Right You see you see how this works it's Just well here are Ways you can Be creative and here are strata of
Accomplishment Within Those Ways and so then The question is what Does it look like yes
yes
yes fair enough and and This probably Needs to be Updated to reflect That
So so there's There's the distribution of Scores Now That's Dismal That's a Dismal Thing
To look at you have to understand that Why look at this?
Zero
Right The median person has not done anything creative ever in Their life with anything on any Dimension
Right It's really important to know that and then You have These Horrible People out Here?
Right They do everything They do everything price is Law Here's prices Law This does something to hammer into your Heart?
The square root of The Number of People in a domain do 50% of the Work
Okay so let's Let's Go through That you have ten Employees three of them Do Half The Work
Makes sense That's reasonable you have a Hundred employees?
Ten of them Do Half the Work
That's problem so the Other Ninety Percent are doing the other Half Who cares about them you have ten Thousand employees a
Hundred of them Do Half the Work
Right So Here's That Here's a Nasty Little law As Your Company grows
incompetence Grows in It Exponentially and competence Grows Linearly
Got It right Because It with ten it's three who are doing half the Work but at ten Thousand it'S one Hundred that are doing
Half The Work so nine Thousand Nine Hundred of your employees are doing as much as The best 100
you Might Not even know who the best 100 are but probably they know and maybe Their Peers Know
Too and so One of The things That's Really interesting
When Big companies start to Shake Which means maybe They've had a Bad quarter too Bad quarters and the stock price starts to tip down
And The People the hot People who have options are not Very happy about that and
Maybe They start to announce layoffs all The Hundred People who have opportunities leave and They're the ones who were doing Half The Work?
So boy that puts your company in a Pretty Rough situation Because Now you've Got the ninety Nine Hundred
People Left Over Who we're only doing half the Work and the next time you announced layoffs the next most
Productive Hundred leave and so Then You're Left With Nobody Who's productive at a Massive
Overhead Payroll
Prices Law You can look that Up to soul a price to soul a price Is a Guy who was looking at scientific productivity and
One of The Things he found was When he was looking at Phd students is That
The Median Number of publications for a Phd graduate When he did his Work Which Was in the Early 60s Was one
okay half as Many Had - Half as Many as That had three Half as many as That had four it's a Real Step down
And One of The corollaries of that is that There's a Certain Number of People Who are hyper productive and That's These People Out Here?
and If You were graphing the distribution Let's Say You Graphed how many People in that Population of 300 had
$10,000 in a Savings account It Would Look Very Much Like This
Some of them would Have or
Some of some of them Would most People Would have like no Savings Whatsoever?
The Median person Would Have no savings Whatsoever and then You Go up here where the
1% is they have all the Money But the thing you want to understand about that 1%?
Issue that you always Hear about is that It applies in Every single Realm Where there's difference in creative production Every realm
Doesn't Matter Number of Records produce Number of Records sold Number of compositions Written so here's Here's an Example 5 composers
Produce The Music That occupies 50% of the Classical repertoire right bach Beethoven Brahms
Tchaikovsky
Who's Mozart That's right Those 5 ok so Here's something cool so you take all the Music Those People wrote
5% of the Music all Those People Wrote
occupies
50% of the Music that of Their writing That's Played
so not only
Do Almost all the composers never get a Listen But even among the composers who do get a Listen Almost none of Their Music ever
gets Played
So so then That's a That's another Example of This prices Loss Scaling so when It Applies to all sorts of Things Like Number of
Hockey Goals Scored Is also distributed This Way Number of Basketball Basketball
Basketball
Successfully Put Through The hoop Follows the same distribution
size of Cities Follows The Same distribution It'S a Weird it'S a Weird law and you can Think about it in part
Why Does this Happen
While imagine What happens when you play Monopoly
What happens Everybody has the same Amount of Money to begin with right
so then You start Playing it's basically a Random Game
Well some People start to win a Bit and some People start to lose a Bit and then if you win the hut
probability That You'll keep Winning starts to increase and if you lose Your
Vulnerability Increases as You lose and then Maybe You've Got to say Six People Playing Monopoly Soon One person has zero
What happens When they have zero?
They're out of The game so zero Is a Weird Number Because When you hit zero you're out of the game so
So then if you keep Playing People start to stack up at zero Right What happens at the end of the game
One person has all The property and all the Money and everyone else Has none
Right That's What happens if you Play an
Iterated trading Game to its Final Conclusion and That's Part of The the law in a sense That's Underlying This Kind of
Distribution so it's it's really it's it's it's not a consequence
NeCessarily Of Structural Inequality it's built into the system at a Deeper Level Than That
so you know People Talk about all The time about how Unfair it is That
1% of the population has the vast Amount of the Money and 1% of The 1% has most of That Money and
1% of The 1% of The 1% has most of That Money but It is a
It's a it's an inevitable conclusion of iterated trading Games and we Don't know how to fight it we don't know. How to take
From The People Who have and move it to the bottom Without Instantly moving back Up to the top
Different People Maybe But Still back Up to the top because even The 1% churns a Lot like i think
you have a
10% chance if i remember Correctly you have a 10% Chance of being in The top 1%
for At Least One Year of Your life and a
40%
Chance of being in The top 10%
For At Least One Year in Your life That's in canada in the us it's less so in europe
So there's a Fair Bit of Churning at The top end it's not the same people all the time who have the Money
But It is a Tiny Fraction of The People all the time who have all the Money
yeah
No
Not usually i
Mean They do but it's attenuated
Because The People Mean
If you Reshuffle the entire company and Put everywhere somewhere Else There's some
Probability That some of Those People Would rise to the top that Weren't
At the top before but in that Company that that isn't Generally What happens People Get stuck in their niche and they don't move so
yeah This is you cool you wonder sometimes well how can Companies die so quickly
Well They go they go into a Death Spiral That's almost impossible for them to get out of
so and It Happened It can Happen Extraordinarily Quickly This is why you know the typical fortune 500 company only lasts 30 Years That's it
It's not That Easy for These bam moths to continued Existence across Time
So and it's because it's really easy for something to die it's very Unlikely that it Will be built
It's very Unlikely That It Will Be Successful and Once Successful it's Very Unlikely that It Will continue to duplicate its success because the Underlying
Landscape Shifts on It and It Doesn't Know where to go and That's also partly Because
It's not That Easy to integrate
Creative People Into your Company right You Certainly don't want them at the bottom Because They're supposed to be people who are doing What they're
Told to do
So you filter Out a Lot of them at the bottom and then you need them at the top but They've already Been Filtered out
and also creative People are troublesome to work with because They're always how do You evaluate a creative person
You all you almost can't By
Definition Because They keep coming Up with New Things and you don't have a Good
Evaluative Strategy for a New Thing It Wouldn't be new if you had a Good
Evaluative Strategy for It right It Would have to be the member of a Class That You've Already encountered
Substantially so Anyway so the take-Home lesson from this is?
Zero
Right Right and Then That's Like That's like a Graph of Money Monetary distribution as Well and The Thing the problem with being at zero
Is it very difficult to get out of zero This is also Why People Get stuck in
Poverty You Know you can't get a bank account if you're if you don't have any Money Right if
There's a Bunch of Things That start to move against you when you're at zero that you can't
Shake it's very difficult to get out of the out of the
The Pit here because zero Is a Kind of Pit