If you are so clever, why not rich? This tricky question has puzzled many talented and gifted people. The scientists decided to clarify this dispute and created a computer model of redistribution of wealth between people and seems to have confirmed the long-known truth that the most successful are far from the smartest. Research is of an applied nature and will help in the future to get the most out of investments in science.
The distribution of wealth in society has long followed the well-known principle of 80:20: 80% of the money on our planet is in the possession of 20% of people. The empirical rule discovered by the economist Pareto is always valid for any sphere of life and society of any size. Of course, the distribution of money is too contradictory and sensitive to leave it as it is. Why do some people get a lot and others do not?
The traditional answer to the question is: we live in meritocracy, which means that people receive welfare in proportion to their talent, intellect, efforts, etc. regardless of social status and origin. People believe in a logical at first sight justice, but still forget about the share of luck, which plays an important role.
The idea of a uniform distribution of world finance among intellectuals for some reason crept into error. There is a law on the normal distribution, when most of the values are symmetrically grouped around the average digit and this rule occurs almost everywhere. Take, for example, IQ tests. In most people, the intelligence measured by such a test will, on average, be about 100 units. But it is unlikely that you will find a person with an IQ of 1000 or 10 0000.
Exactly the same distribution expresses the employment of a person at work. Most of the employees work a normalized number of hours every day. It's unlikely that you met a person in your life who managed to process another for a billion hours.
But when it comes to remuneration for the work done, it turns out that there are people who have billions of times more money than average citizens. What factors determine the possibility of getting rich for a person? How can these factors be calculated and used in later life for a more equitable distribution of money?
Scientist Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues from the University of Catania found the right answers to these questions, creating a computer model that showed how people use their talent to realize in life. During the research, it became clear what role luck plays in the whole process.
Created by scientists digital simulation accurately reproduces the distribution of wealth around the world. As initial data, it contains the N-number of people with average talent, or intellect, no lower and no higher than average mental development. Thus, each of the simulated people is slightly less or slightly more talented, just as our physical parameters - height and weight - are correlated. Someone is heavier, lighter, taller, or, conversely, low, but no one is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. On average, we are very similar.
The computer model developed by Plucino calculated the life of a person for 40 years with everyday events and successful twists of fate that could directly lead the person to enrichment. Of course, if a person took advantage of the moment and was moderately talented. But there were also failures. That is, scientists created a simulation of the natural life of an average citizen with random events.
After each simulation, Plucino analyzed the fictional world and watched what happened to each person towards the end of the career period in 40 years. Scientists studied the income that people received and looked for a correlation of well-being with mental abilities. Then the original experiment was repeated many times, but the results were the same every time. As predicted by the Pareto principle, even in the computer model the wealth distribution was distributed according to the 80:20 rule.
The researchers said that they would not be surprised if all virtual people who turned out to be rich in simulation had a marker with a high intellect, or, in simple words, would have a real talent in real life. But in reality the maximum wealth even in computer simulation was obtained by mediocre individuals who were just lucky. It turns out the obvious thing: the maximum financial success will never match the maximum talent.
Plucchino and his team did not in vain start researching the connection between talent and wealth. The US financial funds that invest in science are eager to know how soon they will receive the return on investment and how to minimize the unprofitable technologies in the scientific world. To solve these problems, a special research program was created that received $ 1.7 million to study luck or the role of luck in scientific discoveries in order to better predict the results of funding a particular project in the future.
Alessandro Plucino used his computer simulation, where he tested the distribution of wealth in the world, and calculated three models of funding scientists with the mandatory addition of a factor of luck in the calculations. The fact is that investment funds for a long time did not know which of the three options is preferable to send financing: teams from already held and successful scientists, beginners or make an even distribution.
Digital simulation of Plucino has shown that the best strategy is to distribute funding in equal quantities among all scientists, and in the second place in terms of rationality, grant grants randomly to 10-20% of all scientists. Partial investment strategies work perfectly to benefit from unexpected scientific discoveries that scientists make from time to time. At the same time, the success of a scientist does not matter, if he invented something significant in the past, this does not mean that he will be different in the future.
The approach based on the simulation of Plucino is beneficial not only in large science, but also in calculating investments in technological start-ups, medium and large industrial enterprises, educational projects and much more.