There is an idea in manufacturing history known as Wright’s law, which says that some things get cheaper as we learn to build more.35 The theory is named after Theodore Wright, an American aeronautical engineer who served as vice chairman of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.36 In the 1930s, Wright recognized that the cost of building airplanes had declined with an eerie consistency since World War I: for every quadrupling of total aircraft production, unit costs consistently fell by about one-third. In 1936, Wright proposed that some products enjoy a kind of
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