Wright's Law: The Technology Learning Curve

Technology Parameters

Learning rate 80%

Starting unit cost $1,000

Base production growth 20%/yr

Demand elasticity 0.8

Live Readout

Unit cost

$1,000

Cost drop

Cumulative units

Doublings

0.00

Years elapsed

0.0

Production rate

—/yr

How it works

Wright's Law (the "experience curve" or "learning curve") says a technology's unit cost falls by a fixed fraction — the learning rate — every time cumulative production doubles, not every time a fixed amount of time passes:

C(X) = C₁ · X^(−b)
b = −log₂(learning rate)
doublings n = log₂(X / X₁)
⇒ log C = log C₁ − b·n   (a straight line on a doublings-vs-log-cost plot)

The curve you see plots exactly that: the horizontal axis is doublings of cumulative production, the vertical axis is unit cost on a log scale, so a constant learning rate always traces a straight declining line. A steeper slider (lower % = more learning per doubling) tilts the line down faster.

Production itself grows exponentially, but with a feedback loop: as cost falls, the product becomes more attractive, so demand elasticity lets falling cost accelerate production growth above the base rate —

effective growth = base growth × (1 + elasticity × cost-drop-fraction)
dX/dt = X × effective growth

This is the same feedback that drove real cost declines for solar photovoltaics (~20–24% learning rate, i.e. ~76–80% progress ratio), lithium-ion battery packs (~18%) and DNA sequencing — cheaper production sells more units, which produces more learning, which makes it cheaper still.

Experience curve (doublings → cost) Doubling milestone

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