The Lindy Effect: Why old things outlive new things
The counterintuitive principle governing what endures
There was a deli on Seventh Avenue in New York called Lindy’s, famous for its cheesecake and its clientele of Broadway comedians. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, informal wisdom circulated among the performers who gathered there. They observed that the longer a comedy show had been running, the longer it was likely to continue running. A show that had lasted 10 years could be expected to run for another 10; one that had lasted 20 could reasonably be expected to run for another 20. Longevity predicted further longevity.
The idea remained informal and unnoticed outside its immediate milieu until the writer Albert Goldman coined the term “Lindy’s Law” in a 1964 article, which the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot later adapted in his 1982 book on fractals. It largely disappeared again until Nassim Nicholas Taleb seized upon and developed it in Antifragile, published in 2012.
Taleb’s elaboration transformed a deli observation about Broadway shows into a general principle regarding the behaviour of ideas, technologies, institutions, and cultural artefacts across time – a principle with implications that are simultaneously obvious once stated and deeply counterintuitive in their practical applications.
The core claim of the Lindy Effect is straightforward. For certain classes of things – principally non-perishable items lacking a natural biological lifespan – past survival predicts future survival, and the relationship is roughly proportional. The longer something has already existed, the longer it can be expected to continue existing.
This inverts the intuition applied to perishable, biological entities. A 70-year-old human has a shorter expected remaining lifespan than a 30-year-old because biological organisms age, accumulate damage, and eventually die from causes that increase in probability over time.
The Lindy Effect applies to books, technologies, institutions, ideas, and practices that operate outside the biological clock of senescence, relying instead on a different dynamic: survival itself serves as evidence of fitness that predicts further survival.
Most new ideas fail quickly, filtered out by competition, irrelevance, or the inability to find an audience that values them. The ideas that survive this initial period have demonstrated some capacity to persist – some quality of usefulness, resonance, or adaptability that allowed them to outlast the many contemporaries that did not make it.
An idea that has survived a century has passed through a century of tests, including changes in technology, political circumstance, cultural fashion, economic conditions, and the intellectual frameworks through which people evaluate claims. Its survival through all of these is evidence of a robustness that a new idea cannot yet demonstrate. The ancient idea’s very age is information – it tells you that the idea possesses properties making it resilient to the disruptions that destroy newer things.
Taleb makes the application to books vivid. A book published last year has unknown prospects; most books published last year will be forgotten within a decade. A book that has been in print for 50 years has already survived the filters that eliminate most literature, and the probability that it will remain in print for another 50 years is substantially higher than the probability that last year’s bestseller will be read in 2075.
A book read continuously for millennia – such as the Bible or the Iliad – has survived the collapse of the civilisations that produced it, the loss and rediscovery of its language, and the transformation of every social and political context in which it has been read. Its continued survival is evidence of properties so robust that predicting its endurance for another two millennia seems reasonable. Homer has already passed tests that no contemporary novel has yet faced.
The principle scales in interesting and useful ways. Consider medical treatments. A practice used continuously for 500 years – such as herbal remedies, certain dietary interventions, or particular physical therapies – has survived exposure to the empirical filter of human experience across that period.
This does not mean it is effective in any clinically rigorous sense, as the history of medicine is full of harmful practices that persisted for centuries on the basis of misguided theoretical frameworks. Nevertheless, the Lindy argument suggests that practices with long histories of use have passed at least some tests: they have not killed their users too rapidly, they have provided enough subjective benefit to retain adherents across generations, and they have survived the competitive pressure of alternative treatments.
A new pharmaceutical, by contrast, has not yet been exposed to the full range of conditions, populations, and long-term effects that time reveals. One should maintain epistemic humility regarding new interventions and take seriously what has endured; the rigorous clinical trial is a vastly more efficient mechanism for testing efficacy than centuries of informal use.
The Lindy Effect’s application to institutions is equally instructive. The Catholic Church has been operating for some 2,000 years. The British monarchy has existed, with interruptions and transformations, for over 1,000. The common law tradition of England has been developing continuously since the twelfth century. The University of Bologna has been teaching students since 1088.
These institutions have survived catastrophes – plagues, wars, revolutions, the invention of printing, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, democracy, and two world wars – that destroyed enormous numbers of their contemporaries.
The Lindy argument suggests that the probability of any of these institutions surviving another century is substantially higher than the probability of a newly founded institution surviving a comparable period. These institutions demonstrate the adaptive capacity required to survive a millennium. In a meaningful sense, they are tested in a way that a technology company founded last year is not.
The distinction between perishable and non-perishable is crucial to applying the principle correctly, and this is where casual applications of the Lindy Effect go wrong. The principle does not claim that old people are more likely to survive than young ones, that an aging infrastructure is safer than a new one, or that physical objects deteriorate less with age.
These are perishable things, subject to the biological and physical processes of senescence and decay. The Lindy Effect applies to the non-perishable: ideas, practices, technologies, and institutions that exist in the domain of information and social reality rather than in the domain of material decay. A hammer wears out, but the idea of using a hammer-like tool to drive objects by impact has been with us since the Paleolithic and shows no sign of becoming less applicable.
The practical implications of taking the Lindy Effect seriously are significant and somewhat sobering. They counsel scepticism toward novelty for its own sake – toward the assumption that newer is better, that the latest technology is necessarily superior to the established one, or that contemporary ideas have surpassed the intellectual achievements of earlier ages.
The things most likely to be in use or read a century from now are those that have already demonstrated a track record of persistence, rather than those that feel fresh and relevant today.
Email – an unglamorous technology that has been declared obsolete many times since its invention in the early 1970s and stubbornly continues to dominate professional communication – has a better Lindy-based claim to longevity than whatever communication platform launched last quarter. The Greek tragedies that have been performed continuously for two and a half thousand years are safer bets for another century of performance than the plays that won prizes last year.