For example, consider a case where finance becomes much more productive (in terms of $ per employee-hour) and raises wages to attract smart people, leading to fewer people becoming doctors because finance is much more attractive. Is society wealthier? The money says yes. The line goes up. But finance doesn’t set a broken bone or treat cancer. This may well have made society less wealthy in terms of what ordinary people actually care about.
Now, advertising...
But this can go too far. In London during 2000-2008, finance consumed every spare IT worker, as well as mathematicians and physicists. Salaries were far higher working for a bank than working in any other IT-related industry or start-up. Did this produce great works? Is London now better off because of this? In a word, no.
But then, the US is full of picturesque small towns where the original heavy industry (logging, copper mine, steel mill) disappeared and tourism did not fill the gap. And all the young people moved out in search of better opportunities, except for the ones addicted to meth. There's no money, no jobs, no hope.
Every socioeconomic shift has downsides, but it doesn't automatically mean that the alternative is better. Broad economic gains tend to lift all boats because money changes hands.
> Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences?
It baffles me that you apparently think this is some kind of zinger. Yes!
Facebook is currently showing me these ads:
Lady's earrings (see my name), Pixel 10 (I'm theoretically an iPhone developer), cat food (I don't own any pet let alone a cat), special offers from a supermarket I would have been shopping at anyway even if they had not told me about the offers, a sponsored government message because apparently the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit don't have a better method of contacting German residents than by buying ads from a US social network (I have previously seen such from the British government telling me that some breed of dog was now banned even though I don't own a dog and also live in Germany)…
… but none of that's what's importantly wrong.
Cost effective? It's an auction, each ad in isolation may be fair (but there's reason even then to be suspicious), but in aggregate the ad sector is an all-pay auction.
There's a massive over-supply of solutions because all the startups chase the same ideas at about the same times, and the only one of them to get big is the one that pays enough to the gatekeepers of eyeballs to win the all-pay auction bidding for mindshare.
If everyone stopped advertising, the knowledge of solutions would still diffuse, the winner would be so by word of mouth. The difference is that the 1200 "trusted partners" on all the GDPR popups wouldn't collect rent on advising people on the best strategy for selling their user's privacy and battery life and mobile data allowance for money that those users never get to see, and the people buying those eyeballs wouldn't be wasting their VC runway making something other than the product.
Word of mouth benefits incumbents. Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily lose money and gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever.
That's a weird one - what's your metric for the "wealth of overall society"? Stock market indexes can't be it because those are subject to extreme levels of unreported inflation and gaming.
How can you measure something that is subject to extreme inflation when that inflation is not only unmeasured but not even acknowledged as a phenomenon?
At present, the "wealth of overall society" is a unicorn metric as opposed to the perfectly measurable and extreme levels of income and wealth inequality. In other words, the overall losses from skewed distribution dwarf the gains from higher efficiencies.
this would also explain why things that are not subject to said arbitrage do not actually get cheaper, e.g. anything that must be done locally.
If I can make one widget per hour, and some new tool lets me make 10 widgets per hour?
Conventional economic theory suggests the gain will be split between the widget-maker and the widget-consumer, in proportions determined by the relative slopes of the supply-demand curves, but definitely the product will become somewhat cheaper.
For housing, there's also significant location effects: One doesn't have to live in, say, Manhattan. People trade time for location, and then select the space they want. A whole lot of the space Americans use is completely optional. Go look at cities in Asia, or in Spain: You can have a city with an average density similar to NYC's Upper East side, but not even NYC comes close. That's not about a limitation of supply, but very specific policy choices.
It's similar in other mandatory things: In healthcare, the amount of things that are actually mandatory isn't that large, training to become a doctor is offered to far fewer people that would want the job, drugs can be handed long monopolies... It's not about non-discretionary, but mostly a regulatory problem. Same with American colleges, which waste an order of magnitude more money in what is shaped like an old luxury good. Anyone that has gone to a public university in continental Europe and to a US college can tell you it's a completely different good, and the American approach isn't all that focused on efficient education, as it's still shaped like a finishing school. And again, it's not necessary.
So I'd argue it's almost always regulation written to help certain incumbents, instead of inability of market forces to keep prices low even when it appears that a good is non-discretionary.
There exists greater friction with many of the items in red than the highly automated ones.
My question is how linked is this friction to the lack of automation?
With text books and meat packing there are few players due to consolidation. This means they can avoid investing in automation and keep prices high because they face less resistance from consumers and virtually none from competitors.
In short I’m asking if market forces are to blame for lower automation. And therefore automation is not the root cause of price increases.
If you're unable to eat because you spent all your resources paying for that residence near the grandparents you would certainly move.
The thing about status symbols is that you are buying them to feel better than someone else. So they almost have to be scarce - and therefore expensive. That's the basic idea behind cost disease; scarce things in an economy of abundance become more expensive, not less.
Better for whom? And better in what sense?
Long-term, on average, post-college careers still blow the trades out of the water in earnings.
In my case certainly, if I had bought into the “trades are better!!” online rhetoric I would be making far less money than I am now, and I get to work remote.
That average has a lot of outliers. There are a handful of degrees which almost guarantee you gainful employment. Like, someone getting a law degree or prepping for hospital residency will make waaay more money than maths, liberal arts, or anything on PhD track. The latter do not have anywhere close to the same job prospects.
Furthermore, some degrees are extremely expensive to get. My guess is you got an engineering or CS degree, which in terms of "degrees with job prospects" are still reasonably priced. You can graduate and go into the work force with little debt (or at least, I did, YMMV). Less so for the lawyers and doctors pushing up the college average, who have to go to more expensive schools and even more expensive post-graduate programs. They rack up lots of student debt in the process. Even if it gives you a higher salary, you might not be comfortable with a decade and change of debt slavery.
Arguably your base desktop/tablet/phone OS editor which is free may already do enough.
In practice most longtime Photoshop users paid the $600 once and some $200~ upgrade cost every 2-4 years. Adjusted for inflation its same or more than what you pay now.
If you think you'd be fine now with 25 year old Photoshop features you maybe forget how basic the product was compared to today. Further besides OS compatibility there were file format / camera raw version additions made over time that you'd have wanted.
I don’t know about the aggregate data tbf
CPLX•5h ago
2. In 2025 if you hear someone talking about it in the context of the US economy you are most likely hearing propaganda, designed to provide a dodge for the real driver of higher costs which is mostly concentrated corporate power, consolidation, and collusion.
ungreased0675•5h ago
nostrademons•5h ago
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-...
drewmate•4h ago
Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.
For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.
Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
wat10000•4h ago
I live in a high demand area. A perfectly cromulent house on a particularly good lot will sell for $1.5 million as a teardown. The new house will be 6,000+ sqft and be inhabited by a family of four. Builders won’t build smaller because the land price sets a hard floor. The most profitable and economically productive thing would be to split the lot and build several smaller houses, or build a small apartment building, housing several times more people for the same cost. But this isn’t legal. Construction costs don’t make a difference. If construction costs doubled, the new houses would just get smaller. Some of these teardowns would stop being torn down. The cost of living in the area would stay about the same.
steveBK123•2h ago
So for example childcare & education both fall into high inflation because we almost demand that it be inefficient. Customers demand to know the worker:customer ratios, and expect them to be low. It's held up by universities as a measure of quality!
Similarly with medical care, you don't see a lot of efficiency-increasing changes over time. The process of going to the doctor when you are sick, getting a prescription, and picking it up at the pharmacy is about 90% the same as it was in the 1980s. Maybe Amazon's efforts with telehealth&pharmacy can help here, tbd.
Housing is partially land use / zoning, increased regulatory burdens with time on multi-family housing, and that home construction itself is still something of an artisan craft than an industrial automated process.