What Should We Optimize Away?

Consider the dishwasher. Dishwashers are great: I really, really like having a dishwasher. Growing up, we didn’t have a dishwasher. Much time was spent immersing plates in soapy water. Now, a house that doesn’t have a dishwasher seems lacking. I recently moved to a house that lacked a dishwasher (now, there's a small mobile unit that I complain about constantly). Much as I disliked not having a dishwasher, adding a dishwasher hardly saved any time, because, following the timeless freemarket principles of supply and demand, dish usage soon caught up with dishwashing capability. The equilibrium — time spent immersing objects in soapy water — was maintained, even as thruput increased. Rather than saving dinner dishes for dessert, all kinds of culinary extravagances cropped up, like drinking wine out of wineglasses instead of mugs, and eating small objects on fussy little saucers, and so forth: extravagances which anyone who has gone camping, or lived without a dishwasher, will know are…