Doctors have a similar motivation. Statistically, when times are tighter (fewer patients), the article pointed to the proportion of interventions going up (referring here to internists and surgeons). The article isn't crying conspiracy. Rather, it's talking about the natural incentives, and the consequences of the asymmetry of knowledge. The doctor knows more, so if they (consciously or subconsciously) recommend more intervention than is necessary, the patient has no way of knowing in order to assess bias and accomodate. Likewise with Real-estate agents.

With alternative practices or new sciences there is an even larger knowledge gap, because even popular wisdom hasn't filtered down to the masses in digestible CNN-sound-bite chunks. Also, there is a lot of "naive money" in new fields, as well as a lot of genuine people who are just trying to help. Unfortunately, this means that there are a lot of wolves among the sheep, and they're wearing the costume of a sheep-dog.

I think, in some ways, that was at the basis for Ken Schwaber's concern on the Scrum Developer's list about a scrum practitioner who was not really teaching scrum, but was (in Ken's paraphrased view) bilking the customer and ego-tripping. Scrum will have a similar dynamic as one finds in, say, alternative health and nutrition, or other early-stage professional arenas. There will be idealists and opportunists and then some who try to apply balance. One has to be very careful of both the idealists and the opportunists. Sometimes it is very hard to tell, and this has a high chance of painting the whole Agile community with the same brush. One of my associates had a very very bad experience with Scrum for that reason. An unscrupulous person who used the position of Scrum Master to aggrandize himself.