“Suppose that to make a finished good, 20 different parts have to be attached to a frame, one at a time. A worker could proceed in numerical order, attaching part one first, then part two…. Or the worker could proceed in some other order, starting with part 10, then adding part seven…. With 20 parts, …there are [more] different sequences … than the total number of seconds that have elapsed since the big bang created the universe, so we can be confident than in all activities, only a very small fraction of the possible sequences have ever been tried.”
Paul Romer, “Ideas and Things”, in The Future Surveyed, supplement to The Economist, September 11, 1993, pp. 71-72,
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