I'm curious about your reactions because I felt a similar sense of unease while reading this article -- feeling that I was being sold something, instead of lear

I'm curious about your reactions because I felt a similar sense of unease while reading this article -- feeling that I was being sold something, instead of learning something. I managed to set it aside because I encountered various vestiges of this industry where I live in S.A., and was spurred to look into it a bit. That presenting the low-cost of purchasing a slave today comes across as shock-value to get an emotional response. And the response that he seems to be going for is ... I'd say that this seems at odds with I feel like I want to see all of the numbers, and when numbers are pushed off to the side, it feels .. deceptive Although, as you mention, it'd be nice to see ALL of the numbers. Still, you could probably suss up your own percentage comparison with wikipedia. But here he's just presenting a solid, straightforward bit of data: the retail price. You said that this is (or feels) a bit disingenuous -- giving us data out of context to provoke emotion; NY isn't Haiti; it's hard to get the slaves across borders; slaves were money-making operations in the past and aren't anymore, which is why the price is down. Incidentally, human slaves ARE still money-making machines, albeit less completely than during the days of slavery. Brothels are the most straightforward example -- in the country I live in (most of the time), prostitution itself is essentially legal; it may be illegal, but the enforcement is all of the regulatory type (stay-classy headline: "Officers Check Douches In Area Prostibulos.") Despite this, human trafficking is a not-insignificant component of the prostitution industry there. Why? The economy is getting better. A pretty young teenage girl has way, way more options than selling her body. So the only way to get and keep 'good talent' is, essentially, slavery that starts really young. Now, in that context, it's clear that the retail price is an important part of the equation. If one of the ways you make money is the sex tourism industry (either globally or regionally), clearly you've figured out how to scale either the movement of your humans or the business of attracting customers to you, and the price of the humans is an important data point; the fact that it's so low, given how much harder smuggling people is than cocaine, is a disheartening problem for those considering where to target disincentives. it's coming across as deceptive (even though the intentions may be good) I think that it may be feel that way, but as the facts seem to be solidly behind (essentially) everything he's saying, I'd ascribe that more to the artificiality that comes from other sources. Like being asked, over and over again (speaking engagements, book tours, countless one-off interviews like this one), to try and squeeze the impact of an important message through the needle-eye of interview questions of variable quality.