Tyler Cowen discusses the possibility of economics prodigies. I refer him and his commenters to Dick De Veaux's saying, "Math is like music, statistics is like literature." You can decide yourself where economics is or should stand in this spectrum. I will say, though, that it can take decades to develop a good idea, just because you can be busy doing other things.
Math is like music, statistics is like literature, economics is like . . .
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Andrew Gelman's Books
I have a degree in Statistics, and I can't find any grounds for the statistics-literature comparison.
Math, and music, well, yes, I see it.
as for economics...hard to tell
The New Yorker
Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers
Why do we equate genius with precocity? by Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
Agustin: I wrote Gladwell the following email. But I have no idea how many emails somebody like him receives.
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Dear Mr. Gladwell,
A commenter pointed me to your recent New Yorker article, which interested me because, as a statistician, I am very aware at how different abilities develop as we get older. As a child I was a math prodigy, now in middle age I am an applied statistician. A wonderful statistician and teacher, Dick De Veaux, has written that math is like music, statistics is like literature. He asks, "Why are there no six year old novelists?" Statistics, like literature, benefits from some life experience. Dick writes:
"We haven’t evolved to be statisticians. Our students who think statistics is an unnatural subject are right. This isn’t how humans think naturally. But it is how humans think rationally. And it is how scientists think. This is the way we must think if we are to make progress in understanding how the world works and, for that matter, how we ourselves work."
A link to Dick's talk is here:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/07/math_is_like_mu.html
I think you might find it interesting.
Yours
Andrew Gelman