That’s the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here’s an excerpt:
Consider business. For decades now, big business has been on the rise in the US, meaning that employment opportunities at large companies that use a team approach are on the rise. One consequence of this is that each exit is difficult to measure. When a product does well, it’s often not clear who should get the credit, because many people’s ideas contributed to its creation.
It is difficult to recalibrate incentives to reflect this changing reality. Often companies respond by enforcing greater validation, trying to ensure that everyone is contributing appropriately. That could include seeking an Ivy League education or a prominent GitHub profile. Either way, companies may want to ex ante quality signs and less chances to take chances on real outsiders, because if the outsider doesn’t pull their weight, it may not be visible for a long time.
And this:
The real losers in the group system are those who don’t have the spirit to learn and gather information. Those testimonials include recommendations from well-known contacts, so communication and networking have become very important. This is a workable situation for many people but a frustrating arrangement for others.
Some recent evidence shows that this problem is very serious in the world of science. The number of authors in scientific papers has been increasing dramatically, a trend I have observed in my field of economics. It used to be rare for a young person’s research paper on the job market to be collaboratively written; now it’s normal. The work may be beautiful, but how can you tell which one author contributed? In the natural and biological sciences, a single paper can have many co-authors.
Again, approval will be more important, not less. In terms of criteria, someone from MIT who is on the list of the most frequently written paper is more attractive than someone from Iowa State University.
The last part of this piece also explains why we invest less in databases, and then in LLMs. It is difficult to reward people, under the current framework, for contributing to such a broad collective enterprise.
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