Mostly rhetoric, but it gestured towards some mathematical/modeling intuition. I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fair

Mostly rhetoric, but it gestured towards some mathematical/modeling intuition. I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fairly constant value until recently, at which point things began to increase rapidly. I had in mind instability and explosion, a mania like for tulips, and self-destructive involution, like a society locked in competition with itself to pass the Emperor's exams. Why an exponential? I know that, in contrast, finance people speak of things going "parabolic". But there may be reason for literal exponentials, for dx/dt = x. It's not that difficulty begets difficulty, but that difficulty arises from economic concentration and concentration of opportunities, and economic concentration begets economic concentration.