economics

Economics studies how scarce resources are allocated among competing uses. In engineering, those resources include capital, energy, compute, time, attention, risk capacity and the people able to operate a system.

Economics studies how scarce resources are allocated among competing uses. In engineering, those resources include capital, energy, compute, time, attention, risk capacity and the people able to operate a system.

A technically superior design can still lose when it spends the wrong resource or assigns cost to the wrong stakeholder. This is why architecture should expose not only performance, but also who pays, when they pay, what scales with usage and which commitments become difficult to reverse.

Every architecture is also an incentive system with cables attached.