, we can now say, "As if inventing stuff defines creative genius!"

Anonymous said...

As recently as the 1980s it was taboo to listen to black music or ply it on TV/radio


What country did you grow up in?

Since Steve already screens all the comments, I don't see why he can't just leave some of the more gratuitously stupid of them on the cutting room floor.

And "as recently as the 1980s it was taboo to listen to black music" counts as gratuitously stupid. Someboidy has spent far too much time in her African American Studies class.

Anonymous said...

>raised by very Christian, conservatively inclined lower middle class families. That's not exactly an oppressive environment<

It beats landing in a concentration camp, but not by much.

We must always challenge the assumption that creativity or any kind of highly developed brains are valued. Many people disvalue them. The only thing that is widely valued is concerning one's thoughts and activities exclusively with obeying the law, breeding, and making a lot of coin.

Even Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms were appreciated by most people of their time only after becoming breadwinners, and only to that extent.

To the vast majority, it made no difference whether Brahms made his pay by banging a honky-tonk piano in bars or by writing masterpieces (except that writing masterpieces is a dubious or disreputable activity, since they are hard and long and make a normal person's head hurt).

The majority of people who idolized Jobs and his employees as G*E*N*I*U*S*E*S did so only because Apple made beaucoup money. The thing snowballed around some particles of dirt, wealth-signaling status symbols. Outside of the world's Silicon Valleys, true appreciators of Apple tech qua tech are outnumbered by people who rush out to get the latest iPad because it's the cool thing to do, like faceplanting off a rail or buying an Izod shirt. "Cool" means law-abiding (following the accepted values of the tribe), breeding (pursuing sexiness), and making coin (actually spending coin, which is supposed to signal that you have/are making it).

The question "how can we encourage creativity?" boils down for most people to "how can we get more money?" This mentality is disinclined to look too deeply into things. So the most successful answer to the question "how can we measure creativity?" would be: by gauging financial success. The more money, the more creativity. Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave so he ain't worth shit. One must bay with the wolves. If that weirdo was so smart, then how come he warn't rich?

catperson said...

Why are only the first 200 comments visible?

catperson said...

After making a comment, I can see comments 201-225 but I couldn't when I just reading (I tried several computers)

Anonymous said...

why we gotta post something to see later comments? this no good.

Anonymous said...

For all you fools who done say Beethoven was not a bro, how you explain this?

Anonymous said...

For centuries China was way ahead of the West in technological development. The rise of the West in a very recent phenomenon.

Anonymous said...

Why are only the first 200 comments visible?


Because you're not intelligent enough to figure out how to see the rest of them. It's an aptitude test, and you flunked it.

rob said...

As measures of innovativeness or creativity, IPOs and VC funding would be biased against the most creative. VCs like to fund ventures that are similar to things that are already around, albiet with a twist. "Facebook for academics" or "Facebook for careers" would do better with VCs than anything that can't be described in a ~45 second elavator pitch. Not to mention that there's not all that much that was new about Facebook compared to Friendster or Myspace, or any other "social networking" site that came before.

Hail said...

Conan O'Brien is humbled by Chinese creativity.

ben tillman said...

Obviously the founding of Christianity does not count as "modern history".

You can't comprehend what you read. But at least you get credit for figuring out how to view comment #201 et seq.

Anonymous said...

"For centuries China was way ahead of the West in technological development. The rise of the West in a very recent phenomenon."

I don't think the Chinese were ahead of the ancient Greeks or the Romans. They were ahead for awhile after the fall of Rome, during which time much of Europe was under assault from barbarians. But then, China was probably a pretty dull place after the Mongols came and burned down lots of stuff. And there was a period of total cultural collapse during the Mao yrs when a Chinese auto factory produced 12 cars a year--some junky 50s model at that--and produced nothing of any creative worth. And if Detroit and Los Angeles are the future of the US, expect another long dark age for the West... perhaps one that will never end.

Anonymous said...

Wiener vs. Shannon?

Well, Wiener was the first to construct mathematical Brownian motion, which is the foundation of all stochastic analysis.

When he visited the Soviet Union around 1960, Landau met with him and wanted to talk about the Wiener-Hopf method. But Wiener wanted to talk about a more boring topic, something about the coming revolution in networked computers. Landau was disappointed in the so-called genius and said later, "It must have been Hopf who did all the work."

Wiener also met with Nehru in India and advised the Indian government to promote an information technology industry.

They were both geniuses, but my money's still on Wiener.

Hacienda said...

"I'd be living in a mud hut if it weren't for a whole bunch of cantankerous obsessives down through the ages."

Not me. I would build a nice tree house in the lush forest by the lake.

Anonymous said...

Only commenting so I can read the second page of comments

Anonymous said...

"Yet knowing about Taranto, Pearl, Repulse & Prince of Wales the Japanese frittered away the Yamato."
That was merely pennance for the Yamashiro.

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