Ah, that clever retort. If you've been approached by an Amway "IBO", or as I will affectionately refer to them "Ambots", you've doubtless been wary when you found out you'd be in the business of prospecting recruits for your income. You'd probably encountered this sort of thing before, and probably in a negative light. Certainly, in that moment, you asked this common-sensical question--"but isn't this a pyramid scheme?" And certainly, your question was answered immediately by one of two boilerplate answers spoon-fed to him by his glib upline. The first I'll address today, which is "Oh gosh no! Why, you can make more money than your upline, so it can't be a pyramid scheme!" The implication here is that in any true pyramid scheme it is impossible to make more money than the person who solicited you. Like most claims Ambots make, this one is an outright lie.
While it is true that in any pyramid scheme, those at the top stand to profit more, it is not a foregone conclusion that a sponsor makes more than his sponsee. In fact, as long as you sponsor more people than your sponsor, it is possible for you to earn more than he does in a pyramid scheme. To show that this is true, let's consider the oldest pyramid scheme, the classic chain letter. In this scheme, an individual will send out a list to 5 people. The list will have 5 names on it (his own name and 4 aliases). The instructions will inform the recipient to send 5 dollars to each of the 5 names on the list, add his name to the bottom of the list, and scratch the top name from the list. He is then to send the new list to 5 people and ask them to do the same. This is what such a pyramid will look like after 2 generations of sponsorship:
So at the first generation, there would be 5 "recruits", and at the second, 25 "recruits". If this were propogated for 5 generations, there would be 3125 at the last generation. At that point, the initial sponsor would have his name drop off the list and have no further payments sent to him for further generations. For each of the 5 members who enrolls at the 1st generation or later, the maximum he can make is $19500 dollars (-$25 + 5x$5 + 25x$5 + 125x$5 + 625x$5 + 3125x$5). However, suppose some "lazy" member at the first generation decides to sponsor only 1 person, as in the diagram below. Here, his one second generation recruit is shown sponsoring a full 5 recruits in the third generation:
So, now for the left-most "lazy" member of the 1st generation, the maximum he can profit is $3880 (-$25 + 1x$5 + 5x$5 + 25x$5 + 125x$5 + 625x$5). However, his ambitious recruit can earn the full $19500 given that he sponsors 5 subsequent generations. So, we see, just as in Amway, breadth is more important than depth. More importantly, we see that this claim, like so many by Amway zealots is just plain false. In just about any commonly encountered pyramid scheme, it is possible for a recruit to make more than his upline, so long as he sponsors more recruits. This simple chain-letter example just proves the Ambot claim false.
