The experience curve: learning by cumulative production

Practice, not the passing of time, is supposedly what makes a craftsperson better -- and this page gathers conjectures that test whether that was true in the ancient and medieval world too. The claim comes from Wright's law, an idea from industrial economics holding that products get better and cheaper following a precise mathematical curve tied to total units made, since each additional unit made is one more rehearsal that tightens a maker's tolerances. Applied to old workshops, that predicts a specific pattern: a potter's dimensional consistency, or a mosque-builder's compass accuracy, should trace a straight line against how much a region had cumulatively produced, not a vague drift measured merely in centuries.

Wright's law in clay tests the law directly against the dimensional scatter of mass-produced pottery, asking whether consistency improved as a function of how many pots a workshop had already made. The qibla learning curve applies the same logic to the accuracy of a mosque's prayer-direction orientation over time. The winner's curse at the Rialto looks for the opposite signature -- a bidding pattern at a Venetian galley auction that behaves like the "winner's curse" from modern auction theory, where the most optimistic rather than most accurate bidder tends to win.