Аннотация
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western
cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not
exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills,
efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain
degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material
success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the
importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well
known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the
population, whereas the distribution of wealth - considered a proxy of success
- follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a
Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant
distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind
the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we
suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show
that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in
life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success,
being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our
knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between
the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It
sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the
reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive
honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been
simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy
hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient
strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy,
diversity and innovation.
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