The lesson of nonlinearity

What Shape Does Progress Take? Don’t Assume It’s a Straight Line

Is this worth doing? The question arises in every domain of life, at every scale, from the smallest and most personal of decisions to the largest and most public. For assessing what—and how much—is worth doing, one useful conceptual tool is a production function. It maps the relationship between units of input (like money, time, or effort) and outputs (whatever you are trying to achieve, from social change to completing a research paper). People often assume, without thinking about it much, that the relationship between inputs and outcomes will be linear, like figure 1(a), where the output rises by the same incremental amount for each unit of input. ….[READ]