No I'm not saying that at all. Of course people will buy these things. It's just really creepy to me that we've gotten to this point as society where people willingly accept having a webcam and microphone connected to the biggest corporation in the world sitting in their living room, able to monitor anything at any time. People don't realize how much power they are giving to these companies. Do you really think they won't start listening in to conversations and using key phrases to modify your advertising profile? How far do we let these things go?

People aren't good at preemptively adjusting behaviours if it is beneficial to them in the short term. Just look at saving money or the economics of gym memberships.

Once there are news stories about the privacy costs of using an always-on microphone in your home then people will become wary of purchasing such a device. The conceptual threat will become a real threat.

But in the meantime, as these devices are new and the real life human interest stories of lost privacy are still rare, it's easy for people to look beyond those risks for what they see a significant gain. And not everyone is oblivious to the risks, they just don't care or hide behind the "I've got nothing to hide" fantasy.

Being able to ask a digital assistant questions at anytime is a very useful thing. I would personally love to have such a device if the cost was more accessible (as I don't need it that badly) but the privacy stuff is also a road block for me. But regardless most of the people I know would probably be able to look past that.

That being said, there are a number of cases where products became less popular as the risks became better known and it was harder to look beyond them. And the social pressures is also another factor. Such as having a friend visit who is uncomfortable talking in a room with a listening Alexa - that type of thing could ultimately put downward pressure on the service.

Anecdote time. I remember turning on my iPhone and briefly seeing a picture of myself from earlier that day. I don't think I had ever used the front camera on the phone up until that point. My phone was spying on me. It was the creepiest and most unsettling feeling seeing that picture of myself where it should not have been. There were lots of reports of this sort of thing at the time. And I was surprised to see it happen to me. Not entirely pleased with Apple but Google is worse.

Yeah, I had that realization as I was typing this. I think the crucial difference here though is that having a powerful computer with GPS and an internet connection in my pocket is a life changing technology that empowers me as an individual. These new products from Amazon are nothing but another vector for collecting your personal information disguised as a convenience. It's like those "As seen on TV" products. Useless nonsense that solves a specific problem already covered by more general tools.

I suspect inequality and wealth transfer explains much more of the observed trends than the author acknowledges at the end. In each of the verticals discussed, there have been strong (albeit sometimes less obvious) trends for consolidation among institutions and organizations. This includes companies, government contractors, and even vendors in ecosystems we tend to think of as decentralized like local schools, where significant consolidation might be occurring over time at the level of food suppliers like Aramark, utility companies, or diesel fuel suppliers for school buses.

These organizations' compensation and capital structures, in turn, likely grew increasingly unequal over time. Stockholders, stakeholders like executives, and intermediaries like insurance companies in those organizations likely extracted more and more capital relative to traditional stakeholders like the college students, physicians, and teachers addressed in the post.

Wealth transfer from traditional stakeholders (college students, physicians, teachers) to organizational stakeholders (execs, stockholders, suppliers in consolidating markets) seems like both a cause and a consequence of the 'cost disease' discussed in the post.

Amongst people who are aware of cost-disease, conservatives and libertarians normally see the cause as excessive regulation and occupational licencing, whilst liberals jump to increasing corporate power and market failure.

Determining which if these is the true cause is tricky, and can quickly become political. However, it is important for everyone to acknowledge the problem.

If a job has to be done by a human in the West, of course it's expensive compared to those that have either been outsourced to cheaper humans or turned over to machines.

The "exchange rate" between human-produced goods and machine-produced goods looks worse and worse over time. The classic example is whenever you hear someone describing "flatscreen TVs" as a lavish expense. They're not. All TVs are flatscreen and you can get perfectly adequate ones for under $100. Whereas ladies' haircuts can easily exceed that - after all, it's a job you can't export to the Far East. And a college education costs several hundred televisions.

It seems that there are other factors at play as well though. Scott shows that wages haven't risen as fast as costs in many of the problem sectors, and that there is significant cost variation between countries with similar wealth levels.

Admittedly that's automatic given cost increases without concomitant salary increases but I think one can this to standards of capitalization of productive industries bleeding over to non-productive industries. And there's a constant belief/hope/snake-oil that these increases in capital spending will make the industries productive. Indeed, the "captains" of these would never frame the industries as static, non-productive support industries.

However, as mentioned in the article, the average house that is built today is larger than a house built in 1960 and that can account for some of the increase also.

Moreover, a 3x increase in one cost factor is a good start on explaining a 10x increase in overall costs. You can't expect any economic process, from grocery bills upwards, to yield an exactly proportional result between two "back of the envelope" estimates, now can you? One inflation estimator might not be akin to another etc, etc.

1. A sustained, inflation-adjusted increase in human-intensive services over time. Specially when combined with stagnation in the compensation of this (supposedly) expensive, and specialized Labor over the same period of time.

2. A perceived trend of decrease in quality of the service, in a futile attempt to keep #1 under control.

If I where to venture an explanation of that would take automation and technology into account, I'd try to approach the problem from a systems theory point of view and suggest that maybe we are observing an overzealous attempt at partial automation.

This industries, as you correctly pointed out, cannot be fully automated/outsourced. This however does not prevent upper management from trying to achieve at least a part of the goodness that is benefiting other, more malleable, industries. They will of course try to automate some non-critical part of their workflows, which will upset the balance between the different subsystems of the whole and place more burdens in the critial parts. This, paradoxically, will force them to hire more personnel to keep the operation afloat, which then seeds the way for future interventions when technology advances makes posible the automation of some of those extra positions.

Even in a very bread-n-butter manufacturing environment, that type of death-cycle is extremely damaging. Take a look at Eliyahu M. Goldrat's novel "The Goal" to see a fictional example unravel.

Increasing corporate power begets more regulations that favor them (via minutae that their lawyers can manage, but that new entrants will run afoul) that begets increased corporate power.

Edit: ... hide stuff ...

Although "stuff" works too, I guess.

My guess is this was not the case in the 60s and 70s, or not to the same degree. I know, I know, "new math" and all that, but that may have been just the beginning of this trend of constant curriculum strategy churn, which seems to be getting worse with each passing year.

I wonder what educational material and consulting company revenues look like over the last 5-6 decades?

1. One or several motivated schools attempt a new style of teaching / grading / curriculum. 2. It succeeds amazingly. 3. Other schools rush to grab some of that success.

The issue is that the causality between #1 and #2 is: "A motivated admin & teaching staff all working in the same direction can improve outcomes". While #3 is assuming: "a magic curriculum will do it for us".

Then after adopting the new-hotness fails, repeat with another new idea.

I think most of the motivation for this (in general, not the specific failure mode in the previous paragraph) is blame-shifting. If you're switching stuff around you're trying something. It's a sign that you're working so hard to improve things. If it's some consulting-corporation-blessed system you don't need to justify it personally—they say it's good and sell it for you! If (when...) it fails, maybe the system was at fault, maybe the company, but at least there are potential targets for blame that aren't you.

And the only people who've lost are everyone who's not in school admin or education consulting/supply, so you know, just teachers, students, taxpayers, parents. No biggie.

1. A school produces great results. 2. A consultant comes and mines that school for "best practices". 3. Other schools pay the consultant a small fortune to replicate those practices.

Where the successful school may not even have updated anything in the last decade; they just have a particularly good combination of dedicated staff, helpful administration, and well-supported students. Particularly bad is trying to replicate something from a suburban school full of privately-paid tutors and parents reviewing the nightly homework in a setting where lunch and school supplies are a major hurdle for many families.

Let's do a Fermi calculation: 6 subjects x 1 / 6 of a text book per year x 1.1 for lost or destroyed textbooks * $200 per book = $220 in textbooks per year per student.

For scale, Mississippi has the lowest average spending per pupil in the nation -- $8,130 as of two years ago.

Granted there's workbooks and software too, but if you look at the budget of a school district, the lion's share is going to district personnel not books or computers or electricity or anything else external.

Disclosure: I work for an e-textbook company.

>Fifth, might the increased regulatory complexity happen not through literal regulations, but through fear of lawsuits? That is, might institutions add extra layers of administration and expense not because they’re forced to, but because they fear being sued if they don’t and then something goes wrong?

>I see this all the time in medicine. A patient goes to the hospital with a heart attack. While he’s recovering, he tells his doctor that he’s really upset about all of this. Any normal person would say “You had a heart attack, of course you’re upset, get over it.” But if his doctor says this, and then a year later he commits suicide for some unrelated reason, his family can sue the doctor for “not picking up the warning signs” and win several million dollars. So now the doctor consults a psychiatrist, who does an hour-long evaluation, charges the insurance company $500, and determines using her immense clinical expertise that the patient is upset because he just had a heart attack.

That is, a big fraction of medicine is "we have to cover this base for fear of being sued", and it's hard to look at external metrics to evaluate "this was a legit cost, vital to the patient's care" vs "this was just covering bases".

I would say that such "legal insurance" is subject to "Knightian uncertainty". It's not like "oh, 5% will get sued a year, which costs $50k each". There is wild variation in what juries award, what goes to trial etc. Needless to say, that forces the insurance/prevention cost up very high, even when it doesn't correspond to a jury verdict. Think about the cost to insure a satellite launch failure vs first contact with aliens.

Europe and Asia lack this cost because many of these incidents don't have to go to trial. "Oh, the operation botched your life? Boom, the social insurance gives you this nice predictable payout." Nothing lost in the legal black hold of jackpot justice.

Both were imperfect people in unique situations, but Gladwell's distinction seems to boil down to "Harvard, game theory, & Nobel prize winning PhD advisor" in the case of Ellsberg vs. "community-college dropout" in the case of Snowden, followed by Gladwell falling over himself to redefine "insider" right after spelling it out in detail with the language of class, prestige, and societal privilege.

I don't think Gladwell understands enough about either person - or "leaks" in general - to draw meaningful conclusions.

Here's the thing, though: Gladwell is probably not wrong about this. Ellsberg was far better read in to the program he leaked about that Snowden is to the topics of his leaks. As you can imagine, most of my industry friends and acquaintances are broadly pro-Snowden, and an argument that I've seen from literally none of them is that Edward Snowden had the technical expertise to either vet his documents himself, or to build a process whereby they would be effectively vetted. Which you can see by the shitshow that was the original PRISM disclosures.

Another potentially self-serving issue that Gladwell conveniently glosses over in this piece: We could also make the argument that Ellsberg also had a much more effective and courageous press and educated population behind him. But it's easier to smear community college drop-outs and discuss a hypothetical "Edward Snowberg" than a hypothetical New Yorker with more reporters like Jane Mayer than commentators like Gladwell.

Gladwell's process serves well enough as a lazy caricature for the piece but doesn't represent a good-faith articulation of his subject's views, which is hard to excuse in light of the dozens of events, thousands of tweets, etc. that are much more accessible than Ellsberg material was decades ago.

Gladwell could have interviewed Snowden and Ellsberg but probably chose not to, perhaps because it was easier to trash-talk someone whose life is under threat at an especially sensitive time (pardon consideration) for a "clever" contrast with Ellsberg than to try to represent his perspective in good faith.

Long before this piece was published, I had the impression of Snowden as a sort of technocratic an-cap type.

I will confess to not being the slightest bit interested in what Ellsberg thinks of Snowden, and far more interested in what people report about Ellsberg and Snowden than what either of them think of each other.

My argument was that Gladwell is painting a cheap caricature of a "hacker" when it's both easy and reasonable to interpret a quote like the one above in the broader context of the full speech/event and the dozens of others that he's given in recent years.

I'm not trying to argue that Snowden has or doesn't have respect for governing institutions. I think that's Snowden's story to tell. But my read of the piece is that Gladwell reached some "clever" sounding conclusion - perhaps in a "blink" - and then found a quote that supported his narrative, which reads more like Harvard-worship in Ellsberg's favor than careful presentation of arguments/evidence. This strikes me as misleading and dishonest in light of the sheer volume of interviews, tweets, etc. from Snowden that (at least to me) paint a more nuanced and careful picture.

Gladwell's uninformed gee-whiz speculation seems like an excuse to parrot the claim that Snowden "may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service" without mentioning any evidence or even a clear argument beyond its appearance in a book. Maybe Snowden was that or worse, but the only argument Gladwell seems to construct to support the claim is that he was a dupe/fool because he didn't go Harvard like Ellsberg.

But they probably also knew (from a look at their commit logs, it's pretty obvious) that the technical work could not continue without them. So it strikes me as a pragmatic compromise.

A clean sheet board I think is another good reason why Roger stepped down.

A few days before Jacob stepped down, Roger was so tired he could barely stand. With Shari Steele as the new director and a new board, it probably is a relieve for Roger and gives more room for a personal live after all these years of dedication to the TOR project.

I'm glad that Roger remains in his role as community manager and core committer. Looking forward to his State of the Onion at 33c3.

The original NYT article discusses allegations of sexual assault against prominent former TOR employee Jacob Applebaum, in case that's unclear to anyone reading the blog post that's now linked.