CONCEPT
The Adoption Curve as Seismograph
The reframing that transforms adoption data from a product report card into a diagnostic instrument — measuring not the quality of the rupture but the magnitude of the stress that accumulated along the fault line.
Economics is, at its most honest, the discipline of reading evidence that the economy produces about itself. The conventional reading of adoption curves treats them as report cards for products and markets — a steep curve means a good product in a receptive market, a shallow curve means inadequacy on one side or the other. Say's framework transforms this reading into something more powerful: the adoption curve as seismograph, measuring not the surface event but the tectonic forces that produced it. When an earthquake strikes, the seismograph does not measure the quality of the rupture. It measures the magnitude of the stress that accumulated along the fault line before the rupture occurred. A large earthquake does not mean the fault was particularly weak; it means the stress was particularly deep, accumulated over a particularly long period, and released through a rupture at a particular point in space and time.
