Value Increase

I posit there are multiple ways to add value to a system.

One can increase the number of people working on a process, such as in manufacture, or one can increase the amount of resources that one works with, such as using more land for agriculture. One can take the resources of another, or one can work/process for a longer time, in order to obtain more value out of the processes one applies.

Such increases of value are additive, for each increase of a constant amount of inputs (invested value - e.g. an extra worker) results in an additive increase in the number of outputs (resulting value - e.g. an extra 8 shirts made per day). Such increases are commonplace, and are present in common daily life.

One can also improve the process through which one produces value. The introduction of a machine to manufacture yarn, for instance, substituting the manual labor that used to produce it, can increase the production of this process by a certain factor (say, +70% output), in addition to reducing the cost of manual labor (say, -30% input).

Any method that introduces efficiency into a process is multiplicative, for each increase of a constant amount of inputs (invested value - e.g. one-time substitution of machines for manual laborers) results in a multiplicative increase in the number of outputs (resulting value - production ratio increase of 1.7 / 0.7 ~= 2.4). Though the investment of such improvements tend to require more effort or deeper analysis, and they are not as commonplace as the additive methods, their value increase grows much faster, and their improved effects are (in theory) long-lasting.

Furthermore, there are changes that occur in the world that bring about ways that can increase the value of processes even faster than multiplicative ones. Such improvements change the way in which a population itself produces value in their daily lives. In such a change, each individual is given the opportunity to improve his/her own production processes in multiplicative manners. As the processes between individuals interact with one another, and critical flow paths between them are unclogged, and flow quicker and easier, the individual multiplicative factors compound, resulting in exponential increases in the value of the entire population.

Such improvements, rarer over the course of generations, tend to bring about revolutionary changes across a population. Examples of such changes in our collective memory have been the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of Computers, the Internet, and most recently Artificial Intelligence.