It's probably worth noting that "credit" rather than work is explicitly the relevant concept in play in the formation of Price's Law -- Price seems to have conc

It's probably worth noting that "credit" rather than work is explicitly the relevant concept in play in the formation of Price's Law -- Price seems to have conceived the relationship in the context of looking at academic citations. "Work done" is certainly one component of having a much-cited paper; you are simply not going to have a relatively large number of cited papers if you have not written a relatively large number of papers. But there's the question of what other factors lead papers to awareness, recognition of value, and citation, and those questions likely don't have a linear relationship with "value created." Given the description of some of the dynamics involved as a "preferential attachment process" involving "cumulative advantage" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment ), Price seems to have recognized this and probably had a different conception than the author of the piece we're discussing. (Peterson, who the author indicates brought Price's law to his attention, seems to recognize this as well, and sometimes suggests that it's best to assume that people who aren't at the top of some Pareto distribution "P" in contributing value are probably contributing value in some other way that isn't visible to people focusing on P. )