You don’t use ceteris paribus to launch into a deep retrospective or forecast. It’s used to exaggerate the effect of a single variable to make a point about that variable, reductio ad absurdum .
You say it’s ridiculous to compare two equal companies with different backlogs, well it’s ridiculous to presume that they could have just produced $4.5b worth of product perfectly efficiently if they wanted to.
It’s just used to make the point that all other things being equal, some backlog is better than no backlog. You can invent all kinds of reasons why having a backlog is bad, but in any of those situations, if everything in the backlog was canceled at once that would probably be bad, right?
You say it’s ridiculous to compare two equal companies with different backlogs, well it’s ridiculous to presume that they could have just produced $4.5b worth of product perfectly efficiently if they wanted to.
It’s just used to make the point that all other things being equal, some backlog is better than no backlog. You can invent all kinds of reasons why having a backlog is bad, but in any of those situations, if everything in the backlog was canceled at once that would probably be bad, right?