tl;dr: Intelligence ("talent") has a Gaussian distribution, but money ("success") follows a power law. The difference might be "luck", and they use a simple age

tl;dr: Intelligence ("talent") has a Gaussian distribution, but money ("success") follows a power law. The difference might be "luck", and they use a simple agent-based model to simulate intelligence+luck to get power-law success. "The most talented people [almost never] reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals." Some interesting policy analyses, too. "[I]t is evident that, if the goal is to reward the most talented persons (thus increasing their final level of success), it is much more convenient to distribute periodically (even small) equal amounts of capital to all individuals rather than to give a greater capital only to a small percentage of them, selected through their level of success - already reached - at the moment of the distribution."