“The first prototypes are always fantastically expensive. Spread over many items, the first cost trends toward negligibility… That high first cost is simply the cost of learning. Once we have learned, we start modeling what we know. A book is one kind of model, a speech is another, a machine is still another. What you paid for this book is a tiny fraction of what learning to write it cost me, or my cost to the communities that maintained the schools I went to…

Most of the costs of most of the things we buy were long ago amortized. They are simply available, as “general knowledge.” Everyone, most of the time, is riding free on all that mankind has learned. We are all on welfare.”