Brooks's law says that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Fred Brooks coined the idea in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. New people need training, and the existing team must spend time explaining the work to them, which pulls productive hours away from the job. Communication also grows fast: a team of n people has n(n-1)/2 possible pairwise channels, so each extra member adds more coordination than the last. Brooks argued that under certain conditions a newcomer adds to the time needed rather than shortening it.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.