Cosa succede quando una massa di umili lavoratori immigrati provenienti da altre culture irrompe in un paese occidentale ad alto tenore di vita con un sistema produttivo avanzato?
Forse il più titolato a rispondere è l’economista Garett Jones che ci fornisce qualche dritta nel suo saggio “THE O-RING THEORY OF TEAMS AND THE ENDLESS QUEST FOR SUBSTITUTES AND THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF IMMIGRATION”.
Per capire cosa sia la teoria o-ring bisogna partire dallo shuttle, sì, quell’affare americano che volava in giro per lo spazio. In particolare dalla tragedia di cui fu protagonista…
… 1986, THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER EXPLODED shortly after take-off, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of the explosion was the failure of one of the rubber O-rings—essentially rubber bands—that helped to seal the joints in the shuttle’s booster rockets. The O-rings served as gasket seals, like washers in a faucet, there to ensure that burning fuel didn’t leak out. It was too cold the morning of the launch, so the rubber O-rings became too rigid to maintain the seal and the burning rocket fuel escaped, heating the shuttle’s massive external fuel tank and creating the fatal explosion. The failure of one O-ring was enough to cost the lives of all seven astronauts… it is the smallest of failures that can cause the greatest of losses…
Una minuzia, un gommino fece fallire il volo, provocò sette vittime, vanificò il lavoro di decine di ingegneri spaziali e fece dire basta alle avventure cosmiche di un paese.
La teoria o-ring nasce da un’intuizione di Michael Kremer…
… Harvard economist Michael Kremer saw the O-ring story as a tale of tragedy, but he saw something else as well: he saw a parable that might help explain why workers in some countries are so much more productive than quite similar workers in other countries. Kremer’s O-ring theory assumed that some kinds of projects are like the space shuttle—in which any one failure can lead to disaster…
La teoria spiega bene le disegueglianze che esistono anche tra chi fa il medesimo lavoro, spiega il perché i migliori vanno con i migliori e i peggiori con i peggiori. Lo intuiamo facilmente guardando alla vicenda dello shuttle: anche chi si dedica alle minuzie, qualcosa che in teoria potrebbe fare chiunque, deve farlo con la massima cura, non tanto per quello che fa in sè (una minuzia resta una minuzia) ma per quello che puo’ distruggere.
… why the janitors and executive assistants at top law firms earn more than people with the same jobs at ordinary law firms, why small differences in the average skill of workers across countries can cause massive differences in productivity across countries, and why the richest countries tend to produce entirely different goods than the poorest countries…
Ci sono produzioni in cui la squadra è come una catena. Ebbene, la robustezza della catena è pari alla robustezza dell’anello più debole.
Si realizza una concentrazione verticale dei talenti:
… business owners will naturally—by an invisible hand—put highly skilled workers together on the most valuable projects and put lower-skilled workers together on the less valuable projects… that’s an O-ring sector of the economy: since one mistake can destroy most of the value…
Un esempio di settore o-ring è l’industria cinematografica…
… Here is one modern example of an O-ring production method that we’re all familiar with: moviemaking. Why do award-winning directors team up with award-winning cinematographers and get a musical score by elite composers such as Ennio Morricone or John Williams or Hans Zimmer? Why do the best tend to work with the best—and the not-quite-best with the not-quite-best? Perhaps it’s all just ego, but at least some of the time it’s surely the production company—the people with financial skin in the game—insisting that the famous director team up with the famous cinematographer rather than the famous director’s buddy from film school…
Nei settori o-ring le forze non si addizionano ma si moltiplicano tra loro ma si tratta pur sempre di concatenazioni fragili, facili alla rottura…
…There’s a bigger lesson behind these tales of vases and movies: O-ring thinking gets us away from addition and pushes us toward exponents—when doubling a small number still yields a pretty small number, but doubling two small numbers—and then multiplying them together—can yield a huge number… O-ring technologies produce products that are delicate, fragile, and easy to break…
Facciamo un altro esempio nel ramo del diritto…
… The lawyers working on a billion-dollar corporate merger are probably working with an O-ring technology, in which one typo can mean a $100 million lawsuit down the road…
O in quello medico…
… if you’re having open heart surgery it’s probably a good idea to have the best nurses, the best cardiologists, and the best anesthesiologists together in the same room. On a routine appendectomy you’ll rarely see that combination…
La fragilità dipende anche dalla lunghezza delle catena: più anelli ci sono più cresce la probabilità di un anello debole.
… If your laptop’s battery and screen and eight other critical pieces each work 99 percent of the time, you’ve only got a 90 percent chance of a working laptop. The longer the chain of production, the bigger the exponent, and the bigger the payoff to finding even slightly more reliable workers…
Naturalmente, l’attività produttiva non si configura sempre come o-ring…
… sometimes you can just throw enough person-hours at a problem and things will work out reasonably well—lawnmowing comes to mind, or perhaps routine food preparation or run-of-the-mill divorce paperwork or grading homework in an introductory economics course…
Cosa ci insegna allora l’o-ring? Che i migliori vanno con i migliori, anche se la differenza tra migliori e peggiori è minima.
… it shows how small differences in worker skill—along any dimension—can lead to big differences in who works together, what they produce, and how much they earn…
Inoltre, bisogna dire, che i migliori ci migliorano, per esempio nella motivazione, cosicché lo iato che crea l’ o-ring è destinato a dilatarsi…
… There’s another reason to think that when workers are on team projects, we’ll see a lot more output when the best are paired with the best: because workers inspire and motivate each other, for good and for ill. Humans pay attention to what’s going on around them, and tend, even unconsciously, to imitate the behaviors they see… Berkeley economists Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti did something else with that information: they checked to see if workers became more productive when they were put onto a shift with the top clerks, and if they became less productive when put onto a shift with the weaker clerks.3 Perhaps it’s no surprise that on average clerks rose (or descended) to the occasion…
Gli sportivi conoscono bene questo meccanismo…
… Perhaps this is little surprise: swimmers and runners and athletes of all types know that you’re a bit more likely to train harder when you’re in the presence of stronger athletes…
Più ampio è il gruppo più l’effetto incide…
… And remember: on a team, we are, each of us, potential motivators. So the bigger the team, the bigger the motivational side effect…
L’ IQ è una buona approssimazione delle abilità…
… academic management researchers have run dozens of studies checking to see if higher-average-IQ teams are more productive than lower-average-IQ teams… Unsurprisingly, the average IQ of team members does indeed predict team productivity across about two dozen studies…
Qualora la produzione sia o-ring il parametro fondamentale è l’IQ più basso del gruppo…
… My presumption is that the question of which IQ score matters most—the team high, team low, or team average—will vary from task to task. The more O-ring the process the more that the weakest team member’s IQ score will matter…
La teoria delle relazioni di Matthew Jackson offre altre motivazioni per cui l’ IQ medio (o il più basso) incidono pesantemente sulla produttività di un gruppo.
… Jackson’s theory of networks starts with the obvious points that some human relationships are more valuable than others and that relationships are expensive to create…
L’ IQ dei partecipanti incide sulla qualità della rete di connessioni…
… Once one starts thinking about the value of connections, of relationships, it becomes obvious that cognitive skills are going to be a key ingredient in building good networks. Remembering the names of distant acquaintances, recalling the time that the company found someone to supply those specialized hard drives at the last minute, figuring out that Carlos in accounting has just the skill set that Marjorie in the executive suite was looking for in an executive VP—these are all skills that will be more common among people with higher IQ scores… working memory is one of the better predictors of IQ…
Il gioco del telegrafo senza fili offre un’analogia…
… You know the game of Telephone: kids sit in a circle, the first person whispers a slightly complicated phrase such as “The kittens go to the vet at 5 p.m. Sunday” into the ear of the child on her right. That child whispers what he hears to the person on his right, and so on around the room, with small errors accumulating until the first kid is finally told “The kids go to the Fabian Soap Derby.” Corporations, government agencies, nonprofits—all are playing games of Telephone on a daily basis. Personally, I’d love to see a study of whether higher-IQ teams are better at Telephone than teams with average IQ…
Un’altra teoria economica che esalta l’uniformità del gruppo è quella del “cheap talk” di Sobel e Crawford: 1) quanto più gli interessi di due persone convergono, tanto più si parleranno in modo esplicito, 2) se gli interessi divergono si parleranno in codice, 3) le persone con alto IQ dominano meglio i vari codici 4) le persone con alto IQ si coordinano meglio anche quando i loro interessi non convergono…
… when two people have more in common—perhaps they’re on the same football team, trying to win the FIFA World Cup—A will tend to speak clearly to B. When they have no common interests—perhaps they are strangers, or even nations at war—A will speak in gibberish to B… Sobel and Crawford prove that even if two players have an infinitely large language at their disposal—infinite numbers or words or even multiple languages—a rational player A who shares only a partial common interest with his fellow player B will use only a partial set of the messages at his disposal. He’ll speak in a stilted language… In the rich countries we see politicians talk this way all the time: there are only a few “policy stances” a senator can take, and she’s considered either a “moderate,” a “conservative,” or a “progressive” with maybe a handful of other options. Even though she might hold sophisticated, nuanced views on Shakespeare or the Qing dynasty or the best way to train for a marathon, once she switches to her role of senator the subtlety drains away and she is reduced to speaking in clichés. Part of the reason for speaking in clichés is because that’s what voters can most easily remember—voters pay little attention to politics most of the time, so branding is important… Sobel and Crawford’s finding: when two people in any kind of short-run interaction have diverging interests, both sides know that any statement gets taken with a grain of salt…But I want to push beyond the formal model to suggest that people with high average test scores are more likely to convert a game of conflict into a game of cooperation…
L’esempio classico è il divorzio: due coniugi intelligenti sapranno mettere da parte il rancore e distinguere quelle aree in cui conviene a tutti e due trovare un accordo…
… Two reasonably intelligent people getting divorced certainly face a zero-sum game when it comes to how they split up the retirement savings… part of the power of memory, part of the power of being able to recall obscure facts, is the power to remember interests the couple still have in common: “Oh, there’s a day care right between our two houses,” “Here’s an investment company that doesn’t add on fees when we split our retirement plans in half,” “I read about a job online that might be a good fit for you.” There’s at least the opportunity to think win-win… It’s that the memory skills and other traits that higher-IQ individuals tend to have are useful in searching out win-win possibilities…
Adam Smith nel primo capitolo de “La ricchezza delle nazioni” esponeva il concetto di “specializzazione del lavoro” ricorrendo alla descrizione di una fabbrica di aghi. Gli studiosi hanno reagito in modo diverso. C’è chi c’ha visto l’elemento alienante e chi c’ha visto l’elemento discriminante che tende a riunire i migliori con i migliori…
… Marx looked at the pin factory and saw workers alienated from the craft process, for instance. A second way to look at the pin factory is to see an O-ring process at work, in which one weak worker means you’re making pounds of shoddy pins each day. A third way is to see peer effects when a talented new worker ever so subtly inspires others to work just a little bit harder… Production is a team effort, and teams with better-than-average memories, better-than-average social intelligence, and better-than-average job skills can become vastly more productive than even a slightly less-skilled team…
Bene, direi che ora possediamo l’apparato concettuale per maneggiare il problema dell’immigrazione di massa di lavoratori generici.
Cominciamo col dire che la produzione o-ring non è l’unica, anzi quella più studiata è la Cobb-Douglas a rendimenti decrescenti. Nell’o-ring le abilità dei lavoratori interagiscono esaltandosi tra loro mentre nei settori “impermeabili” (o Cobb-Douglas) i lavoratori non interagiscono tra loro e le abilità si sommano per realizzare la produzione complessiva.
Ipotizziamo un economia mista: due settori, uno o-ring e uno foolproof…
… In a paper I wrote a few years ago I created a mathematical model that showed what happens if some parts of the economy are O-ring, in which team skills matter a lot, and other parts of the economy are Foolproof… There are two kinds of tasks: delicate O-ring jobs and rough-and-tumble Foolproof jobs… This model, a dramatic oversimplification of real-world economies, might help explain why people with high test scores typically earn only a little more than their average neighbors within a country but why nations with high average test scores earn vastly more than nations with just ordinary scores…
Si noti che la diseguaglianza nei settori o-ring è minima perché c’è chi produce molto e chi puo’ distruggere molto, cosicché tutti devono essere compensati a dovere. D’altro canto – se è possibile distinguere i lavoratori migliori dai peggiori – le diseguaglianze tra chi lavora nell’ o-ring e chi lavora nel foolproof possono essere profonde.
Un primo scenario potrebbe essere quello dei cloni:
… Imagine all workers in the same country have exactly the same skill set, a nation of clones…
In questo caso non è possibile distinguere i migliori dai peggiori cosicché le diseguaglianze di trattamento economico sono azzerate indipendentemente dal settore dove si lavora: se l’o-ring paga meglio del foolproof tutti andranno lì finché il foolproof non pagherà meglio dell’o-ring, fino a raggiungere un equilibrio.
Pensate ad un paese in cui tutti sono laureati e specializzati in ingegneria spaziale. Lo spazzino guadagnerà come l’astronauta e naturalmente, come l’astronauta, sarà un ingegnere spaziale.
Se le abilità dei lavoratori variano il modello fa la previsione attesa: comincerà la discriminazione dei migliori con i migliori nei settori o-ring.
… the first big prediction of the O-ring-Foolproof model: if one were to compare across countries that differ in average skill level, in nations of high average skill level—measured how you will—one will tend to see a bigger fraction of the workers in delicate, cutting-edge O-ring tasks and a smaller fraction of workers engaged in routine decades-old work tasks…
E nel caso comincino i flussi migratori di lavoratori non specializzati e non integrati? Chiamiamoli pure i “peggiori”, nel senso che a volte nemmeno sanno parlare la lingua della comunità.
Costoro non entreranno certo nei settori o-ring poiché farebbero crollare lo shuttle. Entreranno nei settori foolproof.
Questo cosa comporta? Ci sono diverse possibilità.
Quella più comprensibile è che una maggiore concorrenza tra i “peggiori” porti ad un abbassamento dei redditi e a diseguaglianze ancora più forti.
Ma c’è un altro esito possibile. Ricordate l’ingegnere spaziale che faceva lo spazzino? Nello scenario dei cloni una figura del genere è la regola ma anche nel secondo scenario c’è una quota residuale di soggetti con queste caratteristiche. Ecco, costoro a fronte della nuova concorrenza potrebbero migrare nell’o-ring (hanno le carte in regola per farlo) e intaccare i redditi dei “migliori”. Magari non proprio dei migliori ma della classe media sì. A volte questa migrazione, paradossalmente, alza i redditi del settore foolproof.
Forse è proprio per l’effetto appena descritto che negli USA l’immigrazione non ha comportato un calo rilevante nel reddito dei lavoratori più umili:
… For the rich countries, especially for the well-studied United States …less-skilled immigration doesn’t do much to the wages of U.S.-born residents… The most pessimistic academic estimates come from Harvard economists George Borjas and Larry Katz, who reported that less-skilled immigration may have pushed down the wages of American high school dropouts by 8 percent… It’s even possible that economists Ottaviano and Peri are right: they claim that less-skilled immigration to the United States has actually raised the wages… For that and other reasons—in the authors’ words, because of different abilities in “language, quantitative skills, relationship skills and so on”—they’re not in direct competition with U.S.-born, less-skilled, less-educated workers. In this view the people in the United States hurt most by recent waves of nonnative-English-speaking immigrants are actually people who came as part of previous waves of non-native-English-speaking immigrants. Recent immigrants and older immigrants are substitutes for each other…
Quando la migrazione si fa massiccia la concorrenza si concentra nei settori foolproof ed è essenzialmente concorrenza tra immigrati.
Possiamo concludere dicendo che l’immigrazione offre un grande beneficio all’immigrato senza colpire granché il “non specializzato nativo”. A volte ne risente di più la classe media.
… the biggest beneficiaries of less-skilled immigration are the immigrants themselves, whose lives are often transformed from a nightmare of dollar-a-day poverty to a realm of modest comfort, health, and safety… It’s always worth reminding citizens of the high-productivity countries that immigration is still the most reliable way to raise the living standards of people in low-productivity countries. Rather then send aid workers or cash to help people in poor countries…
Il problema si potrebbe far sentire quando la carenza di nativi è tale da spingere l’ingresso nell’o-ring anche dei lavoratori “peggiori” (immigrati): a quel punto lo shuttle sarebbe in pericolo, il loro potenziale distruttivo è immenso.
Oppure quando individui a basso IQ votano. Probabilmente voteranno per politiche ottuse (tipo quelle anti-immigrazione o stataliste) mettendo nei guai una nazione. Ma questa è un’ altra storia.
