How Poverty Leads to Under-Participation in Innovation
April 4, 2025
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Speaker: Stephanie Plamondon
Abstract: The U.S. is an innovation-based economy. To grow and thrive, the country depends on continued creative contributions from its citizens and the transformation of those contributions into innovative products and services. For much of the past century, with the U.S. considered the world leader in innovation, this growth was a given.

But the privileged position of the U.S. in the global innovation landscape is under threat. In recent years, the U.S. has fallen out of the top ten innovative countries in the Bloomberg Innovation Index. Commentators and scholars lament the country’s stalled productivity and declining ability to compete against international cities for venture-capital backed startups and creative talent. As other countries learn and implement lessons about innovation from the U.S., global competition threatens to leave the one-time leader behind.

In the face of this shift of fortunes, there is no shortage of proposed solutions. But in the midst of this discussion, one topic that has been largely overlooked is the potential role that poverty and inequality play in a country’s ability to produce socially beneficial innovation.

To this end, innovation scholars have recently made a concerning discovery: those raised at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in the U.S. innovate at much lower rates than those raised in more affluent circumstances. While there are many possible causal contributors to this result, in this chapter I draw on a wealth of psychological and neuroscientific evidence to make the case for one such contributor: the profound impact growing up in poverty has on brain development. Poverty changes brain developmental trajectories in ways that negatively impact present and future creative and innovative potential. Additionally, the circumstance of poverty affects adult decision-making in ways inimical to creativity.

This analysis suggests that a large percentage of the U.S. population is failing to meet its innovative potential because of poverty. Economist Raj Chetty, whose group identified this innovation gap between rich and poor, refers to the children who could be innovating as adults (but are not) as “lost Einsteins.” Further, the innovation gap, though at least partially driven by socioeconomic status, also has racial and gender components that overlap with socioeconomic factors. Given the importance of innovation for our economy and the general welfare, this missed innovation is a loss not only for individual lost Einsteins, but also for the country. The Chetty study estimates, for example, that if “women, minorities, and children from lower-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top-quintile) families, the total number of inventors in the economy would quadruple.”

This chapter helps set the stage for my larger argument that poverty- and inequality- reduction, in the form of guaranteed income, is a viable and sensible innovation policy that will help the U.S. reclaim its position as a global innovation leader.

Speaker Bio: Stephanie Plamondon joined the BYU Law faculty in 2015. Her research focuses on mind sciences, innovation, and the law. She is particularly interested in applying empirical work in psychology and neuroscience to current legal and policy challenges in innovation law, intellectual property law, criminal law, public health law, and other areas. Her recent research has explored how poverty and adversity impact decision-making and what this means for innovation, creation, and distributive justice. She is currently working on a book project that explores the potential of poverty-reducing policies to bring more underrepresented persons into the innovator pool and improve the quality of innovative and creative output in the U.S.

Prior to joining BYU's faculty, Plamondon was the resident academic fellow with Stanford's Program in Neuroscience and Society (SPINS), a joint initiative of Stanford Law School and Stanford Department of Psychology. She also spent time as a patent litigation attorney at Goodwin Procter in Boston, and as a law clerk for the Honorable Raymond C. Clevenger III on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. In Fall 2018, she was a visiting professor at Notre Dame Law School.

Plamondon holds a J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Utah School of Medicine, and an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Prince Edward Island in her hometown of Charlottetown. Her legal writing (some of which has been published under the name Stephanie Plamondon Bair) has appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the University of Illinois Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, among other outlets. Her science writing has appeared in Nature, Animal Behaviour, and the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

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