throwaway202104

To me as well, that was the most interesting part of the article. Almost sounds like communism :) but really it's more like the advice to not judge a book by it's cover. Giving everybody a chance is much more effective than funneling funds into a small "elite". As far as individuals and people are concerned at least.

Having said that, the model used in the research is way too simplified to draw conclusions from. "Talent" in it is just a change in the likelihood of a randomly good event or bad event. There is no activity, no searching for opportunities and no competition. They could substitute "talent" for electrical conductivity and events for being struck by lightning and the results would be exactly the same.

Yes the model / simulation is incredibly simplified. The individuals instead should be proactive and competing each other for limited(or maybe constantly growing but still limited) resources, with varying success depending on their talent and luck.

Still the idea that they are trying to represent has it's own merits. People are not that different from each other - because we are the same species. That's how living things are - they are similar to each other because they are just copying from their parents. In that sense somebody having 10^5 times more wealth than somebody else cannot be because of some inherent difference in qualities. We all behave mostly the same, mostly reach the same conclusions and mostly the same speed and accuracy, and we all have the same amount of time. Contrary to popular belief everyone are mostly trying their best to live their lives to the fullest as well.

I want to see someone make a more sophisticated model that simulates the real world more. There are some complex factors like being "talented"/knowledgable in multiple fields that are better than being extremely gifted in one field if the goal is to maximize your wealth. A complex factor like that might happen to provide a huge boost to your chances of getting rich - but the factor has to be insane, orders of magnitudes large.