To understand the distinction, suppose the best, hardest-working construction worker could lay one thousand bricks in a day while the tenth-best laid nine hundred bricks per day. In a well-functioning market, pay would reflect this difference proportionately, whether it could be attributed to more efficiency and skill, or simply to more hours of work. In a traditional market, someone who is 90 percent as skilled or works 90 percent as hard creates 90 percent as much value and thus can earn 90 percent as much money. That’s absolute performance. By contrast, a software programmer who writes a
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