By analogy, why do the richest people in the world have tens of billions of dollars? Are they a million times smarter than the average person? A million times more hard working? A million times luckier? No. If you multiply all their advantages together do you get to a million? I don’t think so.
What’s actually going on is that they’re enough better that they’re able to stay at the top of some enterprise that, in an interconnected world, is able to grow to world scale. And so they’re able to accumulate a small but non-negligible fraction of the world’s wealth.
I predict that if the world was 1000 times bigger, the richest people would be roughly 1000x richer. (I could be convinced that it might scale super- or sub-linearly, but the main point is that if you wanted to predict the size of their wealth, the first thing you’d want to look at would be the size of the whole world, rather than the size of their absolute advantage to the median person.)
By analogy, why do the richest people in the world have tens of billions of dollars? Are they a million times smarter than the average person? A million times more hard working? A million times luckier? No. If you multiply all their advantages together do you get to a million? I don’t think so.
What’s actually going on is that they’re enough better that they’re able to stay at the top of some enterprise that, in an interconnected world, is able to grow to world scale. And so they’re able to accumulate a small but non-negligible fraction of the world’s wealth.
I predict that if the world was 1000 times bigger, the richest people would be roughly 1000x richer. (I could be convinced that it might scale super- or sub-linearly, but the main point is that if you wanted to predict the size of their wealth, the first thing you’d want to look at would be the size of the whole world, rather than the size of their absolute advantage to the median person.)
I completely agree with your point about models. So yeah, I guess my “on paper vs reality” idea is a non-starter.