The Learning Curve. Every doubling makes it cheaper.
Front
The Learning Curve
Every doubling makes it cheaper
The rule that cost falls a fixed share each time output doubles.
Back
Solar panels cost roughly a hundred times less per watt than in the 1970s. That was not one breakthrough. It followed a curve: every time the total ever built doubled, the price fell by about a fifth. Batteries, LEDs, and aircraft did the same thing. Volume is what makes a thing cheap, and volume takes time.
- This is why early buyers of any technology overpay. They are funding the doublings that make it affordable for everybody who comes after them.
- It also explains what never gets cheap. Anything built once, on a new site, never reaches the repetitions that would teach the process.
Way et al
(2022), energy cost forecasting
Keep exploring
Because you read The Learning Curve.
The Attention Economy
You are the product
The business of holding attention and selling it to advertisers.
The Chip
The hardest thing humans make in bulk
The layered silicon device behind almost every modern machine.
Entrepreneurship
The lemonade-stand principle
Spotting a problem people will pay to have solved, and solving it.
Read as a path · 6 cards · 3 min
From Material to DoorstepHow a thing becomes a thing, and then becomes yours.