Ronald Coase

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The number that rewired my thinking was not twenty. Not the twenty-fold productivity multiplier from Trivandrum, though that number changed how I build. The number was forty-five.

Forty-five percent. That is the share of the American economy that two economists estimated, back in 1986, was devoted not to making things but to the process of making deals about making things. Finding the right person. Writing the specification. Negotiating the terms. Reviewing the output. Managing the handoff. Forty-five percent of everything, consumed by the friction between one mind and another.

I read that number and felt the floor tilt.

Because that friction is exactly what disappeared in Trivandrum. When my backend engineer built a user interface she had never attempted, she did not learn frontend development overnight. She