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Comment by clarkevans | Hacker News Reader

This is the winner-take-all economic system that we have constructed for ourselves. It's not a law of nature.

Winner take all systems occur anywhere that there are large differences in quality of performers and the top performers can serve many consumers (almost) as easily as serving as small numbers.

Before recorded music the very best professional musician probably made five times as much as the one who was just barely able to reliably get work.

There’s an entire economics literature on these systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

> Tournament theory is the theory in personnel economics used to describe certain situations where wage differences are based not on marginal productivity but instead upon relative differences between the individuals.

Where this doesn’t apply you get Baumol’s Cost Disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

> Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher (low or no) labor productivity growth.

> The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains is from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, ...

"Winner-take-all" is an end result, not an explanation.

The explanation, or part of it, is a unified interconnected world market where even a tiny idea, well executed, can be incredibly well rewarded, since it scales across the economy of most of humanity.

Nobody really "constructed" it. It emerged.

Of course it was constructed. Aliens didn't just drop it from the heavens - the US specifically released the internet to the public and commercial interests, whereas previously it was limited to academic interests. Once commerce was up and running on the internet, it was simply a matter of companies getting big quickly and inserting themselves as middlemen between customers and producers/distributors. The fact that most of these companies eschewed profits for many, many years in favor of growth makes it self-evident that they understood that capturing the majority of the network (winner-take-all) was the primary goal.

"People will come up with reasons the system they live under is the laws of nature," probably is a law of (human) nature, though.

Actually it kinda is (power law and all). Whether or not we should choose to adhere to it is another question.

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