Economics essay · about
The Price of the Unexamined Interface
This essay collects the published costs of failures that happen at the handoffs between parts of a system, and labels each figure by how it was produced. It does not add them into one total.
In plain words
- Some failures at handoffs have exact price tags, like a lost Mars probe that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
- The bigger national numbers are estimates from surveys and models, and none of them counts handoff failures alone.
- Writing down and checking what each side assumes is cheap, but the person who does it pays while everyone benefits, so it tends not to get done.