The whole argument seems naively flawed to me: given a certain individual, with some defined IQ and personality, there are problems that they won't ever solve,

The whole argument seems naively flawed to me: given a certain individual, with some defined IQ and personality, there are problems that they won't ever solve, no matter how much time they live. I'll never write a single novel, Georges Simenon wrote 200 of them. The average person wouldn't discover relativity, or write Mozart's music, in any amount of time. It's not true that abilities scale linearly. Not even the difference in the amount if work people can perform is linear: there are people that can start successful companies in the time it takes me to set up an appointment with the dentist (weeks of procrastination). Frankly it doesn't surprise me at all that this research comes from my country: a country that is deeply suspicious of success and, especially in the public sector, of any form of reward based on results. In fact the study finds exactly what most Italian public employees (such as university researchers) ask for: indistinct financing for everyone without the need to show anything for it.