The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)

If you’ve taken high school biology, you’ve probably encountered this picture:

There’s a good reason why the normal distribution pops up so much: it represents the sum of some number of component factors. We can generalize this example to our preferences and choices generally: the decisions we make whenever we spend something (money, time, opportunity, etc) represent the sum of many factors. We consider many factors when determining whether conditions are right, so our preferences and decisions are multifactorial in nature – that’s why we see normal distributions so consistently.

Source: alexdanco.com