Transcript excerpt...
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter) And there is always someone who will help us be a little bit lazier - for a profit.
SMITH: And I guess in some ways with all that, you know, one-click shopping, the internet has made us lazier, and it's simultaneously created all these opportunities for people to jump in and make things even easier but to take a little slice of the profit here and there.
VANEK SMITH: Exactly. Like, save us a couple of keystrokes and charge us a little more. Michael Munger is an economist at Duke. He has been studying the middleman for years.
MICHAEL MUNGER: All you have to do is have a computer with a connection to the internet and the ability to write code, and you can be a middleman. It's the most competitive industry the world has ever known.
Political Science