There is no efficiency in child care. There is very little scalability in nursing. Dental cleaning or cardiac surgery or pulling espresso shots or replacing tires takes about the same amount of a skilled workers time year on year. In the classic example, the time it takes for a string quartet to prepare for a recital hasn’t gotten any shorter in the past century, even as new technologies and modes of production have increased productivity and lowered costs in the world around them. Economists call this discrepancy “Baumol’s cost disease,” and even the name itself is a tell, since calling it a disease categorizes it as pathological, something to be cured. But these kinds of skilled human labor, especially caregiving, can’t be made to happen faster, or at scale, and so they do not get cheaper with time. Nor should they. A former student of mine, Mikell Taylor, is a roboticist and she tells the story of hearing one of her professors, my former colleague Gil Pratt, respond to a reporter who asked him about designing robots to take care of his children so he could concentrate on his work. Gil responded that the reporter had it exactly backward, that he wanted to design robots to do his work so he could spend more time with his children.