Consequence, acceleration and velocity

From Why Is There No New Milton Friedman Today? by Tyler Cowen. I like his insight.

If I approach this question from a more general angle of cultural history, I find the diminution of superstars in particular areas not very surprising. As early as the 18th century, David Hume (1742, 135-137) and other writers in the Scottish tradition suggested that, in a given field, the presence of superstars eventually would diminish (Cowen 1998, 75-76). New creators would do tweaks at the margin, but once the fundamental contributions have been made superstars decline in their relative luster.

In the world of popular music I find that no creators in the last twenty-five years have attained the iconic status of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, or Michael Jackson. At the same time, it is quite plausible to believe there are as many or more good songs on the radio today as back then. American artists seem to have peaked in enduring iconic value with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, mostly dating from the 1960s.

In technical economics, I see a peak with Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow and some of the core developments in game theory. Since then there are fewer iconic figures being generated in this area of research, even though there are plenty of accomplished papers being published.

The claim is not that progress stops, but rather its most visible and most iconic manifestations in particular individuals seem to have peak periods followed by declines in any such manifestation. In essence the low-hanging fruit for the production of fame becomes much harder to find. Probably there will never be another geometer as fundamental as Euclid and no economist to rival the reputation of Adam Smith as a founder of the discipline.

Newer areas still seem to be generating iconic superstars up through the current day. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg stand good chances of going down as world-historic innovators and perhaps thirty years from now we will be asking why there is no new Steve Jobs.

Elsewhere, I use the term consequentiality as a measure (or collection of measures) of the impact of a book. There is no means to quantify subjective perfection but we can use consequentiality as a proxy. The more people are discussing a book (song, play, idea, etc.), over greater lengths of time, and across more cultures, the more basis there is for claiming such a book as consequential. This definition frees you from the shackles of passing celebrity, well funded marketing, topicality, the impact of movie tie-ins, etc. Such an approach can be used in terms of individuals as well.

I think the insight that Cowen provides is that fame is a function of absolute contribution and relative contribution and cumulative contribution. If you were there earliest with the initial insights, you are likely then to be much more iconic (or in my terms, consequential) than someone making an equally weighty contribution today. Making a contribution of five pounds of knowledge when the sum of knowledge is ten pounds is huge. Making a contribution of five pounds of knowledge when the sum of knowledge is one hundred pounds is incremental. In some regards, equally important but not as consequential.

Another way to put this perhaps is in terms of acceleration and velocity. We are looking at a particular case in any established field of knowledge, and that is when the acceleration of knowledge begins to decrease while the velocity continues to increase. We continue increasing our store of knowledge but the rate of increase has fallen.

What is it that we perceive, the reduction or the increase? Depends on frame of reference and that is usually time based with a substantial recency effect bias, i.e. proximate items are esteemed or held in regard to a greater degree than items more remote in time or awareness. Perhaps what we notice is the continued (incremental) increase in velocity but what we remember is the decrease in acceleration. That would explain why, given that there are always contemporary celebrities who command our attention (they are going faster than anyone has gone before but in smaller increments) in a given field, who we really focus on as the "greatest" are those that made the biggest strides (greatest acceleration) and because of the declining returns on effort, those biggest strides are early on. Morgan Freedman is a really great actor but in terms of impact on his field, how can he compare to a Chapman or Keaton or Grant or Bogart? Freedman is inching towards perfection while they leapt towards it.

What we remember most, in this framing, are those who gave us the greatest surge of acceleration in a field while acknowledging those superior absolute performances of the late comers.

These thoughts tie in to some of the issues raised by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge with regard to punctuated equilibrium and by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 with his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

You can be the brightest and work the hardest and take the most planned risks and be the most articulate in promoting the results but if you are in a field of reducing acceleration, you will be overshadowed by the early players and you will likely achieve less celebrity compared to others of comparable ability in nascent fields.

Hard work, persistence, risk taking, effectiveness, are all necessary ingredients to success but the degree of success will depend on the context. There is a tension between those that believe that achievers are basically lucky while others point towards effort as the determinant of outcome. They are both right: individual effort gets you in the game but the degree of success (money, fame, etc.) is dependent on the game (context).