That’s because Allesina has created a computer model that can determine the frequency of nepotism in hiring. He applied it to academic life in Italy, but the same model could just as easily be applied to political hiring here.
“I wanted to keep it simple so anyone with a laptop can repeat it,” he told us. “What I wanted to show was that it’s not a few bad apples. I wanted to show the magnitude.”
His findings, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, proved that nepotism is widespread among academics in Italy, and now the Italian media are all over it. But what about Chicago?