Factor 03 of 9
Economic factors
Scarcity, unequal access, time poverty, short-term incentives, and slowing research productivity.
Barriers within this factor
Each barrier has its own page with the evidence and sources behind it.
- 1Poverty and scarcity
Mullainathan and Shafir (2013) argued scarcity captures attention and reduces mental "bandwidth." Mani et al. (2013) found financial worry temporarily lowered cognitive performance in low-income participants. This finding is contested: a later study found no cognitive difference before and after payday (Carvalho, Meier, and Wang, 2016), and reviews describe the evidence as mixed.
Evidence and sources (2 evidence points, 4 experimental methods)
- 2Inequality and limited mobility
Chetty et al. (2014) found the chance of a U.S. child rising from the bottom to the top income fifth ranged from 4.4% in Charlotte to 12.9% in San Jose. Growing up in a poorer family is a much better established barrier than a society's overall level of inequality, whose causal effects are debated (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009).
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 3Unequal access to education and healthcare
When access depends on family income, talent goes undeveloped. Heckman's research (Heckman et al., 2010) shows early childhood investment produces some of the highest returns of any public spending.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 4Time poverty and precarious work
Long hours, multiple jobs, and unpredictable schedules leave little time for learning or reflection. Across OECD countries, lack of time due to work or family is the most commonly reported barrier to adult learning (OECD, 2025).
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 5Misaligned incentives and short-termism
Quarterly earnings pressure and election cycles reward short-term results over long-term research, infrastructure, and climate investment.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 3 experimental methods)
- 6Slowing research productivity
Research productivity is declining. Keeping computer chip progress on pace now requires far more researchers than in the early 1970s (Bloom et al., 2020).
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 7 experimental methods)
Evidence strength
Main findings behind this page, grouped by the strength ratings, from strongest to weakest. Each tier lists the findings that received that rating.
| Strength | Findings |
|---|---|
| Strong | Upward mobility by U.S. city. The income gaps in who becomes an inventor. |
| Moderate | Short-termism in executive surveys and firm data. Exposure to long working hours. Research productivity trends. Returns to early childhood investment. |
| Limited | Perry Preschool returns. Global wealth shares. Causal effects of overall inequality. |
| Contested or debated | Scarcity impairing cognition. The heart disease deaths attributed to long working hours. |
Actions that can reduce these barriers
Proven actions for the economic barriers have not yet been researched. Each barrier below lists proposed and experimental methods only, with the stage labels and ratings explained below.
Proposed and experimental methods
Each barrier also has a list of proposed and experimental methods. It covers methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places but not widely used, or tried and then failed or reversed, so readers can see what is being tested. Each method has a stage label and an evidence rating in parentheses. The stage labels are Theoretical (proposed but not yet tested as an intervention), Early trial (small or first studies), Large trial (large randomized or field trials), Approved but not scaled (legally approved or running in some places but not widely adopted), In wide use (widely adopted but newly tested or questioned), Sold commercially without trials (used for polygenic embryo screening), and Failed or reversed (tested and shown not to work, or adopted and then withdrawn). The word contested is added where the evidence is disputed. Failed, reversed, and unhelpful methods are listed last and begin with "Failed," "Reversed," or "Not shown to help." A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works, and the rating shows the strength of the evidence.
Ideal conditions that counter this factor
Economic conditions
What the evidence shows
Economic conditions matter most through security, time, and the freedom to take risks. The best-measured economic barrier is growing up in a lower-income family: children of top 1% families become inventors at about ten times the rate of children from below-median families (Bell et al., 2019). Whether a society's overall inequality reduces mobility by itself is contested (Corak, 2013), so the evidence most directly supports reducing childhood disadvantage, while reducing overall inequality involves value judgments the data do not settle. Funding that tolerates failure may help, since HHMI investigators produced high-impact papers at a much higher rate than similar NIH grantees, though the authors caution it may not scale (Azoulay, Graff Zivin, and Manso, 2011). Support helps only if it leaves thought free, as Beethoven's patrons, who asked only that he stay in Vienna, and Spinoza's refusal of a professorship that required him not to disturb the established religion show. The claim that scarcity itself impairs thinking is contested and rated D (Mani et al., 2013).
Ideal:
- Economic security
- Stable income with time to think
- Long-term failure-tolerant funding for people rather than narrow projects
- Multiple funding sources so one rejection is not fatal
- A low cost of risk-taking
- Support that does not require giving up freedom of thought
Evidence strength: Mixed. Contested for scarcity's effect on cognition (rated D) and limited for funding structure (rated C: one unreplicated study of elite scientists). Strong for the gap by family income (rated A for the measured gaps) and contested for the causal effect of overall inequality (Corak rated C for causal claims). The conditions attached to support rest on historical cases only.
In the pioneer cases
Statements from the pioneer records that this site classifies under the economic factor. The classification is this site's.
| Pioneer | Effect | Statement |
|---|---|---|
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Technical exposure. His father and uncle ran an electrical engineering business. |
| Albert Einstein | Barrier | Real hardship. In 1902 his father's business went bankrupt and Einstein tutored to get by. The hardship was temporary, not extreme. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | A stable job with bandwidth. The Bern patent office paid a steady income. The workweek was 48 hours, and the science library usually closed before he got off, but the routine work left his mind free. |
| Albert Einstein | Note | A close call. He nearly left physics for high-school teaching. One recommendation from Grossmann's father changed his path. |
| Michael Faraday | Barrier | A poor family and schooling only until 13. |
| Marie Curie | Barrier | Her family was not wealthy. |
| Marie Curie | Helped | A family pact. She worked as a governess to fund her sister Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, and Bronisława then helped her. |
| Srinivasa Ramanujan | Barrier | Poverty, no contact with active mathematicians, and no degree. |
| Jonas Salk | Barrier | Born in New York to poor Russian-Jewish immigrants. |
| Jonas Salk | Helped | Free public education at Townsend Harris High School and City College of New York. |
| Jonas Salk | Helped | Public funding. The March of Dimes, founded in 1938, funded the research and trials. |
| Norman Borlaug | Barrier | He grew up on an Iowa farm during hard economic times, began school in a one-room rural school, and had no school bus to the high school 12 miles away. He left for college with $50 of his own and $11 from his grandfather, and worked his way through. |
| Norman Borlaug | Helped | Institutional backing. In 1944 he joined a Mexican government and Rockefeller Foundation wheat program, turning down DuPont. |
| Katalin Karikó | Barrier | In 1985 she left communist Hungary with her family, carrying savings from selling their car sewn into her daughter's teddy bear (sources differ on $900 or £900). |
| Katalin Karikó | Barrier | Few scientists shared her vision, making grants hard to get. Some commentators, including UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, have suggested she was penalized for being a woman and an immigrant from Eastern Europe. This is a suggestion rather than a documented finding. |
| Katalin Karikó | Helped | A collaborator's funding. Weissman's grants kept her work going. |
| Katalin Karikó | Helped | A private-sector path. She joined BioNTech in 2013. |
| Tu Youyou | Barrier | Her project began in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, when most research had stalled and many experienced experts had been sidelined. With pharmaceutical workshops shut, her team extracted herbs in household vats, and several members, including Tu, developed health problems from solvent exposure. |
| Tu Youyou | Helped | A national mission. Project 523, a secret program begun in 1967 to find new malaria treatments, involved over 500 scientists from about 60 military and civilian institutions. Its office coordinated collaboration and logistics, and her academy's leadership appointed her to head its research group. |
| Percy Julian | Barrier | Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the grandson of enslaved people. Montgomery had no public high school for Black students, so he entered DePauw University inadequately prepared and started as a probationary student. |
| Percy Julian | Helped | Fellowships and study abroad. A fellowship took him to Harvard, and he earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1931, where he began working with plant compounds. |
| Percy Julian | Helped | A private-sector path. When universities closed their doors, the Glidden Company hired him in 1936 to direct research in its soybean division. In 1953 he founded Julian Laboratories, which he sold in 1961 for more than $2 million. |
| Ignaz Semmelweis | Helped | A second post. After moving to Budapest, he again reduced maternal deaths as a professor there. |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Barrier | Her family's fortunes were unstable. Her eldest brother, Edward, inherited directly from their grandfather and was the only child to receive a formal education. He became a lawyer, while she received little formal education. This inequality shaped her lifelong views on educating men and women. |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Barrier | Her school failed, and she then worked as a governess before turning to writing. |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Helped | A publisher. Joseph Johnson paid an advance on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which eased her debts. He later gave her steady literary work, including reviewing for his Analytical Review from 1788. |
| Baruch Spinoza | Barrier | At seventeen he was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family business. |
| Baruch Spinoza | Helped | Independent income. He supported himself modestly by grinding optical lenses. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Helped | A patron. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, helped pay for the book's publication. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Not overcome | After her owners' deaths she struggled to support herself. She married John Peters in 1778, lost two children in infancy, and died in poverty on 5 December 1784, aged about 31. |
| Ludwig van Beethoven | Helped | Patronage. In 1809, after he was offered a post as music director to Napoleon's brother in Kassel, Archduke Rudolph and Princes Kinsky and Lobkowitz agreed to pay him 4,000 florins a year. The only condition was that he decline the Kassel offer and stay in Vienna. His friend Ignaz von Gleichenstein led the negotiations. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Barrier | Limited schooling. He was one of seventeen children of a Boston candle and soap maker. He started grammar school at 8, and at 10 his father took him out to work in the family shop. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Barrier | A harsh apprenticeship. At 12 he signed indentures binding him to his brother James, a printer, until age 21. James often beat him, and Franklin eventually ran away to Philadelphia. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Barrier | A broken promise. Pennsylvania's governor, William Keith, encouraged him to go to London to buy printing equipment, but the promised support never came. Franklin worked in London printing houses for about eighteen months before returning. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Helped | Books through his trade. His father chose printing for him because of his love of reading, which gave him daily access to printed material. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Helped | Time to think. He retired from his printing business in 1748, which gave him leisure for science. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Note | Sharing his inventions. He declined a governor's offer of a patent on his stove, writing that because people benefit from others' inventions, they should share their own freely. |
| Gregor Mendel | Barrier | His parents were struggling farmers who could not pay for his studies. He supported himself by tutoring, and his sister Theresia gave up part of her dowry to help pay for his education. |
| Gregor Mendel | Barrier | He entered the Augustinian monastery in Brno in 1843, later stating that his circumstances decided his choice of vocation. |
| Gregor Mendel | Helped | Land, time, and a local society. The monastery gave him garden space for his experiments, and the Natural Science Society of Brno printed his paper. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | He supported himself at Simpson College in 1890 and 1891 by running a laundry. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | Many of the farmers he served were tenants too poor to buy fertilizer or equipment, and since they could be evicted, they had little reason to invest in the land. |
| George Washington Carver | Helped | Philanthropy and federal support. Morris K. Jesup funded the 1906 wagon, which carried seed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and reached about 2,000 people a month in its first summer. |
| George Washington Carver | Not overcome | The tenancy system and his farmers' poverty limited how widely his methods were adopted. His three patents, for a cosmetic and for paints and stains, were not commercially successful. |
| Yuan Longping | Barrier | From 1953 to 1971 he taught at a rural agricultural school in Anjiang, Hunan, rather than working at a research institute. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Barrier | Before 1900, women chemists were mostly limited to assistant jobs under men, teaching, or nutrition work. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Barrier | With few jobs open to women chemists, she held research fellowships at Penn and Yale and in 1898 cofounded her own laboratory in Philadelphia. |
| Fritz Haber | Helped | An academic base. He held posts at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic from 1894 to 1911 and became a professor there in 1906. |
| Fritz Haber | Helped | Industry partnership. BASF partnered with him in 1908, and he demonstrated a working ammonia apparatus in 1909. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Helped | Early state backing. As head of the Lenin Academy, he oversaw the founding of about 400 research institutes, according to Britannica, and the state funded his collecting expeditions abroad. |
Key figures
| Measure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| People in extreme poverty (below US$3.00 a day) | About 831 million in 2025, roughly 1 in 10, down from about 2.3 billion in 1990. A March 2026 update revised the 2024 count to 847 million and projected the rate to fall from 10.4% in 2024 to 10.0% in 2026 | World Bank (Fall 2025, March 2026) |
| People in poverty at the US$8.30 a day line, 2025 | An estimated 3.7 billion | World Bank (Fall 2025) |
| Children in households below US$3.00 a day, 2024 | An estimated 412 million | World Bank (Fall 2025) |
| Change to the extreme poverty line, June 2025 | Raised from US$2.15 to US$3.00 a day, adding about 125 million people. Older figures near 700 million used the previous line | World Bank (June 2025) |
| Share of global wealth | Top 10% own about 75%, bottom 50% hold about 2%, top 1% hold 37% | World Inequality Report 2026 |
| Share of global income | Top 10% receive 53%, bottom 50% receive 8% | World Inequality Report 2026 |
| Upward mobility, bottom to top income fifth (U.S. cities) | 4.4% (Charlotte) to 12.9% (San Jose) | Chetty et al. (2014) |
| Inventor rates by parents' income | Children whose parents are in the top 1% of income become inventors at a rate of 8.3 per 1,000, compared with 0.85 per 1,000 for children of below-median-income parents. Early ability explains little of this gap: top-scoring third graders are much more likely to become inventors only if their families have high incomes. By 8th grade, test scores explain half the gap, because low-income children steadily fall behind | Bell et al. (2019), authors' summary |
| Third-grade math scores and the innovation gap | In the conference version of the study, third-grade math scores account for less than one-third of the income gap in innovation | Bell et al. (2018), conference version |
| Patenting at the most innovative colleges | At colleges such as MIT, students from low- and high-income families patent at similar rates. The authors conclude that childhood environment and exposure drive most of the gap, rather than lack of funding or aversion to risk | Bell et al. (2019) |
| Great Gatsby Curve | Across rich countries, higher income inequality goes with lower mobility between generations (Corak, 2013). Corak has said it is not a causal relationship, while also arguing that dismissing it as mere correlation is too glib. Critics argue that with a different mobility measure, the United States has upward mobility similar to Canada and Sweden despite very different inequality (Winship, 2015). Durlauf and Seshadri (2018) propose that inequality reduces mobility by increasing residential segregation, a model-based argument. Within the United States, Chetty et al. (2014) found lower mobility in areas with greater inequality, also a correlation | Corak (2013), Winship (2015), Durlauf and Seshadri (2018), Chetty et al. (2014) |
| Income versus wealth in the mobility and inventor studies | These studies measure parents' income, not wealth. The global wealth figures above are rated C because many countries' wealth shares are estimated rather than measured | Strength ratings |
| Perry Preschool Program, annual social rate of return | About 7% to 10%, lower than earlier claims but above the historical return on U.S. stocks. The program was small (58 treated children), so generalizing its results requires caution | Heckman et al. (2010) |
| Researchers needed to double computer chip density vs. early 1970s | More than 18 times | Bloom et al. (2020) |
| Long working hours | In 2016, an estimated 488 million people (8.9% of the world's population) worked 55 or more hours a week. WHO and ILO attributed 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease that year to these long hours, a 29% increase since 2000. Working 55 or more hours was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease than working 35 to 40 hours. Independent epidemiologists argued the heart disease conclusion does not meet the reviewers' own evidence standards, because the link was weaker and not statistically significant in the higher-quality studies. The review authors replied that their conclusion stands, so the death estimates are contested | Pega et al. (2021), Kivimäki et al. (2020) |
| Short-termism, survey of executives | In a survey of 401 financial executives plus 20 interviews, 78% said they would give up economic value to smooth reported earnings, and many said they would delay valuable projects to meet short-term earnings targets. This measures stated willingness, not observed decisions | Graham, Harvey, and Rajgopal (2005) |
| Short-termism, public versus private firms | Comparing matched U.S. firms, private firms invested nearly 10% of assets a year against about 4% for public firms, and were about four times more responsive to new investment opportunities. Firms invested more in the five years before going public than after, and the gap was largest where stock prices react most to earnings news. The study assumes private firms face less short-term pressure, and later studies using other data found public firms invest as much or more (Gilje and Taillard, 2016, Feldman et al., 2021), so the finding is debated | Asker, Farre-Mensa, and Ljungqvist (2015) |
| Adult learning barriers | In the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, about one in four adults across OECD countries reported a barrier to participating in adult learning. Among them, lack of time due to work or family was the most common reason (48%), ahead of a lack of suitable training (14%) and cost (13%). These are self-reported reasons | OECD, Trends in Adult Learning (2025) |
References cited on this page
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- Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1553-1623. Oxford Academic
- Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level. London: Allen Lane.
- Heckman, J. J. (2006). Skill formation and the economics of investing in disadvantaged children. Science, 312(5782), 1900-1902. DOI
- Heckman, J. J., Moon, S. H., Pinto, R., Savelyev, P. A., & Yavitz, A. (2010). The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program. Journal of Public Economics, 94(1-2), 114-128. DOI
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- Bloom, N., Jones, C. I., Van Reenen, J., & Webb, M. (2020). Are ideas getting harder to find? American Economic Review, 110(4), 1104-1144. AEA
- World Bank: Poverty and Inequality Update, Fall 2025
- World Bank (2026, March 26). March 2026 global poverty update from the World Bank. Data Blog
- World Bank: June 2025 update to global poverty lines
- World Inequality Report 2026: Global economic inequality
- Pega, F., et al. (2021). Global, regional, and national burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke attributable to exposure to long working hours for 194 countries, 2000-2016 (WHO/ILO Joint Estimates). Environment International, 154, 106595. DOI
- Kivimäki, M., Virtanen, M., Nyberg, S. T., & Batty, G. D. (2020). The WHO/ILO report on long working hours and ischaemic heart disease: conclusions are not supported by the evidence. Environment International, 144, 106048. DOI
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