This is a great article… I’m stillnot sure what kind of genius I am, but I definitely like the idea that I might be a late bloomer if something incredible doesn’t materialize soon….(Thanks Chuck!)
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Wired 14.07: What Kind of Genius Are You?
In the fall of 1972, when David Galenson was a senior economics major at Harvard, he took what he describes as a âgutâ? course in 17th-century Dutch art. On the first day of class, the professor displayed a stunning image of a Renaissance Madonna and child. âPablo Picasso did this copy of a Raphael drawing when he was 17 years old,â? the professor told the students. âWhat have you people done lately?â? Itâs a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday. It surfaces whenever an upstart twentysomething pens a game-changing novel or a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur becomes a billionaire. The question nagged at Galenson for years. In graduate school, he watched brash colleagues write dissertations that earned them quick acclaim and instant tenure, while he sat in the library meticulously tabulating 17th- and 18th-century indentured-servitude records. He eventually found a spot on the University of Chicagoâs Nobelist-studded economics faculty, but not as a big-name theorist. He was a colonial economic historian â a utility infielder on a team of Hall of Famers.
Now, however, Galenson might have done something at last, something that could provide hope for legions of late bloomers everywhere. Beavering away in his sunny second-floor office on campus, he has scoured the records of art auctions, counted entries in poetry anthologies, tallied images in art history textbooks â and then sliced and diced the numbers with his econometric ginsu knife. Applying the fiercely analytic, quantitative tools of modern economics, he has reverse engineered ingenuity to reveal the source code of the creative mind.