Wealth & Money Quote by Jerry Pournelle

Pournelle isn’t defending Tom Doherty so much as defending the idea of incentives as intelligence tests. The line has the blunt, slightly exasperated cadence of someone tired of hearing tidy theories about how an industry “could just” cut costs, move faster, or stop being irrational. He’s pointing at a reality check: if there were an obvious lever to pull for more profit, the people with careers built on pulling levers would already have yanked it.

The subtext is an argument against amateur diagnoses of institutional behavior. Publishing, in this case, often looks archaic from the outside: slow timelines, layered gatekeeping, stubborn formats. Pournelle flips that frustration back on the critic. He implies that what seems like incompetence is more likely constraint - supply chains, retailer demands, author relations, risk management, legacy contracts, and a marketplace where “streamlining” can mean breaking the very machinery that reliably sells books.

It also carries a rhetorical sting: by insisting “they’re not stupid,” he suggests the critic’s model is. Not maliciously, but by omission - an analysis that doesn’t account for why smart operators stick with messy processes is probably missing key variables. There’s a second, quieter implication too: if these firms aren’t leaving money on the table, then whatever annoys you about the system might be functional. Efficiency is not a moral virtue here; it’s a tell. If it hasn’t happened, maybe it can’t. Or maybe you’re underestimating the costs of “more money out of it” in reputational damage, quality loss, or long-term viability.