What is talent ? Elements of the social physics of differences and inequalities (continued)

For the second year, this lecture is devoted to the question of talent. It takes seriously the current "talentification" of the world of work and the debates and controversies that accompany it. Two well-known pitfalls need to be avoided: on the one hand, the essentialist approach, which transforms talent into an initial endowment that propels its holder onto the road to success, according to a perfectly tautological argument, and, on the other, the constructivist critique of the notion, which holds it to be a screen and a pure illusion. To achieve this, we need to bring together several currents of research, which are respectively interested in: the multidimensionality of skills and the complex technology of their production function; the variability of non-routine work; gaps in professional success that are disproportionate to the underlying distribution of observable individual characteristics; the stratification effect of assortative matching in teamwork and the organization of collaborations.