>PaulGraham: And how could you possibly cheat to increase the market size?

I can literally think of a million ways.

1) lie to your customers about what your product actually does; this seems inevitable, once (if not before) private equity gets involved.

Using AirBnB as example: all the excess fees which have slowly crept into the final purchase price, while still requiring guests to clean &c

Have you ever listened to a congressional hearing? Or spoken to an "average reader"?

Most absolutely glaze over at the idea of calculating the "log base" of anything. If they ever got that far in math class, they certainly have not used the concept since then and cannot remember what it means or how it works. They might remember exponents, but the compounding of them is absolutely lost on the overwhelming majority of people.

Unfortunately, there was plenty of not understanding exponentials on display during Covid, including from politicians, journalists and other public figures.

It’s appalling that it is at the top of the front page.

(Edit: At the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/classic, at present.)

The most offensive part to me is that it tries to excuse obscene wealth as simply (shrug) a pesky, I mean "magic", byproduct of math.

Regardless, can we talk about the danger to society of having these resulting billionaires and how we ought to address that? I think that is in fact what "the politician" mentioned in the article was trying to address.

(The new American Dream appears to be: be one of the 30 people every 21 years that finds themselves the head of a startup that succeeds.)

Come on. Exponentials are deeply counterintuitive, but simultaneously pretty much where all the returns come from in startup investing. I think it’s extremely illustrative, especially to a group that’s probably heard a lot of degrowth propaganda.