The Molecule of More

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his later years in, and he 
sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and rents it just as the trees 
are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men 
to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he settles in a 
place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable belongings 
elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges 
into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor 
he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the 
vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in 
a few days, to shake off his happiness.
Tocqueville described a nation inhabited by hyperthymics.
INVENTORS, ENTREPRENEURS, AND 
NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
As a nation of immigrants, the United States has racked up spectacular 
dopaminergic achievements. According to a research brief published 

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
by the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University, 
between 1901 and 2013 the United States received 42 percent of all 
Nobel Prizes awarded, the highest of any country in the world. More-
over, a disproportionate number of American Nobel laureates have 
been immigrants. The top three countries they came from were Can-
ada (13%), Germany (11%), and the United Kingdom (11%).
The United States continues to attract immigrants from all over 
the world, and the immigrant population continues to include a high 
proportion of extraordinary individuals. Some of the most important 
companies of the new economy were founded by immigrants, including 
Google, Intel, PayPal, eBay, and Snapchat. As of 2005, 52 percent of
Silicon Valley start-ups had been founded by immigrant entrepreneurs, 
a remarkable figure in light of the fact that immigrants make up only 
13 percent of the U.S. population. The country that provides America 
with the greatest number of technology entrepreneurs is India.
In the book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and 
Will Define Our Future, the authors report that in 2006, foreign nation-
als living in the United States were listed as inventors or co-inventors 
on 40 percent of all international patent applications filed by the U.S. 
government. Immigrants also file the majority of patents by leading 
technology companies: 60 percent of the total at Cisco, 64 percent at 
General Electric, 65 percent at Merck, and 72 percent at Qualcomm.
Immigrants don’t just launch technology companies. From nail 
salons, restaurants, and dry cleaners to the fastest-growing companies 
in America, immigrants start a quarter of all new businesses in the 
United States—about twice as many per capita as other Americans. 
And looking at entrepreneurship broadly, we can come full circle and 
find a direct link to dopamine.
A group of researchers led by Nicos Nicolaou of the Entrepreneur-
ship & Innovation Enterprise Research Centre at the Warwick Business 
School recruited 1,335 people in the United Kingdom and asked them 
to fill out a questionnaire on entrepreneurship and to provide a blood 
sample for DNA extraction. The average age of the volunteers was 55 
years and 83 percent were women. Nicolaou found a dopamine gene 
that came in two forms (alleles), identical except for one single building 

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PROGRESS
block. That variation in the building block (called a nucleic acid) made 
one form of the gene more active than the other. People who had the 
more active form were almost twice as likely to have started a new busi-
ness compared to those who had the less active form.
It’s worth noting that it’s not just the United States that has been 
shaped by dopaminergic immigrants. The Global Entrepreneurship 
Monitor, an ongoing project sponsored by Babson College and the 
London School of Economics, found that the four nations with the 
highest per capita creation of new companies are the United States, 
Canada, Israel, and Australia—three of which are among the top nine 
countries with the highest immigrant populations in the world, and one 
of which, Israel, is less than three generations from its founding as an 
immigrant state.
There are a limited number of highly dopaminergic people in the 
world, so one country’s gain is another country’s loss. Many American 
immigrants came from Europe, a migration that boosted the dopami-
nergic gene pool in the United States, leaving Europe with a residual 
population more likely to take an H&N approach to life.
1
The Pew Research Center conducted a survey to learn more about 
the differences between Americans and Europeans, and published 
their findings in a report titled The American–Western European Values Gap. 
Although values are influenced by many factors other than genetics, 
some of the questions they asked were closely related to the dopaminer-
gic personality. For example, they asked, “Is success in life determined 
by forces outside our control?” In Germany, 72 percent said yes. In 
France it was 57 percent, and in Britain, 41 percent. However, only a 
little more than a third of U.S. respondents said outside forces were in 
control, while the majority took a more dopaminergic outlook.
The dopaminergic difference shows up in other questions, too. 
Americans were more likely to approve of the use of military force—the 
1 In chapter five, we discussed ways in which American liberals, representing the