Let me start with the economist Sherwin Rosen. In the early eighties, he wrote papers about “the economics of superstars.” In one of the papers he conveyed his sense of outrage that a basketball player could earn 2 million. To get an idea of how this concentration is increasing—i.e., of how we are moving away from Mediocristan—consider that television celebrities and sports stars (even in Europe) get contracts today, only two decades later, worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars! The extreme is about (so far) twenty times higher than it was two decades ago! According to Rosen, this inequality comes from a tournament effect: someone who is marginally “better” can easily win the entire pot, leaving the others with nothing. Using an argument from Chapter 3, people prefer to pay 9.99 for a struggling pianist. Would you rather read Kundera for 1? So it looks like a tournament, where the winner grabs the whole thing—and he does not have to win by much. But the role of luck is missing in Rosen’s beautiful argument. The problem here is the notion of “better,” this focus on skills as leading to success. Random outcomes, or an arbitrary situation, can also explain success, and provide the initial push that leads to a winner-take-all result. A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons; because we like to imitate one another, we will flock to him. The world of contagion is so underestimated!