I saw Jaron speak last week. My biggest takeaway from his talk was his thought on asymmetric information relationships. When you buy something through amazon,

I saw Jaron speak last week. My biggest takeaway from his talk was his thought on asymmetric information relationships. When you buy something through amazon, you are exposed to the price they think you should pay (there's some truth to the idea that Amazon varies their price depending on how much money they think you have to spend). This is an example of an asymmetrical information relationship. Amazon has global pricing information and a big data system that they can leverage to push all of the risk onto local bookstores, but while you can remove risk from a particular part of a system, that risk is always offloaded elsewhere. Companies with these big data systems have the ability to push risk onto the other companies in the system. The example Jaron uses that is easiest to understand is healthcare, particularly insurance. Essentially, with enough data, insurance providers can insure people right to the point of predictable illness and then cut care, thereby transitioning risk to the public sector. If you look at this situation from the perspective of the shareholder, that's fucking awesome, but if you look at it in a larger societal context, the public is paying for the insurance companies profits. In short, there's a lot of information asymmetry in the world. This asymmetry is the new definition of power. Even if you think Jaron is an idiot, this is a profound point.