Pakistan, Sept. 18 -- Place one egg on the first square of a chessboard. Two on the second. Four on the third. Eight on the fourth. Keep doubling until you reach the 64th square.

At first, nothing remarkable happens.

After ten squares, you need only 1,023 eggs. After twenty, just over one million. By the thirtieth, the number crosses one billion. By the fortieth, it crosses one trillion.

Cover the entire chessboard, and you would need 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 eggs.

More than 18 quintillion.

The frightening thing about exponential change is not how enormous the final number becomes. It is how ordinary the first half of the chessboard looks.

For most of modern economic history, governments and businesses have been trained to think i...