Claiming the Lion’s Share of the Credit
Although Meyer’s giving strengthened his reputation in the inner circles of show business, he toiled in
anonymity in the outside world. In Hollywood, there’s an easy solution to this problem. Writers gain
prominence by claiming credits on as many television episodes as possible, which proves that the
ideas and scenes were their brainchild.
George Meyer shaped and sculpted more than three hundred Simpsons episodes, but in quiet
defiance of Hollywood norms, he’s only credited as a writer on twelve of them. On hundreds of
episodes, other writers got the credit for Meyer’s ideas and jokes. “George never took writing credits
on The Simpsons, even though he was an idea machine,” Tim Long told me. “People tend to come up
with ideas and jealously guard them, but George would create ideas, give them to someone else and
never take credit. There’s a crucial stretch of The Simpsons over ten years where he’s not credited
with a single joke, even though he was responsible for a huge number of them.”*
By giving away credit, Meyer compromised his visibility. “For a long time, George’s towering
contribution to what some see as the most important TV show of the period was not as well known as
it should have been,” Long recalls. “He was generating a tremendous amount of material, and not
really getting credit.” Should Meyer have claimed more credit for his efforts? Hogging credit
certainly seemed to work for Frank Lloyd Wright: at Taliesin, Wright insisted that his name be on
every document as head architect, even when apprentices took the lead on a project. He threatened his
apprentices that if they didn’t credit him first and submit all documents for his approval, he would
accuse them of forgery and take them to court.
Yet if we take a closer look at Meyer’s experience, we might draw the conclusion that when
Wright had success as an architect, it was in spite of taking credit—not because of it. Meyer’s
reluctance to take credit might have cost him some fame in the short run, but he wasn’t worried about
it. He earned credit as an executive producer, landing a half dozen Emmys for his work on The
Simpsons, and felt there was plenty of credit to go around. “A lot of people feel they’re diminished if
there are too many names on a script, like everybody’s trying to share a dog bowl,” Meyer says. “But
that’s not really the way it works. The thing about credit is that it’s not zero-sum. There’s room for
everybody, and you’ll shine if other people are shining.”
Time would prove Meyer right. Despite his short-term sacrifices, Meyer ended up receiving the
credit he deserved. Meyer was virtually unknown outside Hollywood until 2000, when David Owen
published his profile in the New Yorker, with the headline describing Meyer as “the funniest man
behind the funniest show on TV.” When Owen contacted key Simpsons writers for interviews, they
jumped at the chance to sing Meyer’s praises. As Tim Long puts it, “It makes me incredibly happy to
extol George’s virtues, even if I’m going to embarrass him.”
Just as matchers grant a bonus to givers in collaborations, they impose a tax on takers. In a study
of Slovenian companies led by Matej Cerne, employees who hid knowledge from their coworkers
struggled to generate creative ideas because their coworkers responded in kind, refusing to share
information with them. To illustrate, consider the career of the medical researcher Jonas Salk, who
began working to develop a polio vaccine in 1948. The following year, scientists John Enders,
Frederick Robbins, and Thomas Weller successfully grew the polio virus in test tubes, paving the
way for mass-producing a vaccine based on a live virus. By 1952, Salk’s research lab at the