[Market outcomes] depends on the cumulation of random events. - W. Brian Arthur

Where we observe the predominance of one technology or one economic outcome over its competitors we should thus be cautious of any exercise that seeks the means by which the winner's innate 'superiority' came to be translated into adoption.

Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down to us more than a century ago by a handful of European economists — Alfred Marshall in England and a few of his contemporaries on the continent. It is an understanding based squarely upon the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations, so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was roughly valid for the bulk-processing, smokestack economy of Marshall’s day. And it still thrives in today’s economics textbooks. But steadily and continuously in this century, Western economies have undergone a transformation from bulk - material manufacturing to design and use of technology — from processing of resources to processing of information, from application of raw energy to application of ideas. As this shift has occurred, the underlying mechanisms that determine economic behavior have shifted from ones of diminishing to ones of increasing returns.

As we begin to understand , we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, non-linear, kaleidoscopic world.