From Rob Henderson's Newsletter:
A small percentage of workers in an organization or field is responsible for the bulk of the output. The top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of least productive workers contribute only 15%. The most productive contributor is, on average, about 100 times more prolific than the least. (source). Relatedly, in their intellectual biography of Lee Kuan Yew (the founder of modern Singapore), the authors write:
The most able in society would have to be drawn into the top rungs, given the most important jobs through a strictly meritocratic system. This group at the top – [Lee] guessed that they made up between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the population in any society – was the yeast which would raise the lot of the entire society. These people would have to be thrown up by a meritocratic system – or sought out by the society’s leaders – and nurtured from a young age. To them would fall the responsibility of the top jobs, both in government and the private sector. Lee dismissed suggestions that such a system was elitist. Rather, he contended, it was based simply on a pragmatic recognition that not all men were of equal abilities and talents. He once said, only half in jest, that to bring Singapore down, an aggressor need only eliminate the top 150 or so men on whom the country relied most for it to keep ticking.
AVI writing: I'm not sure what they are measuring about productivity. Are the top 10% of police officers doing 50% of the work? 10% of the nurses? I am guessing that the closer one gets to concrete tasks, the more this levels out - though I absolutely saw this phenomenon in action in my own hospital of 20 supposedly-equal doctors, 40 supposedly-equal social workers, etc. A few of us got a lot more done, others were placeholders. Yet I really don't think that four of us did half of all the work.
The more we move into the territory of abstract work, or perhaps managerial work, the more I think this leveraging of talent becomes reality.
This would apply to the entrepreneurial class, and to researchers n general. In both instances, you do have a small subset of people generating outsized returns. The closer you get to pure labor, the less it applies, though there is still a differential. Not, I think, an order of magnitude, often a 1.5-2 to 1 ratio of top performers vs. bottom performers. There is the category of those who are negative performers, where they actively create more work than they accomplish…
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