Baumol's Cost Disease

In a way, I thought about this when I changed my career the last time. I had worked in what I will call "high end" tech support for some proprietary (and some less proprietary) networking equipment. My job generally paid great and customers paid big support contracts, good deal for a good 20 years. But Tech Support is never glamorous, executives eventually think of them as just problems (even if they're solving problems) because that's all they hear. Quality management…

Granted it's a Wikipedia article and not the original research, but I have two quibbles. The first is that it still takes the same number of people to perform a Beethoven symphony, but 4 kids with electric guitars and barely any training can now perform music to a packed concert hall or dance floor. And those kids are under price pressure from someone who can now deliver the same productivity with a laptop. (I was one of those kids once)…

The effect on the poor is interesting, it would seem to lead to the poor being even more poor relative to what they used to be able to afford and later cannot.