But whatever the precise numbers, all these distributions are examples of the power law, so called because the winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate, so that they explode upward far more rapidly than in a linear progression. Once Jeff Bezos achieves great riches, his opportunities for further enrichment multiply; the more a scientific paper is cited, the better known it is and the more likely it is to attract further citations. Anytime you have outliers whose success multiplies success, you switch from the domain of the normal distribution to the land ruled by the power law—from
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