At the height of the space race, or so the story goes, American astronauts struggled to take notes, the standard ink pen being of no use in a zero-gravity environment. Faced with the problem, NASA is said to have spent millions of dollars developing a writing utensil capable of functioning in orbit. Soviet cosmonauts, more cognizant of thrift, simply used pencils.

Though it appears semiregularly on the internet and in popular culture, the anecdote is entirely apocryphal. But it likely persists, at least in part, because the phenomenon it describes is so undeniably real. Large bureaucracies, as anyone who’s worked in one well knows, can sometimes be hardwired to make clunky decisions about where to invest time and resources — said decisions often reflecting the convoluted internal politics of the organization in question more than any overriding allegiance to efficiency. Contra the standard neoliberal line, which tries to pin the problem on states and public institutions while holding up the market as the solution, it’s a dynamic that can exist in plenty of private contexts as well.

And the secret lubricant is usually money. Or, more specifically, profit.