Demonstrated expertise trumps latent talent

Proposition - The benefits of specialization in terms of expertise outweigh native capability. How would you test this proposition which I suspect is true?

Teasing the idea out a bit - I suspect that while variance and normal distribution means that there are some fortunate individuals who are extremely competent at a wide range of things (and for lack of any better measure, lets use IQ as the designator) and might be considered one or two standard deviations better off than the average person for some portfolio of capabilities, picking a single applied competency would yield a population of individuals with lower overall capabilities but superior performance on that single metric.

Putting it this way, it begins to seem obvious. Any decent plumber, gardener, carpenter, brick-layer, etc., regardless of average IQ, will have superior performance to a high IQ generalist. Partly this would be due to the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. The decent carpenter may have a narrower and shallower set of explicit knowledge about wood and woodworking than a high IQ generalist but they have a broader and deeper pool of tacit knowledge gleaned from experience.

The bigger effect though, I suspect, is that the specialist invests the time in practice and experience to achieve superior competency. Were they to both invest the same number of hours of practice, I suspect the high IQ individual would achieve a higher level of demonstrated expertise sooner. However, they don't spend the same amount of time because of the law of comparative advantage. The high competency individual has a broader range of opportunities to which to apply their gifts and presumably pursues those opportunities with the greater benefit but the lesser gifted individual still outstrips them in the narrower field of their expertise.

The implication would then seem to be that lower competency individuals ought to be encouraged to find the activities they are most interested in (and best at performing) as early as possible in order to begin specializing. The earlier they specialize, the more focused time they invest in honing their particular skills and therefore refining their unique level of expertise. As long as they are able to demonstrate in some fashion the value of that expertise, they should then be able to glean higher levels of benefit.

I do not have them at hand, but my recollection is that high-end plumbers are capable of commanding compensation that is in the range of general practitioner doctors even though the social prestige, level of education, and required IQ of the two professions are markedly different.

This scenario, if accurate, shifts the burden for outcomes away from native talent, which is presumably genetic and not controllable, and on to behavioral traits such as self-discipline and perseverance which can be cultivated.

If one is seeking to find a way to narrow the gap in outcomes between groups and wish to do so in a non-coercive fashion, this line of thought suggests that the emphasis has to be on behavior in addition to knowledge acquisition. There will always be variance in outcomes based on variance in initial circumstances but those differences in outcomes can be ameliorated based on behaviors rather than fatalistically throwing up the hands and accepting that it is all in the genes. If true, thank goodness for comparative advantage.