“OK, Sy, I get how money is sorta like Physics ‘energy‘ except you can’t create energy but you can create money. And I get how Economics ‘velocity of money‘ and Physics ‘velocity‘ don’t have much to do with each other. Your ‘Money Physics‘ phrase doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve got something with more overlap than that.”

“You’re a tough man, Vinnie. How about the word ‘exponential‘?”

“Means something goes up really fast. What about it?”

“Well, first off that’s not really what it means and that’s one of my personal peeves, thank you very much. Yes, quantities can increase exponentially, but not necessarily rapidly, and they can also decrease exponentially, either fast or slow. It’s a math thing.”

“Alright, I got myself into this. You’re gonna tell me how that works and it probably involves equations.”

“You made the phone call, I’m just sitting here, but you’re good, no equations just arithmetic. Ten times ten’s a hundred, right, and you can write that either 10×10 or 10², OK? The little two is the exponent, tells you how many factors to multiply together.”

“And 10 with a little three makes a thousand and ten with a little … six makes a million. See, it goes up really fast.”

“Depends on what the base number is. I’ve sent a tabulation to your phone…”

Exp’t	10	2	99%	100%	101%
2	100	4	98.01%	100%	102.01%
3	1 000	8	97.03%	100%	103.03%
4	10 000	16	96.06%	100%	104.06%
5	100 000	32	95.10%	100%	105.10%
6	1 000 000	64	94.15%	100%	106.15%
7	10 000 000	128	93.21%	100%	107.21%

“What’s all that?”

“Well, the top-row headers are just numbers I multiplied by themselves according to some exponents, and the first column is the series of exponents I used. Like we said, 10² is a hundred and so on down the second column. Number 2 multiplied by itself according to the same exponents gave me the third column and you see the products don’t grow anywhere near as fast. Do you see how the growth rate depends on the number that’s being multiplied and re‑multiplied?”

“No problem. What about the other columns?”

“Start with the fifth column. What’s 100% of 100%?”

“All of it.”

“And 100% of 100% of 100%?”

“I get it — no change no matter the exponent.”

“Absolutely. Now compare that to the 99% and 101% columns that give you the effect of a 1% growth factor. As you’d expect, very little change in either one, but there’s a lesson in the 99% column. It’s exponential by definition, but the results go down, not up. By the way, both of those are such small factors that the results are practically linear. You need to get beyond 15% factors for visible curvature in the usual graphs.”

“OK, so exponential says some arithmetic factor gets applied again and again. What’s that got to do with Physics or Economics?”

“Ever since Newton, Physics has been the study of change, all different kinds. Gradually we’ve built up a catalog of change patterns. Newton pointed out the simplest one in his first Law of Motion — constant velocity, say in meters per second. Plot cumulative distance moved against time and you get a rising straight line. His Second Law implies another simple pattern, constant acceleration. That’s one where velocity’s line rises linearly but distance goes up as the square of the time traveled. But Newton never tackled another very simple, very common pattern.”

“I thought Newton did everything.”

“Not the case. He was an amazing geometer, but to handle this pattern you need algebraic tools like the ones Liebniz was developing. Newton would rather have dunked his arm in boiling rancid skunk oil than do that. It took another century or so until the Bernoulis and Euler beat that problem into the ground.”

“So what’s the simple pattern?”

“Suppose instead of a quantity increasing by some absolute number of thingies per second, it increases by some constant percentage. That’s uncommon in the kinds of mechanical phenomena that Newton studied but it does happen. Say you’re a baby planet in the middle of a dust cloud. Get 15% bigger, you’re 15% better at attracting even more dust. Biological things do that a lot — the more bugs or bacteria you’ve got, the faster they multiply and that’s usually at a constant percentage-per-time rate. Exponential growth in a nutshell.”

“Planets, bugs, what’s that got to do with Economics?”

“Ever hear of ‘compound interest‘?”

“Low rates on bank accounts, high rates on credit cards, compounded. Gotcha.”

“Inflation does compounding, too.”

~~ Rich Olcott