> Consumers must be experts You're right, the reason I said "price" in quotes is that it's usually both intellectual and financial. Very few can afford to be e

> Consumers must be experts You're right, the reason I said "price" in quotes is that it's usually both intellectual and financial. Very few can afford to be experts and make the right choice, then pay for that choice. The confusion related to the driving force is that people imagine more choices means more competition, and this must bring lower price and higher quality. In reality profit is the driving force and profit can come just as well from low cost, low quality as from high cost, high quality. Abundance brings in a drift between these 2 ends of the spectrum, you get extreme low cost with low quality, and extreme high quality with high cost. Most people have no intellectual budget to afford identifying the correct option, or the financial budget to acquire it. This gets compounded and has some network effects so the more low price, low quality choices they make, the lower their chances of gaining the necessary budget to recover.