by Jonah Lehrer
On my last day at NOCCA, I spent a few hours in the auditorium surrounded by five hundred extremely excited students. The kids were getting ready for interlude day, their chance to perform for one another. The range of expression at the Interlude was stunning. Although the show began with someone singing Brahms, it quickly veered into poetry and jazz guitar. There were PowerPoint slides of oil paintings and a collection of funny video shorts; someone recited a Macbeth monologue, and a troupe of students performed a scene from West Side Story. The only connecting thread was the ardor of the kids onstage. After the performances were over — the students gave themselves a standing ovation — I struck up a conversation with Tiffani, a dance student. I asked her if she planned on becoming a professional dancer. “Probably not,” she replies. “I love to dance — it makes me so happy — but dancers make no money. I want to make money.” I then ask Tiffani if she thinks her dance training will still be useful. Wouldn’t it be better to go to a regular school? “Oh, no way,” she says. “I’m not just learning how to dance here. It might look like that when you look at our classes because we’re always dancing. But that’s not it. What I’m really learning is how to say something.”
4.
What are the meta-ideas that we need to embrace? How can we create more pockets of brilliance? This might seem like an impossible task, a misguided attempt to replicate a vanished golden age. But it’s not. We now have enough evidence to begin prescribing a set of policies that can increase our collective creativity. In fact, we’ve already proven that it’s possible to create a period of excessive genius, a moment that’s overflowing with talent. The only problem is that the geniuses we’ve created are athletes.
Bill James, the pioneer of sabermetrics — the statistical analysis of baseball — points out that modern America is prodigiously good at producing sports stars. As a result, a city like Wichita, Kansas — roughly the same size as Elizabethan London — can produce a professional athlete every few years. Think about how impressive that is: the high schools of Wichita are able to regularly churn out talented individuals, such as Barry Sanders and Gayle Sayers, capable of competing at the highest levels in the world. Their physical genius — which is often quite creative — is worth millions of dollars.
And yet, the same excess does not apply to other kinds of talent. Wichita has not produced a surplus of gifted writers, painters, jazz musicians, or inventors. As James notes, this is largely because our culture treats athletes differently. The first thing we do is encourage them when they’re young, driving the kids to baseball practice and Pop Warner tournaments. This doesn’t just allow children to develop their talent — it also lets coaches identify those with the most natural ability. Second, we constantly celebrate athletic success. Winning teams get trophies and parades, coverage in the local newspaper, and the congratulations of the community. Finally, we have mechanisms for cultivating those with athletic potential at every step of the process, from Little League to the NCAA to the major leagues. They are showered with attention and rewarded with huge contracts.
So it’s possible to create more geniuses — we’ve already done it. The question now is whether our society can produce creative talent with the same effi ciency that it has produced athletic talent. Our future depends upon it.
The first meta-idea we need to take seriously is education. Because it’s impossible to predict where the next genius will come from, ages of excessive genius are always accompanied by new forms of educational opportunity. They occur when the sons of illiterate tradesmen go to college, when even the child of a glover gets a library. Like in Elizabethan England, we need to ensure that every student has a chance to succeed. We do an excellent job of lavishing gifted athletes with attention and scholarships, but too many of their peers are forced to attend failing schools with high dropout rates. Their imaginations never have a chance. Think of all the wasted potential.
However, it’s not enough to increase access to the classroom or raise the test scores of the lowest performers. We also have to ensure that those with talent are allowed to fl ourish, that we have institutions that can nourish our brightest kids, just as we nourish our best quarterbacks and jump shooters. Like the administrators at NOCCA and High Tech High, we must identify those with motivation and potential and then give them the tools to discover and invent. “Something very special happens when you concentrate talent,” Wedberg says. “The students here inspire and challenge each other. My favorite moments are when I see kids who are surprised by what they’ve done. It’s like they can’t believe they’re actually this good.”
If we’re not going to properly educate our own children, then we need to at least open the doors and encourage immigration. This is the second important meta-idea: ages of excess genius are always accompanied by new forms of human mixing. The numbers are persuasive. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Patent Office, immigrants invent patents at double the rate of non-immigrants, which is why a 1 percent increase in immigrants with college degrees leads to a 15 percent rise in patent production. (In recent years, immigrant inventors have contributed to more than a quarter of all U.S. global patent applications.) These new citizens also start companies at an accelerated pace, cofounding 52 percent of Silicon Valley firms since 1995. We all benefit when those with good ideas are allowed to freely move about. (Last, immigrants bring America a much-needed set of skills and interests. In 2010, foreign students studying on temporary visas received more than 60 percent of all U.S. engineering doctorates. (American students, by contrast, dominate doctorate programs in the humanities and social sciences.) What makes these engineering degrees so valuable is that, according to the Department of Labor, the 5 percent of American workers employed in fields related to science and technology are responsible for more than 50 percent of sustained economic growth.)
Just look at Elizabethan England, which experienced an unprecedented mixing of its population. Some of this mixing was born of urban density, as people flocked to London from all over the country. However, the period was also marked by the rise of international trade and the emergence of a merchant class that moved freely across national borders. “What you see in this period is a dramatic growth in the number and variety of human collisions,” says Robert Watson, a professor of English literature and history at UCLA. “People were meeting people like never before.”
One of the consequences of all these new “collisions” was an explosion of new words in the English language. Some of these words came from the city streets, as all the recently arrived Londoners were forced to reconcile their regional dialects and local idioms. However, most of the novel words came from abroad. “What really seems to be driving the growth [of the language] is this large group of multilingual citizens in England,” says Watson. “You’ve got people learning French, Latin, Greek, and German.
They’re traveling abroad, encountering new things. And they can’t help but import many of these foreign sayings into English.” As a result, the writers of the period had a vastly expanded palette of expressions with which to paint their world. Shakespeare, for one, took advantage of it: his work features a vocabulary that’s unparalleled in literature, as his plays use more than twenty-five thousand different words. (His closest rival in terms of variety was John Milton, who clocked in at less than half that.) The richness of Shakespeare’s art is inseparable from this richness of language, which itself depended on those immigrants around him.
This lesson isn’t restricted to the sixteenth century — encouraging the collisions of creative people is always a good idea. In fact, these interactions are so important that even seemingly minor regulations can have an outsize effect. Consider the presence of noncompete clauses, those binding contracts that prevent employees from working for competitors. Thanks to a quirk of the California Civil Code, virtually all noncompete clauses are void in the state. As a result, engineers in Silicon Valley are free to constantly jump between firms and chase more interesting problems and bigger paychecks. This
leads, over the long run, to a surplus of horizontal interactions and weak ties. (According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve, the unbridled movement of workers in California has played an important role in the development of Silicon Valley.) The larger point is that we meddle with the social network at our own peril. Like Shakespeare, we should aspire to live in a time filled with new words.
Another crucial meta-idea is a willingness to take risks. It doesn’t matter if we’re giving out small-business loans or research grants to young scientists: we have to consistently encourage those who take chances. Most entrepreneurs will fail, and many of those grants will lead to inconclusive experiments. (Even Shakespeare wrote a number of bad plays.) But those failures are a sign that the system is working, that we’re giving new ideas a chance. In my conversations with Yossi Vardi, the start-up impresario of Tel Aviv, he repeatedly referred to the importance of chutzpah, the Yiddish word for audacity. “You can’t have creativity without chutzpah,” he says. “It takes enormous chutzpah to believe that you have an idea that will change the world and make a lot of money. But unless you believe that, then you will never become an entrepreneur.”
The reason chutzpah is so important has to do with the nature of new ideas, which are inherently precarious. As AnnaLee Saxenian notes, most successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have failed with at least one previous start-up. Their failure, however, doesn’t prevent them from trying again. And again. Or look at NOCCA: the students at the school are always encouraged to take risks, to experiment with the possibility of embarrassment. When I walked into the classroom of Silas Cooper, a drama teacher at the school, I couldn’t help but notice the handwritten banner hanging above the door. This is what it said: fail big.
One way to illustrate the importance of encouraging risk is to compare the research strategies of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the largest funder of biomedical science in the world — and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a large nonprofit set up to “push the boundaries of knowledge.” The NIH evaluates grant proposal in an exceedingly rational manner. A team of experts analyzes and scores each proposal to ensure that the project is scientifically sound and supported by plenty of preliminary evidence. Their explicit goal is to not waste taxpayer money — nobody wants to fund a failure.
HHMI, in contrast, is known for supporting avant-garde projects. In fact, it explicitly encourages researchers to “take risks, explore unproven avenues and embrace the unknown — even if it means uncertainty or the chance of failure.” HHMI does this by focusing on individual scientists, not particular experiments. (Instead of requesting a detailed proposal of future research, HHMI asks for an example of past research.) The assumption is that a creative scientist should be able to pursue ideas without having to justify them to a panel of experts. Sometimes, the experiments with the most potential are still lacking evidence.
A few years ago, a team of economists at MIT and UCSD analyzed the data from NIH and HHMI funded labs to see which funding strategy was more effective. The economists tried to control for every possible variable, such as outside scholarships and the quality of graduate students. Then they compared the output of NIH researchers to HHMI investigators with similar track records.
The data was clear: in every biomedical field, the risky HHMI grants were generating the most important, innovative, and infl uential research. Although HHMI researchers had similar qualifi cations as their NIH counterparts when they first applied for funding, they went on to produce twice as many highly cited research articles and win six times as many awards. They also introduced more new keywords into the scientific lexicon, which is a marker of highly original work.
The bad news, of course, is that all this creativity comes with a cost. This is why, according to the economists, the HHMI researchers also produced 35 percent more research papers that were cited by nobody at all. (These papers were abject failures.) The moral is that these scientists weren’t producing better research because they were smarter or more creative or had more money. Instead, they had more success because they were more willing to fail.
Bill James makes a similar point in terms of sports. He notes that American society has found a way to value athletic potential and not just achievement: “We invest in athletes that might be good, rather than simply paying them once they get to be among the best in the world.” Of course, not all of these prospects work out. Some draft picks are busts, and many highly paid players disappoint. (Athletes, in other words, are a lot like scientific grants.) Nevertheless, professional teams realize that this system is necessary, since it encourages young athletes to pursue the sport, to invest the time and energy needed to succeed. Betting on potential is always a risk, but that’s the only way to get a surplus of talent. And that’s why we need more foundations and government-funding agencies willing to imitate the bold model of Howard Hughes and professional sports teams.
The final essential meta-idea involves managing the rewards of innovation. Inventors should profit from their past inventions, but we also need to encourage a culture of borrowing and adaptation. This tension has been present ever since Queen Elizabeth began granting patents in the late sixteenth century. Although patents serve as an important source of motivation — Abraham Lincoln described the patent system as “adding the fuel of interest to the fire of genius” — they also make it harder for other inventors to build on the innovation. This is why, in 1601, the English government began revoking many of the patents most despised by the public, including those on glass bottles and starch. What the queen discovered is that there is nothing natural about the scarcity of ideas. Of course, just because ideas want to be free doesn’t mean they should be free. It just means that we have to get the price right.
Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. In recent years, American creativity has been undermined by an abundance of vague patents and the recurring extension of copyright claims. Let’s begin with patents. Between 2004 and 2009, patent-infringement lawsuits increased by 70 percent, while licensing-fee requests rose by 650 percent. Many of these lawsuits were brought by so-called patent trolls, those individuals and fi rms who buy patents in bulk and then aggressively hunt for possible infringements even though they have no interest in using the patented inventions. Or consider the length of copyright protection: when the fi rst copyright laws were passed in 1790, the length of protection was fourteen years. (As Lewis Hyde notes, the Founding Fathers were deeply invested in the notion that practically all created works should belong to “the commons.”) (One of America’s initial economic advantages was the weak grip of trade guilds. The primary function of these guilds, which dominated fi elds ranging from printing to soap making, was the restriction of technical knowledge. However, the relative weakness of guilds in the American Colonies meant that much of this valuable knowledge was widely disseminated, cheaply available to the public in the form of reference manuals and trade books. For instance, when Ben Franklin became publisher of the Philadelphia Gazette, in 1729, he declared that one of the main goals of the paper would be the dissemination of “such Hints . . . as may contribute either to the Improvement of our present Manufactures, or towards the Invention of new Ones.”) Since 1962, however, Congress has extended copyright protection eleven times, and the typical length of protection is now ninety-five years. The problem with these extensions is that they discourage innovation, preventing people from remixing and remaking old forms. There will always be a powerful business lobby for the protection of intellectual property — the 1998 copyright extension law was nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act — but we need to remember that the public domain has no lobby. And that’s why we should always think of young William Shakespeare stealing from Marlowe and Holinshed and Kyd. (If Shakespeare were writing today, his plays would be the subject of endless lawsuits.) It doesn’t matter if it’s a hip-hop album made up of remixes and music samples or an engineer tweaking a gadget in a San Jose garage: we have to make sure that people can be inspired by the
work of others, that the commons remains a rich source of creativity.
Bob Dylan illustrates this point beautifully. In Chronicles, his autobiography, Dylan repeatedly describes his creative process as one of love and theft. The process begins when he finds a sound or song that “touches the bone.” He then tries to deconstruct the sound to figure out how it works. When Dylan was a young songwriter in New York City, for instance, he learned to write music by memorizing his infl uences, studying the melodic details of Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, and a long list of English folk ballads. (Dylan, in Chronicles: “I could rattle off all these songs without comment as if all the wise and poetic words were mine and mine alone.” ) But Dylan wasn’t just copying these tunes; his close study was an essential part of his creative method — learning an old song meant that he was on the verge of inventing a new one. Dylan describes how this worked in one of his first recording sessions:
I didn’t have many songs, but I was rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind — slapping a title on it.
One consequence is that virtually all of Dylan’s first seventy compositions, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” have clear musical precursors. In most instances, the original folk composition is obviously there, a barely concealed inspiration. While it would be easy to dismiss such songs as mere rip-offs — several of them would almost certainly violate current copyright standards — Dylan was able to transform his folk sources into pop masterpieces. T. S. Eliot said it best: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.” Even at the age of twenty-one, Dylan was a mature poet. He was already a thief.
