Introduction: The People Who Control Our Society

What Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Lady Gaga Have in Common

By the summer of 1968, Julian Stanley was getting bored. An avuncular 53-year-old professor, Stanley had followed an unlikely path from Macon public schools in Georgia to the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. In the first grade he had made all Cs—the teacher didn’t like that he kept his feet on his desk. But Stanley showed more promise with age. By third grade, he was doing well enough that his teachers recommended he skip the 4th grade.

Seeing that he had no particular skill at manual labor, Stanley’s working class father conceded by way of advice, “You better make a living with your brains ‘cause you’ll never do it with your hands.”[1]

After graduating from West Georgia Junior College, teaching math at a Georgia high school, and then serving in the Second World War, Stanley enrolled at Harvard University as a PhD student in education.

As a workaholic young professor, Stanley became an authority in the field of psychometrics. But he felt increasingly “sick and tired of dry-bone methodology.”[2]

A 12-year-old boy named Joseph Bates provided Stanley with just the diversion he was seeking. It would change Stanley’s life and revolutionize our understanding of highly intelligent children.

Bates had come to the attention of Stanley’s colleague in the computer science department,[3] who had organized a computer camp for middle school students. Bates, however, was so advanced that, as a 7th grader, he was already helping graduate students with FORTRAN programming.

Stanley was not entirely new to the field of intelligence studies. As a distracted undergraduate enrolled in a less-than-riveting course on rural sociology, Stanley had stumbled across a book in the library called Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. The 1914 volume had emerged from the research of psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard. A pioneer in intelligence testing, Goddard was trying to discern the causes of debilitating mental conditions in children by tracing family histories.[4] Stanley later called it a “very bad book” on account of its eugenicist themes, but found it “very alluring and interesting” nevertheless, whetting his interest in intelligence.[5]

Influenced by the book, Stanley decided to give the boy the SAT in math and physics. Bates cracked 700 even though he had never taken physics.

Stanley and Bates’s father, a Baltimore attorney, decided that it would be best for Bates to enroll in some AP courses. When they approached local high schools, however, they were greeted with laughter. A local technological school also rejected him.

At a loss for options, Stanley reluctantly arranged for Bates to enroll at Johns Hopkins as a 13-year-old. Facing a 12-credit load in honors calculus, general physics, and computer science, Stanley assumed that he wouldn’t fare well—perhaps earning B’s and C’s—but that the “intellectual stimulation would be worth the shift.”[6]

Bates went on to earn a 3.69 GPA and graduate degrees in quantitative studies and computer science by age 17.[7]

When word spread about Bates, an “irritable mother” came to see Stanley. Seething with envy, she assured Stanley that her son was at least as bright as Bates. Much to Stanley’s surprise, the boy scored so well on the SAT that he agreed to arrange for his enrollment at Hopkins. Sufficiently challenged at Hopkins, the boy’s “rebelliousness” in school dissipated as he completed his sophomore year with a 3.65 GPA.[8]

After a third student—a 10th grader—found Hopkins to be too easy, only to get A+’s after transferring to Princeton, Stanley decided to create a more formal program.

 As luck would have it, the Spencer Foundation was launched in 1971 with $80 million and a federal mandate to give at least 5 percent a year. Stanley knew the executive secretary because, a few years earlier, he had asked her on a date only to learn that she was engaged. She remembered him “very favorably” nevertheless and gladly entertained Stanley’s casual 4½ page, double-spaced typewritten proposal. Ultimately, Stanley was rewarded with a $256,000 grant to help mathematically talented students over five years.[9]

Of particular interest to Stanley as he got started was an ongoing longitudinal study initiated by Stanford university psychologist Lewis Terman in the 1920s. Terman suspected that the prevailing stereotype of his time—that highly intelligent children were feeble misfits doomed to psychological disturbance—was off base, and that these children were, in fact, healthy and brimming with potential.[10] IQ tests at the time were generally untested among American academics. But Terman maintained that IQ was “one of the most important facts that can be learned about any child.”[11] He identified over a thousand children with an average IQ of around 150 and followed the progress of his “Termites” as they endearingly became known—through adulthood.

As results from the Terman study came to light, critics pounced on the fact that the Termites, while attaining academic and financial achievements at rates considerably higher than the national average, had not, by and large, achieved the kind of outlier eminence Terman had hoped. Two future Nobel laureates in Physics—William Shockley and Luis Alvarez—did not make it through the initial vetting process. None of the Termites themselves won either Nobel or Pulitzer prizes.[12]

Stanley, however, was not deterred by Terman’s example. He had already seen that gifted adolescents could solve math problems on college admissions tests without even encountering the material in their coursework. Stanley believed that his Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), as the program became known, could find children with the highest intellectual potential and help them reach that potential.[13]

Terman’s critics[14] have been conspicuously silent as the results of Stanley’s research have seeped into the public. Data on the intellectually talented 13-year-olds identified in the early days of Stanley’s program reveal that the group’s achievements have “far exceeded base-rate expectations” in terms of their representation on tenured faculty positions at major research universities, upper management at Fortune 500 companies, and the production of books and articles.[15] Notable too is the sizable number of patents the group produced given that patents are recognized as a uniquely objective measure of “inventive skill.”[16]

Duke University psychologist Jonathan Wai aggregated the SMPY data in 2014 along with other studies and found even more signs of outlier achievement in the top 1 percent. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” Wai concluded, “Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society.”[17]

The extent to which Stanley’s subjects are overrepresented in the upper echelon of American society falsifies a longstanding belief that ability beyond a certain threshold has minimal value in determining life outcomes.[18] Adolescents with exceptional mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-rate expectations, with 42 percent doing so at top 10 universities. While many of these individuals did have advantages attributable to their high socioeconomic status, sibling studies suggest that innate talent was a driving factor.[19] The top 1 in 10,000, concluded Vanderbilt psychologists, “seem to be on a different and much steeper developmental trajectory than even the top 1 in 100.”[20]

Why did the students in Stanley’s study end up performing at such a high level?

Part of the answer is the improved research design Stanley used. The individuals in Stanley’s study involved individuals at a higher level of functioning than previous studies. Rather than relying only on tests of highly verbal, general ability measures, Stanley used mathematical reasoning to capture important nonverbal measures of exceptional intellectual talent. Had Terman utilized this methodology, he likely would have included such end-point extremes as Alvarez and Shockley.[21]

Another is the “radical” interventions from which the individuals in Stanley’s program benefited. Stanley later described his programs as “benignly insidious”—benign because they were seeking to help gifted students, insidious because of the way they “clobbered” school bureaucracies.[22] Stanley’s strategy was to establish as much direct contact with students as possible so that they would be empowered to make choices without the biases of parents and school boards. In doing so, they “worked underground” and ultimately set precedents that the schools were otherwise resisting.[23] Ninety-five percent of the most able cohort in the SMPY’s 10-year follow-up, for instance, experienced educational acceleration.[24]

The most enduring of Stanley’s interventions was the establishment in the 1980s of the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. Open to adolescents who scored in the top 1 percent on university exams, the enrichment programs helped produce not only intellectual pioneers such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and mathematicians Terrence Tao and Lenhard Ng,[25] but also celebrities in the arts such as musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga).[26]

But perhaps the most significant reason has to do with the changing nature of the global economy. The exceptionally talented youth that Stanley identified entered adulthood at a time when the most valued expertise depends on precisely the type of intelligence measured in mathematical talent searches.[27] Previous studies, such as those conducted by Terman, occurred in a context in which the economy was less technologically and knowledge based. For the students in Terman’s study, born between 1903 and 1917, opportunities for utilizing one’s cognitive abilities were more limited, particularly for women and minorities.[28]

By the mid-1990s, studies indicated that general intelligence had become the “most powerful single predictor of overall job performance”, trumping every other single factor measured such as specific aptitude, personality, education, and experience in its high predictive validities.[29] A 1997 study in Intelligence estimated that an IQ of about 120 (the 91st percentile) was needed to be “competitive for the highest level jobs.”[30]

And these studies were published before the rise of tech giants, which, as late as 1998, did not even appear on the Fortune 500 list.[31] Less than two decades later, 17 of the top 20 U.S. companies for attracting and keeping talented employees were tech companies[32] and coding had become the most in-demand skill across industries.[33] Guided by a mantra to “hire only the best”, a screening process relying on grades and SAT scores is only the beginning of an intellectually-demanding funnel through which less than 1 percent of applicants emerge with a job offer from Google.[34] Google is only acting on an insight Bill Gates articulated as Microsoft CEO at the dawn of the tech revolution. The key to success, Gates had assessed, is “hiring very smart people. There is no way of getting around, that in terms of I.Q., you’ve got to be very elitist.”[35]

The occupational advantages afforded by high intelligence may be among the reasons why recent research has discerned an association not only with professional success, but also between increasing IQ and life outcomes such as happiness.[36]

The most common pathway to prestigious academic and industry jobs is a small network of elite universities. With the advent of sex-blind and need-blind admissions, as well as greater international recruiting, merit-based admissions processes at these schools function to a great extent as proxies for intelligence. A mere three point advantage in IQ can amount to the difference between a high B average and a low A—the difference between admission into an elite school or a more ordinary public one.[37] Estimates suggest that the average IQ of an Ivy League student is 122,[38] while the average IQ of a white or Asian student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has risen to 138.[39] Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier argues that high-stakes admissions testing has become so consequential that a “testocracy” now forms “the building blocks of a secular religion.”[40]

America not only rewards the gifted, it often lionizes their achievements. Bestselling books and movies on great innovators tend to feature the “lone-genius mythos”—a romantic narrative in which a solitary genius produces earth-changing insights in an indiscernible moment of brilliance.[41] It’s a storyline that sits comfortably with the country’s individualist ethos.

America’s fascination with the “lone genius”, however, has not generated a corresponding enthusiasm for proactively finding and cultivating the children most likely to be the next Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, or Steve Jobs. A federal government that spends well over $100 billion on education per year does not provide direct funding to local school districts for gifted and talented programs.[42] The 2004 Templeton National Report on Acceleration found that the dearth of opportunities for gifted children in the American school system had reached the point of “a national scandal” that would manifest in “the slow but steady erosion of excellence.”[43] Landmark educational reforms since the report’s publication—which mandate standards that gifted children far exceed—have fueled further cuts in programs for the intellectually gifted.

Innovative schools like the Reno-based Davidson Academy, which accepts only the top .01 percent of scorers on achievements tests, are not being replicated to any significant extent—not even in highly educated corridors of the country. Gifted programs that have survived spending cuts are increasingly being “democratized” to accommodate non-academic talent.[44]  And those schools clinging to their identities as specialized systems for gifted students are besieged by legislation and lawsuits aimed at eliminating intelligence testing.[45] In a particularly high-profile case, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is seeking to eliminate the admissions test for the Bronx High School of Science, the alma mater of more Nobel Prize winning scientists than any other secondary school.[46] 

The consequences of America’s underinvestment in gifted children are difficult to measure, but glimpses can be seen in the underrepresentation of native-born students in the highest echelons of American society. Although the United States continues to generate far more wealth, scientific breakthroughs, and innovation than any other country in the world, these achievements are increasingly being driven by Americans who spent their childhoods outside the country. Consider that:

·      17 percent of billionaires under age 40 are immigrants[47] even though close to half of immigrants to the United States are limited English proficient and well under a third have a bachelor’s degree or higher[48];

·      A third of publicly-traded venture-backed companies in the United States between 2006 and 2012 were founded by immigrants, up from just 7 percent before 1980;[49] and

·      40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science since 2000 were immigrants and all six American winners in science in 2016 were immigrants.[50]

Why does America—a nation that celebrates individualism and achievement—have such an ambivalent attitude towards gifted children?

The core thesis of the book is that American culture has undergone a shift toward egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism that has come at the expense of gifted children. Dim prospects for reform, combined with the opportunities presented by technology and globalization, suggest that parents and others interested in nurturing intelligent children are most likely to succeed outside of mainstream institutions.

Part I explores where gifted children come from what distinguishes them from other children. It discusses the genetic and environmental factors that contribute both to the unique gifts and particular vulnerabilities of gifted children. It also examines why gifted children are overrepresented among certain ethnic, cultural, and regional demographics in American society.

Part II provides a historical account of how perceptions of gifted children have shifted since the early 20th century. It shows how, against the backdrop of growing egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism, gifted children came to be seen as a challenge to American ideals about equality and opportunity. Underinvestment in gifted children came to be seen as an acceptable price to pay in pursuit of other national objectives.

Part III looks for solutions. The conclusions in this book are premised on forecasts both pessimistic and optimistic. On the one hand, I argue that the cultural shifts that would need to occur in American society to provide proper nourishment for intellectual children are, at best, a generational challenge with a low likelihood of materializing. On the other hand, the parents and innovators profiled in this book illustrate the extraordinary, unprecedented opportunities that exist today to provide enrichment for gifted children outside of mainstream institutions.

Although the book does not shy away from policy prescriptions, it ultimately seeks answers not in the grinding process of public policy reform, but rather in the private sphere at the intersection of engaged parents, innovators, and technology. I will consider this book a success if it inspires an open-minded reader to act on behalf of gifted children—whether or not American society is ready to follow suit.  

[1] Julian Stanley interview with Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, 6 December 2002, available at:

[2] Benbow, C. P. & Lubinski D. (2006) Julian C. Stanley Jr. (1918-2005). American Psychologist, 61(3), 251-252, available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20...

[3] Julian Stanley, “Rationale of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) During Its First Five Years of Promoting Educational Acceleration,” in Julian Stanley, William George, and Cecilia Solano, ed. The Gifted and the Creative: A Fifty-Year Perspective, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, p. 76.

[4] Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 144,188-91.

[5] Julian Stanley interview with Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, 6 December 2002, available at:

[6] Daniel Keating and Julian Stanley, “Extreme Measures for the Exceptionally Gifted in Mathematics and Science,” Educational Researcher, vol. 1, no. 9, September 1972, 5.

Julian Stanley interview with Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, 6 December 2002, available at:

[7] Peter Smith, “The 62-Year-Old Child Genius,” Topic, available at: https://www.topic.com/the-62-y...

[8] Daniel Keating and Julian Stanley, “Extreme Measures for the Exceptionally Gifted in Mathematics and Science,” Educational Researcher, vol. 1, no. 9, September 1972, 6.

[9] Julian Stanley interview with Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, 6 December 2002, available at:

[10] Robert Sears, “L.M. Terman, Pioneer in Mental Measurement,” Science, Vol. 125, No. 3255, 17 May 1957, pp. 978-9; Mitchell Leslie, “The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman,” Stanford Magazine, July/August 2000, available at: https://alumni.stanford.edu/ge...

[11] Lewis Terman and Melita Oden, The Gifted Child Grows Up: Twenty-five Years’ Follow-up of a Superior Group, Vol. 4, Stanford University Press, 1947, 358.

[12] Mitchell Leslie, “The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman,” Stanford Magazine, July/August 2000, available at: https://alumni.stanford.edu/ge...

[13] Tom Clynes, “How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children,” Nature, 7 September 2016, available at: https://www.nature.com/news/ho...

[14] See for example Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, New York: Little, Brown and Company, p. 76, 89: Terman “was wrong about his Termites....He fell in love with the fact that his Termites were at the absolute pinnacle of the intellectual scale—at the ninety-ninth percentile of the ninety-ninth percentile—without realizing how little that seemingly extraordinary fact meant.”

[15] Lubinski, D., Benbow, C. P., & Kell, H. J. (2014). Life paths and accomplishments of mathematically precocious males and females four decades later. Psychological Science, 25, 2217-2232. 

[16] Huber, J. C. (1999). Inventive productivity and the statistics of exceedances. Scientometrics, 45, 33–53.

[17] Tom Clynes, “How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children,” Nature, 7 September 2016, available at: https://www.nature.com/news/ho...

[18] For examples of the ability threshold claim, see Howe, M. J. A. (2001). IQ in question: The truth about intelligence. London: Sage, 163; Muller, C. B., Ride, S. M., Fouke, J., Whitney, T., Denton, D. D., Cantor, N., et al. (2005, February 18). Gender differences and performance in science. Science, 307, 1043.;

[19] Lubinski, D., Webb, R. M., Morelock, M. J., & Benbow, C. P. (2001). Top 1 in 10,000: A 10-year follow-up of the profoundly gifted. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 718– 729.

[20] Lubinski, D., Webb, R. M., Morelock, M. J., & Benbow, C. P. (2001). Top 1 in 10,000: A 10-year follow-up of the profoundly gifted. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 726.

[21] Lubinski, D., Webb, R. M., Morelock, M. J., & Benbow, C. P. (2001). Top 1 in 10,000: A 10-year follow-up of the profoundly gifted. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 719, 726; Shurkin, J. N. (1992). Terman's kids: The groundbreaking study of how the gifted grow up. Boston: Little, Brown; 35.

[22] Julian Stanley interview with Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, 6 December 2002, available at:

[23] Julian Stanley interview with Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, 6 December 2002, available at:

[24] Lubinski, D., Webb, R. M., Morelock, M. J., & Benbow, C. P. (2001). Top 1 in 10,000: A 10-year follow-up of the profoundly gifted. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 720.

[25] Michelle Muratori et. al, “Insights From SMPY’s Greatest Former Child Prodigies: Drs. Terence (“Terry”) Tao and Lenhard (“Lenny”) Ng Reflect on Their Talent Development,” Gifted Child Quarterly, 1 October 2006, available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/do...

[26] Tom Clynes, “How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children,” Nature, 7 September 2016, available at: https://www.nature.com/news/ho...

[27] Lubinski, D., Webb, R. M., Morelock, M. J., & Benbow, C. P. (2001). Top 1 in 10,000: A 10-year follow-up of the profoundly gifted. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 719.

[28] Lubinski, D., Webb, R. M., Morelock, M. J., & Benbow, C. P. (2001). Top 1 in 10,000: A 10-year follow-up of the profoundly gifted. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 719.

[29] Gottfredson, L. (1997). Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life. Intelligence, 24, 83.

[30] Gottfredson, L. (1997). Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life. Intelligence, 24, 90.

[31] Preeti Varathan, “Just three companies have topped the Fortune 500 since 1955,” Quartz, 21 May 2018, available at: https://qz.com/1283342/fortune...

[32] Lydia Dishman, “The Skills It Takes To Get Hired At Google, Facebook, Amazon, And More,” Fast Company, 24 June 2016, available at: https://www.fastcompany.com/30...

[33] “Why Coding Is Still The Most Important Job Skill Of The Future,” Fast Company, 14 June 2016, available at: https://www.fastcompany.com/30...

[34] William Poundstone, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google: Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy, Little, Brown, and Company, 2012; Bernard Girard, The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It, No Starch Press, 2009.

[35] Bill Gates, interview by David Allison, “Transcript of a Video History Interview with Mr. William “Bill” Gates,” Microsoft Corporation, Bellevue, Washington, available at: http://americanhistory.si.edu/...

[36] Ali, A. et al. (2013). The relationship between happiness and intelligent quotient: the contribution of socio-economic and clinical factors. Psychological Medicine, 43(6). 1303-1312, available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core...

[37] Benedict Carey, “Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher I.Q.” New York Times, 22 June 2007, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/0...

[38] “More Evidence that Ivy League students average IQ 122,” Pumpkin Person, 15 January 2016, available at: https://pumpkinperson.com/2016...

[39] Arthur Hu, “Intelligence: Anydex,” 31 January 2013, available at: http://arthurhu.com/index/aint...

[40] Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, Boston: Beacon Press, 2015, ix.

[41] Ágnes Mócsy, “The Lone Genius Paradigm and Our Infatuation With Intellectual Heroes,” Huffington Post, 6 December 2017, available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/agnes-mocsy/the-lone-genius-paradigm_b_9422682.html; See also Kathryn Olesko, “Myth 25: That Science Has Been Largely a Solitary Enterprise,” in Ronald Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis ed. Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science, Harvard University Press, 2015.

[42] “Frequently Asked Questions about Gifted Education,” National Association for Gifted Children, available at: https://www.nagc.org/resources...

[43] Nicholas Colangelo. A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students. Iowa City, Iowa: The Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, University of Iowa, 2004, 1, available at: http://www.accelerationinstitu...

[44] Linda Gottfredson, “Unmasking the Egalitarian Fiction,” Duke Gifted Letter, Spring 2010, p. 10, available at: http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2006DukeGifted.pdf; Jonathan Plucker, “Common Core and America’s High-Achieving Students,” Thomas Fordham Institute, 2015, available at: http://edex.s3-us-west-2.amazo...

[45] See for example Grace Chen, “Prestigious High School in Virginia Faces Civil Rights Lawsuit,” Public School Review, 2 December 2017, available at: https://www.publicschoolreview...

[46] Kerri MacDonald, “At Bronx High School of Science, a Nobel Homecoming,” The New York Times, 15 October 2010, available at: https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes...

[47] Kate Vinton, “The Youngest Billionaires In The World 2017: 56 Under 40,” 20 March 2017, available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

[48] Jie Zong, Jeanne Batalova, and Jeffrey Hallock, “Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, 8 February 2018, available at: https://www.migrationpolicy.or...

[49] Stuart Anderson, “American Made 2.0: How Immigrant Entrepreneurs Continue to Contribute to the U.S. Economy,” National Foundation for Economic Policy, available at: http://www.nfap.com/pdf/Americ...

[50] “Immigrants and Nobel Prizes,” National Foundation for American Policy Policy Brief, October 2016, available at: http://nfap.com/wp-content/upl...

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