I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about why the cost of living keeps rising, and a cause that may go deeper than simple greed, mismanagement or inefficiency.
In the last few decades, and especially the last few years, the cost of living in America and other developed countries has been rising faster and faster. In what seems like an especially cruel paradox, luxuries like electronics and fast fashion are cheaper than necessities, like rent, health care and education.
Is it because of capitalists hoarding all the wealth for themselves? Well, yes, but there’s another factor at work. It’s called “cost disease,” and it says that as our economy gets more automated and more efficient, the jobs remaining for humans to do should be getting more and more expensive. The question is what, if anything, we can do about it.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
Imagine the world before the Industrial Revolution. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy a ticket to hear a symphony. If you wanted new clothes, you had to pay a tailor or seamstress to sew them. If you wanted a new shovel, you had to pay a blacksmith to make it for you.
When everything was made by hand, there was fairly little difference in productivity, and therefore earning power, among these industries. One person could only produce one person-hour of work per hour, no matter what job they held.
But the march of technology has given rise to a divergence. Assembly lines, robotics, and other innovations have made some industries more efficient, meaning they can crank out more stuff faster for less money. With the rise of the internet, software companies can offer valuable products that aren’t made of anything physical at all. As we consume more and more, outsize rewards flow to these industries—mostly the owners of capital, but the workers as well.
However, jobs that require a human touch haven’t followed this trajectory…
You do get I read this, and no more?
I shan’t continue reading elsewhere.
Wow, AI surgeons? Those sound to me a lot like AI airplane pilots. I think that it’ll be a long while before my primitive suspicious distrust of those dies down enough for me to be able to use them.
I hope that this trend in lower cost of what was a luxury, air conditioning, now available to the poor of the developed world, can continue to finally become affordable to the global poor. Because, not to put to fine a point on it, soon they, and their domestic animals, are going to need it to survive.
What trend(s) do you think is/are keeping food prices so sky-high? A reason for produce, especially, costing so much more and going up so quickly, doesn’t really occur to me.