From a high enough vantage point, I'm willing to bet there's a gaping hole that economists can clearly discern, that a calculable quantity of money just "falls into" somehow, and that there's a corresponding class of citizens that are curiously plump, and their feet don't seem to touch the ground, even though they aren't particularly well known, and don't seem to have lucrative careers.
If you took all the public data, and tried to trace all the economic output, as it fell into the pockets of individuals, and tried to follow the spending patterns of individuals, tracing the return path acting as inputs to fund all the legal businesses out there, you probably can quickly notice a gap too large to chalk up to inefficient friction and people hiding money under their mattresses, and it probably looks more like a willful diverting of funds to parts unknown.
By induction and intuition you might hazard a guess about the story behind such phenomena.
The correlation with "infant mortality" is a subtle nod to prostitution, rape and abortion.
Dead babies come from accidental or unwanted pregnancies, particularly when combined with drugs and alcohol.
If the underground black market has a strong supply of prostitution (and not just human traffic sob stories, but also prostitution as party time and consenting my-vagina-my-choice power plays, aka: porn without the camera) and the johns are kept in line with strong arm tactics, you get a lot of ladies offering services, and a cross section of pregnancies that represent a poor business decision.
Charting an uptick in dead babies and unattended children running around is a bellweather for women doing whatever, and having whatever done to them, in larger quantities. Really large quantities, over a sustained span of time looks more like big business producing unsavory norms, the kind associated with vice.
In the periphery of legal pornography production there's a quantity of abortions that, in the early 20th century would have cropped up as "infanticide" and "infant mortality" for lack of better terms.
Low literacy rate is a measure of the unwanted pregnancies that lived. Kids that have parents that don't care about them won't bother with compulsory education when they approach ten years old, and dealing with other students starts to become truly unpleasant. Individuals may obtain pragmatic reading skills, but creative writing and reading for fun would decline right along with an uptick in other adversities.
That's because having these hot microphones networked in your house is such a creep concept, and feels extremely far from useful, that the people who do buy them, are simply open to the experimentation, and accepting the dare. I don't think anyone imagines the experiment will bear fruit, but they've made peace with throwing some money away on a thing that seems to be something, somehow.
Personally, I hate the idea of Siri. I see people use Siri and I just shrug. I see people with Apple watches and I just shrug.
But I see a lot more people with Apple watches, than I do using Siri. I never see anyone using Okay Google or Cortana or Alexa.
My instictive judgement tells me that people who go beyond mere experimentation with voice-activated personal assistant software, and come to rely on it, are ridiculous people. When you use these things, there aren't many cues to guess at the response you'll get, and the sensation is not unlike yelling at a deaf child that doesn't speak your language. Will it hear me? Does it understand me? Can it follow basic instructions? (frequently the answers are yes, maybe, and no)
This is even with the low learning curve of a consumer product design.
Virtual assistants aren't fun, feel undiginfied, and don't have a lot of redeeming utility. It's no coincidence that only large companies have developed them, and I think it's best to bet against them for now.
Or what if prions are grey goo?
I think grey goo's is pretty much anything small enough to be gooey.