Superlinear Returns

October 2023

One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world
when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance
are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear.
"You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They
meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half
as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers.
You get no customers, and you go out of business.

It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear
in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if
we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear
returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact
of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power,
military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all
of these, the rich get richer.
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