Lindy effect
Based on Wikipedia: Lindy effect
A Broadway show that has run for two years is more likely to run for another two years than a show that opened last week. A book that has been in print for forty years will probably be in print for another forty. The Bible, still a bestseller after two millennia, shows no signs of going out of style. Meanwhile, last year's business bestseller is already being cleared from the shelves at half price.
This is the Lindy effect, and it inverts everything we intuitively believe about aging and survival.
For living things, age brings decay. A ninety-year-old human is far more likely to die next year than a ten-year-old. But for ideas, technologies, books, and cultural practices, the opposite holds true. Age brings resilience. The longer something has survived, the longer we can expect it to continue surviving.
Born in a Delicatessen
The concept gets its name from Lindy's, a famous delicatessen in midtown Manhattan where comedians would gather after shows to gossip about the entertainment industry. In 1964, writer Albert Goldman published an article in The New Republic titled "Lindy's Law," describing a peculiar belief he had observed among the comedians who held court there every night.
These show business philosophers had developed a theory: every comedian has a fixed amount of material. The more frequently you appear on television, the faster you burn through your reserves. A comedian who takes on a weekly show exhausts himself quickly and flames out. But one who spaces out his appearances, limiting himself to occasional specials and guest spots, might last for decades.
It was a theory about conservation, almost Buddhist in its restraint. The comedians believed that Ed Wynn had lasted until age seventy-nine precisely because he had rationed himself so carefully.
This original version of Lindy's Law was really about pacing and scarcity. But the concept would evolve into something much more interesting.
Mandelbrot Flips the Script
In 1982, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot took up the concept in his influential book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Mandelbrot was famous for discovering fractals—those infinitely complex patterns that repeat at every scale, like coastlines and snowflakes and romanesco broccoli. He saw similar patterns in human achievement.
Mandelbrot inverted the original Lindy's Law completely. The comedians at the deli believed in conservation: the more you produce, the less you have left. Mandelbrot believed in momentum: the more you produce, the more you will continue to produce. Success breeds success. A researcher with a long publication record will likely continue publishing. A show that has run for years has proven it can keep running.
There is something almost mystical in this inversion. The same name, the same delicatessen as inspiration, but two opposite conclusions. One view is tragic—every performance brings you closer to exhaustion. The other is triumphant—every survival makes you harder to kill.
Mandelbrot applied his version specifically to things bounded by a human lifespan. A poet's output, for instance, depends on the poet remaining alive. However long their collected works have been growing, they will on average continue growing for an equal additional period. When death finally comes, the poet's promise is cut precisely in half.
Taleb Removes the Limits
The Lindy effect found its most prominent evangelist in Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-American essayist and risk analyst who wrote The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. In his 2012 book Antifragile, Taleb took Mandelbrot's concept and removed its most significant constraint.
Mandelbrot had applied Lindy only to things limited by human lifespans—a researcher's career, a comedian's run. Taleb expanded it to anything without a natural expiration date. Books. Technologies. Ideas. Religions. Philosophical schools. Recipes.
If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not "aging" like persons, but "aging" in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.
This is a remarkable claim. It suggests that survival itself is evidence of robustness. Something that has lasted has proven something about itself. It has weathered storms, outlasted competitors, resisted obsolescence. Each additional year of existence is not just another year—it is another test passed, another filter survived.
According to Taleb, Mandelbrot agreed with this expansion. The perishable follows one set of rules; the non-perishable follows another. A human body accumulates damage over time. But an idea that survives accumulates proof of its resilience.
The Distinction That Matters
The key word is "non-perishable." The Lindy effect only applies to things that do not have an unavoidable expiration date built into their nature.
Human beings are perishable. We are biological organisms subject to entropy. No matter how long a person has lived, their remaining life expectancy does not increase proportionally. In fact, the opposite is true. A one-hundred-year-old is far more likely to die next year than a ten-year-old, even though the centenarian has already survived ninety more years of potential hazards.
But a book is not subject to biological decay. Neither is a recipe, a technology, a philosophical argument, or a religious tradition. These things can persist indefinitely—unless something kills them. Competition. Irrelevance. A better alternative. Cultural shifts. But there is no built-in timer counting down to their inevitable end.
This distinction explains why the Lindy effect seems to contradict our intuitions about aging. For living things, age correlates with increasing fragility. For non-perishable things, age correlates with increasing robustness.
Time as the Ultimate Judge
In his later book Skin in the Game, Taleb developed the philosophical implications of the Lindy effect. He connected it to his broader theory of fragility and antifragility.
Fragility, in Taleb's framework, is sensitivity to disorder. Fragile things break when stressed. Time, Taleb argues, is equivalent to disorder. The longer something exists, the more shocks, stresses, and disruptions it encounters. Survival over long periods therefore demonstrates an ability to handle disorder—the opposite of fragility.
This leads to a striking conclusion: time is the only reliable judge of ideas, technologies, and practices. We do not need experts to tell us what works. We can simply observe what has survived.
Who will judge the expert? Who will guard the guard? Well, survival will.
The Lindy effect offers an answer to an ancient philosophical puzzle. How do we know what is true, valuable, or effective? We trust what has lasted. The works of Homer are still read after nearly three thousand years. The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle still structure our thinking. The major world religions have persisted for millennia. Whatever these things are doing, they are doing something right.
Taleb delights in pointing out that the Lindy effect is itself Lindy-proof. The principle that old things tend to survive was already articulated by the ancients. The pre-Socratic philosopher Periander advised: "Use laws that are old but food that is fresh." Alfonso X of Castile, the thirteenth-century Spanish king, offered similar wisdom: "Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends."
Two and a half thousand years of humans noticing the same pattern is itself evidence that the pattern is real.
A Lifestyle Philosophy
The Lindy effect has inspired more than academic discussion. It has become the basis for a lifestyle philosophy, promoted most visibly by a Twitter personality known as Paul Skallas, or "LindyMan."
Skallas advocates skepticism toward anything new that has not proven its durability. New diet fads, new exercise routines, new relationship advice, new productivity systems—all are suspect until they have survived the test of time. Instead, Skallas promotes an eclectic return to ancient practices: reading the Greek biographer Plutarch and the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, emulating what he imagines to be the lifestyles of Mediterranean peoples.
This is a departure from Taleb's statistical approach. Taleb was primarily interested in the Lindy effect as a tool for prediction and risk management. Skallas uses it as a guide for daily life. Should you try intermittent fasting? Well, has humanity been doing it for thousands of years? Should you use a standing desk? How did the ancients work?
The approach has obvious appeal in an age of constant novelty. Every week brings new health advice, new technologies, new social platforms demanding our attention. The Lindy effect offers permission to ignore most of it. If something is truly valuable, it will still be around in twenty years. Until then, why not stick with what has already proven itself?
Skallas himself acknowledges the limits of this philosophy. Cultural longevity does not imply moral value. Some terrible things have persisted for millennia—slavery, exploitation, abuse of power. The fact that something has survived says nothing about whether it should have survived. The Lindy effect is descriptive, not prescriptive. It tells us what will likely persist, not what deserves to persist.
The Mathematics of Survival
Behind the philosophical discussion lies genuine mathematics. The Lindy effect corresponds to a specific probability distribution called the Pareto distribution, named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.
Pareto originally developed this distribution to describe the distribution of wealth—he noticed that roughly eighty percent of land in Italy was owned by twenty percent of the population. This "80/20 rule" appears in countless contexts. Roughly eighty percent of sales come from twenty percent of customers. Roughly eighty percent of software bugs are caused by twenty percent of the code.
The Pareto distribution is a "power law" distribution, meaning it has a distinctive shape quite different from the familiar bell curve. In a bell curve, most observations cluster around the average, with increasingly rare observations at the extremes. In a power law distribution, there are many small observations and a few extremely large ones, with no meaningful "average" in the usual sense.
When lifetimes follow a Pareto distribution, something remarkable happens. The expected remaining lifetime becomes proportional to the current age. A show that has run for two years can expect to run for about two more. A show that has run for ten years can expect to run for about ten more. This is exactly what the Lindy effect predicts.
The mathematician Iddo Eliazar has explored these connections in detail, demonstrating that Lindy's Law, Pareto's Law, and Zipf's Law—which describes how word frequencies and city populations are distributed—are essentially three expressions of the same underlying mathematical pattern.
This mathematical foundation suggests the Lindy effect is not just a folk observation or a philosophical preference. It reflects something deep about how certain kinds of systems behave.
What Lindy Is Not
It is worth being clear about what the Lindy effect does not claim.
It does not claim that old things are better. It claims that old things that have survived are likely to continue surviving. A terrible book that somehow stays in print for forty years will probably stay in print for another forty. This says nothing about the book's quality.
It does not claim that new things will fail. Many new things survive and become old things. The Lindy effect simply says we cannot yet know which new things will be among the survivors. The ones that make it through their first decade have better odds of making it through the next decade than the brand-new arrivals.
It does not apply to biological organisms. Humans, animals, and plants are subject to aging and decay in ways that books and ideas are not. Your grandmother is not becoming more robust with each passing year, even if her favorite recipes are.
It does not guarantee survival. Even things with long track records can suddenly fail. Latin was the language of European scholarship for over a thousand years before being displaced by vernacular languages. The Byzantine Empire lasted for a millennium before falling. Past performance is evidence of robustness, not a guarantee of immortality.
Practical Applications
If you accept the Lindy effect, several practical implications follow.
When choosing what to read, favor old books over new ones. A book published in 1925 that is still in print has passed tests that a book published last year has not yet faced. This does not mean the old book is better, but it does mean the old book has demonstrated staying power. The new book might be brilliant, but most new books disappear within a few years.
When evaluating technologies, be skeptical of the cutting edge. The newest programming language might revolutionize software development, or it might be forgotten in five years. Technologies that have persisted for decades—email, spreadsheets, relational databases—have demonstrated that they solve real problems in ways that humans find valuable.
When considering lifestyle advice, distrust novelty. If humans have been eating a certain way, exercising a certain way, or organizing their social lives a certain way for thousands of years, there is likely something to it. The diet book published last month is an untested hypothesis. The dietary practices of traditional cultures are long-running experiments.
When predicting the future, bet on the past. The institutions, ideas, and practices that have survived will probably continue to survive. The innovative disruptions that promise to sweep them away will mostly fail. Some will succeed—but we cannot yet know which ones.
The Comfort of the Ancient
There is something deeply reassuring about the Lindy effect. We live in an age of constant change, relentless novelty, and perpetual disruption. The Lindy effect offers permission to step off the treadmill.
You do not need to read every new business book. The ones that matter will still be around in twenty years. You do not need to learn every new technology. The ones that last will eventually become unavoidable. You do not need to follow every new trend. Most trends are noise; the signal will persist.
The ancients had this figured out. Periander's advice to "use laws that are old but food that is fresh" captures something essential. Our perishable needs—food, clothing, shelter—require constant renewal. But our non-perishable needs—wisdom, meaning, guidance for living—can be served by resources that have accumulated over millennia.
The great books are still great. The enduring philosophies still endure. The old songs are still sung, the old stories still told. In a world obsessed with the new, the Lindy effect reminds us that the old has earned its persistence. It has survived because it works. And if it has worked for this long, it will probably keep working for a while yet.