In the 18th century, British economist Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would inevitably outpace food production, leading to widespread famine. What Malthus couldn’t foresee was the stunning acceleration in agricultural productivity ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. New machinery, fertilizers, and improved crop varieties would radically increase yields.

But more transformative than these innovations themselves was their dissemination. Innovations have to spread before they can matter. And in a sense, the history of progress has less to do with the invention of good ideas than with their propagation. The Malthusian trap was escaped by supply chains, infrastructure, literacy, trade, and incentives. Malthus underestimated not innovation, but distribution.

This is not a random historical footnote. Again and again, the biggest challenges we face are not questions of scarcity - they're questions of allocation. Not whether a resource exists, but whether it gets to where it needs to be, at the right time, in the right form. Think of vaccines during a pandemic. Of housing in cities flush with capital and skilled labor. Of clean water in drought-stricken regions. Of code and culture in authoritarian regimes. The breakthroughs are real, the resources exist.

The bottleneck is distribution.

There is a comforting clarity in seeing the world through the lens of scarcity. It suggests the absence of something: oil, food, money, workers. And it often carries a moral weight, implying a cruel lottery of nature or birth. But what looks like scarcity is - frequently, more frequently than we'd like to admit - misdiagnosed coordination failure.

The world today produces more than enough to feed every human being. Yet over 800 million people go hungry. The problem is not caloric insufficiency. It is politics, infrastructure, tariffs, war.

Distribution.

We have YouTube lectures by Fields Medalists, MIT open courseware, Anki decks for nearly every subject. But global literacy gaps persist, and millions of students learn less in a year than others do in a month. Information, unlike rice or vaccines, is infinitely replicable. Its marginal cost is nearly zero. And still it fails to reach the people who need it most. Why? Culture, access, incentives, institutions.

Distribution.

In principle, the greatest productivity tools ever built are freely accessible. GitHub, Blender, VSCode, Jupyter, Hugging Face, and thousands more. But the adoption curve is steep, and the gains are not evenly shared. A knowledge worker in Lagos or La Paz has access to the same tools as one in London or San Francisco, yet rarely the same impact. What separates them is not intelligence or effort, but bandwidth, mentorship, local markets, trust networks. These are the hidden railroads of distribution.

In engineering, distribution = a matter of physics. How far can the signal travel? How fast can we move electrons, or atoms, or packages? But in human systems, the constraints are softer and a damn sight more slippery. They are about norms, power, incentives, and feedback loops. In that sense, most of the work of social progress resembles logistics more than invention.

The mRNA platform that underpinned COVID vaccines was in development for decades. Its eventual success was spectacular: two effective vaccines created in less than a year. But the distribution effort that followed required hundreds of simultaneous negotiations, cold chain logistics, information campaigns, and a sometimes-heroic coordination across borders. Where it failed, the issue was rarely biological. It was political. In many countries, doses sat unused or expired due to mistrust, mismanagement, or lack of delivery mechanisms.

Nor is this limited to medicine. Technologies to reduce emissions already exist: solar panels, electric vehicles, heat pumps, carbon capture. Their costs are falling. Their efficiency is rising. But their global deployment remains patchy and inconsistent. The bottleneck isn’t whether solar panels work. It’s whether permits are issued, capital is mobilized, grids are upgraded, and NIMBYism is overcome. These are not engineering problems. They are distribution problems.

To talk about distribution is to talk about power. Who decides what spreads, and where? Before the internet, distribution was heavily centralized. Editors, broadcasters, publishers, and regulators played critical roles. They were filters, sometimes benevolent, often arbitrary. The internet decentralized much of this, allowing ideas, products, and people to spread peer-to-peer. But it also introduced new bottlenecks: recommendation algorithms, network effects, attention markets.

Some memes go viral; most don’t. And just as in disease modeling, the difference between widespread adoption and obscurity often hinges on R0, the basic reproduction number. For ideas, that number is shaped by visibility, trust, and incentives. Which node in the graph shares your message matters more than how good the message is. Distribution follows power-law curves. The best idea in the world, shared once, dies in obscurity. A mediocre one, endorsed by the right influencer, spreads like wildfire.

This isn’t cynical. It explains why some technologies, institutions, and ideologies take off while others languish. The printing press existed for centuries before the Protestant Reformation. But once Luther nailed his theses and they were copied in vernacular tongues, an entire continent changed. Gutenberg built the tool, but Luther mastered the distribution.

We have an obsession with "product-market fit." Build something people want. But implicit in that phrase is an assumption: that the market will find out about a product to the degree that it can decide whether or not it fits. That discovery and adoption are tractable. In practice, X number of startups fail because they can't reach distribution. They can't get it in front of the right users, or get those users to tell others. A founder who builds a good product and neglects distribution is like a playwright who writes a great script and never books a theater.

This underpricing of distribution leads to distortions. Venture capital underindex on technical talent and overindexes on networked founders who understand power, attention, and virality. Think of Elon Musk's Twitter persona, or Steve Jobs' keynotes. The product is only half the battle. If that.

Even policy operates this way. A well-designed reform can languish in obscurity unless championed by a credible voice, targeted at the right moment, and translated into compelling narrative. The idea must move before it can govern. And movement depends on channels.

If the true bottleneck is distribution, then the best long-term investments are not in creating more stuff, but in building the pipes through which stuff flows. Which largely means infrastructure: physical, digital, institutional. Roads, fiber, satellites, schools, legal systems, and trust architectures. These are not glamorous. They do not produce headlines. But they determine whether progress trickles or floods.

This also reframes certain debates. Intellectual property, for example, is often justified as a way to incentivize creation. But it also acts as a throttle on distribution. What good is a breakthrough drug that no one can afford? Or a research paper behind a paywall? The internet promised infinite distribution. Our institutions responded by building new walls. The tension is unresolved.

Debates over centralization often miss the point. A decentralized system that fails to distribute ideas or resources effectively is no better than a centralized one that hoards them. The relevant metric is not structure but flow. Who can reach whom, how fast, and at what cost?

Some economists have tried to model distribution as a function of market efficiency. Prices coordinate supply and demand; information flows through incentives. But this view is often too clean. Markets themselves require infrastructure. They require norms, transparency, enforceable contracts. And they are embedded in cultures that shape how value is perceived.

This is why purely economic approaches often fail to explain why some things spread and others don’t. There is no market price for dignity, for curiosity, for status. Yet these shape behavior more than spreadsheets do. Why does a teenager in Jakarta learn Python? Why does a rural nurse use WhatsApp to share diagnostic photos? Why does an unemployed miner subscribe to a Substack on philosophy? Because of stories, peers, identity. Because someone showed them the door.

In that sense, distribution is cultural. It rides on trust, language, aspiration, imitation. And this makes it both more fragile and more powerful than we assume.

The first curve of progress is invention. It is the moment of insight, the flash of genius, the spark of the new. But the second curve is what matters most: adoption, diffusion, scale. And this curve is slower, messier, less celebrated. Edison said genius was 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. He might have added: and 100% logistics.

When we fail to think in terms of distribution, we mistake the visible for the significant. We celebrate the launch and ignore the rollout. We idolize the lone genius and forget the system that brought their idea to market. But the history of human flourishing is a history of logistics networks: from Roman aqueducts to Mongol horse relays to TCP/IP.

The next frontier of progress might not come from a lab, but from a loading dock. Or a new protocol. Or a school curriculum. Or a meme. If we want to accelerate the future, we need to think less like inventors and more like smugglers.

Decide: What do you want to spread? Then: Build a path.