Replication confirms talent-allocation frictions explain 41.5% of US growth, but only ~7% now
ChenhaoTan · x · 2026-10-15
Livingscience.ai replicated and extended Hsieh, Hurst, Jones and Klenow's classic paper "The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth." The original found that in 1960, 94% of US doctors and lawyers were white men, and falling frictions for women and Black Americans explain 41.5% of growth in market GDP per person from 1960 to 2010.
The replication reproduces exactly: re-running the authors' data and code yields the printed 41.5%, with all twenty cells of the main table matching. The extension adds Census data for 2022–2024: falling frictions still add 0.06 percentage points a year after 2010 (faster than 2000–2010's 0.04), but that is now only 7% of all growth. For women, frictions approach a floor above parity with white men; Black men's frictions have already dipped below the floor implied by earlier data. On the current path, the model projects only small further gains — a conditional projection, not a forecast.
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