Social Mobility and the Origins of American Science

科学和创新的进步是个人福祉持续改善和经济增长的首要来源。本项目考察了20世纪美国在科学和创新方面的领导地位的起源，从三个主要问题开始：1)社会经济不平等如何影响美国科学的参与？2)从学前班到大学阶段，公共教育投资的好处是什么？3)社会流动如何影响美国的科学和创新？科学实证分析的一个主要挑战在于缺乏关于成功科学家的系统的长期数据，包括他们的社会经济背景、教育、工作经历、发明和出版物。这项研究为1817年至1933年间出生的10万多名美国科学家构建了这样的数据。机器学习算法将每位科学家与其人口普查记录、专利和出版物联系起来。实证分析考察了20世纪20年代基于种族的移民限制的影响，以调查此类政策对美国科学和创新的影响。不平等测试考察的是一个人的社会经济背景对他成为一名成功的科学家的不断变化的影响。教育分析调查了公共教育的扩大对基于社会经济地位的弱势群体以及妇女和少数民族参与STEM的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Advances in science and innovation are the number one source of sustained improvements in individual well-being and economic growth. This project examines the origins of American leadership in science and innovation in the 20th century, starting with three major questions: 1) How has socioeconomic inequality influenced participation in American science? 2) What are the benefits of public investments in education, reaching from pre-K to the university level? 3) How has social mobility influenced science and innovation in the United States? A major challenge for empirical analyses of science lies in the absence of systematic long-rung data on successful scientists, including their socioeconomic background, education, work histories, inventions, and publications. This research constructs such data for more than 100,000 American scientists who were born between 1817 and 1933. Machine-learning algorithms link each scientist with their census records, patents, and publications. Empirical analyses examine the effects of ethnicity-based restrictions on immigration in the 1920s to investigate the effects of such policies on US science and innovation. Tests for inequality examine the changing influence of a person's socioeconomic background on their success as a scientist. Analyses of education investigate the effects of expansions in public education on participation in STEM by people who were disadvantaged based on their socioeconomic status, as well as by women and minorities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.