CONCEPT
The Board-Room Arithmetic
Segal's epilogue to the Galbraith volume — the quarterly conversation where if five people can do what a hundred did, why are we paying a hundred? — and the mechanism through which private capture of AI productivity gains becomes structural default.
Edo Segal's epilogue to the Galbraith simulation closes with a scene of unusual structural clarity: the quarterly board meeting where the numbers go up on the screen and the room runs the same arithmetic — if five people can do what a hundred did, why are we paying a hundred? Segal confesses he has never once heard a board conversation about who funds the retraining, who builds the school that teaches judgment instead of syntax, who maintains the institutions that make the transition bearable for the people who are not in the room. The board-room arithmetic is the microscale instance of the Galbraithian structural pattern: private capture is rewarded by every quarterly earnings cycle, public investment is penalized by the same cycle, and no individual goodwill — including Segal's own — changes the incentive structure that determines what gets funded and what does not.
