When competing for a scarce resource like a prime restaurant reservation or early college admission, the most popular option ('gold') is the riskiest. Strategically targeting a slightly less desirable option ('silver') dramatically increases your chances of success, which is often a better outcome than getting nothing at all.

An explicit purchase limit (e.g., "maximum 4 per person") acts as a powerful signal of scarcity and value. It suggests the deal is so good the store might sell out or lose money. An experiment showed that adding a purchase limit to a beer offer increased the perception of it being a good value by 57%.

The federal government's performance management system is broken by grade inflation, with over 80% of employees receiving top ratings. This makes it impossible to differentiate performance, leading to bonuses being spread thinly across the board and failing to meaningfully incentivize top talent or address underperformance.

Price's Law, where the square root of participants produces 50% of the results, shows a fundamental truth: mediocrity scales exponentially because it's easy for many to achieve. Excellence, however, scales only incrementally, as very few are willing to pay the price to become one of the "fantastic few."

Elite universities with massive endowments and shrinking acceptance rates are betraying their public service mission. By failing to expand enrollment, they function more like exclusive 'hedge funds offering classes' that manufacture scarcity to protect their brand prestige, rather than educational institutions aiming to maximize societal impact.

Schooling has become a victim of Goodhart's Law. When a measure (grades, test scores) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Students become experts at 'doing school' — maximizing the signal — which is a separate skill from the actual creative and intellectual capabilities the system is supposed to foster.

Top universities operate like luxury brands such as LVMH by creating artificial scarcity, rejecting the vast majority of applicants. This strategy boosts their perceived value, allowing them to charge exorbitant tuition at incredibly high margins, effectively transferring wealth from middle-class families to university endowments, faculty, and administrators.

Despite average test scores on a consistent exam dropping by 10 points over 20 years, 60% of all grades at Harvard are now A's, up from 25%. This trend suggests a significant devaluation of academic credentials, where grades no longer accurately reflect student mastery.

Contrary to simple supply/demand, introducing a large hoard of rare coins can stimulate new collector interest, increasing prices. This "supply creates its own demand" effect (Say's Law) only applies to desirable items; common items simply become more common and lose value.