I agree with your assessment. There was a New Yorker article last week on an unrelated topic (Slow Ideas) that came to a similar conclusion about inherent ineff

I agree with your assessment. There was a New Yorker article last week on an unrelated topic (Slow Ideas) that came to a similar conclusion about inherent inefficiencies in our market system: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_gawande http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_... The key quote is here: "This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere." The article continues in a health-care context to discuss the importance of doing-things-that-don't-scale efforts to educate and change behavior. I anticipate the connection here would be some utility-by-utility effort to subscribe to best practice. I worry the opposite will occur.