Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I pretty much still just need Photoshop features from 2000, 25 years later. That’s $24 a year instead of the current price of almost $24 a month.
aren't there open source programs that have caught up to early 2000s era photoshop?
Baumol's Cost Disease
31–40 of 140 posts
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finance funds hospitals and cancer research institutes - or at least, it enables the gathering and concentrating of resources to do so. Now, advertising...
Advertising enables innovation-producing firms to drive awareness of their services in a cost effective manner, and for less informed consumers to understand what is available on the market. Your typical physician might not be fully caught up on what is the state of the art in arthritis treatments, but advertising enables this to happen.
The only way this should happen is if it’s a fake arthritis treatment meant to detect doctors who learn about treatments from advertising instead of legitimate sources, so they can be prevented from practicing medicine.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how it works: Most things that people call non-discretionary still have opportunities for market effects. Take food: You might have spikes for, say, beef, but what is necessary is just enough calories, not necessarily having them come from beef. Therefore, you can switch preferences, eat something else, and not be affected by the price increases. Poeple rarely do though, because the amount of money spent o…
Yeah you’re right, that’s fair. I just think people don’t behave that rationally. I’m not moving away from my kid’s grandparents because my local costs have gone up, for example. 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. Th…
At some price level you would move. Of course there are probably many more people that would move before you so that situation may not arise in practice. Economics works on the margin.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertising enables innovation-producing firms to drive awareness of their services in a cost effective manner, and for less informed consumers to understand what is available on the market. Your typical physician might not be fully caught up on what is the state of the art in arthritis treatments, but advertising enables this to happen.
The only way this should happen is if it’s a fake arthritis treatment meant to detect doctors who learn about treatments from advertising instead of legitimate sources, so they can be prevented from practicing medicine.
What are legitimate sources in your definition? Should physicians be expected to spend all their free time reading every single study in every medical journal or conference, even for niche areas that they don't usually encounter? Should the average diabetic/arthritic patient need to obsessively pore over academic reports to stay informed about their condition? Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences? This is an extremely ill informed line of reasoning.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some finance is needed and beneficial. The ability to form corporations and raise money through the stock market enhances many other fields of endeavour. 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…
The problem I have with these arguments is that they're awfully close to the anti-tourism arguments you hear in tourist towns such as Tahoe. You have this influx of visitors and money, and there's a considerable number of residents who see it as uniformly negative: congestion, high property prices, and so on. Imagine what it could've been without all these rich tech bros! But then, the US is full of picturesque small…
It also doesn’t mean the alternative is worse. Nothing says such a shift had to be overall good.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#36Computer software is on the chart as getting cheaper with time but that can’t be right? I remember Photoshop used to be a disc and you owned it for a reasonable price and now you subscribe to the Adobe protection racket. Software as a service would be a service which should go in the top of the graph with other extortionists like colleges and hospitals.
Well there are other examples, eg Google Docs is free, no need to pay for Office.
I don’t know about the aggregate data tbf
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#37I can’t help but notice the items of increasing price / cost are not optional / discretionary purchases. Price can increase and not affect demand. Whereas the items decreasing in price are all subject intense competition and price sensitivity.
College is optional. Actually, if you're just looking for "a skilled job" trade school is a better bet than college now. But the only people actually saying that are conservative nut-jobs trying to fight a culture war against a balanced education. People send their kids to colleges for the same reason why they demand more car lanes instead of better buses and trains: it's a status symbol.
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.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some finance is needed and beneficial. The ability to form corporations and raise money through the stock market enhances many other fields of endeavour. 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…
The problem I have with these arguments is that they're awfully close to the anti-tourism arguments you hear in tourist towns such as Tahoe. You have this influx of visitors and money, and there's a considerable number of residents who see it as uniformly negative: congestion, high property prices, and so on. Imagine what it could've been without all these rich tech bros! But then, the US is full of picturesque small…
In the case of London, it was misallocation, not an influx of anything. It would have been better if the programmers had been founding start up companies, and the physicists had been researching science, instead of working for banks.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reasonable price was $600 in 2000 which is over $1000 adjusted for inflation. That's four years of subscription, the useful life of a perpetual license may not be much more than that.
No I pretty much still just need Photoshop features from 2000, 25 years later. That’s $24 a year instead of the current price of almost $24 a month.
If that's all you need, there are free alternatives that should be more than sufficient today.
Re: Baumol's Cost Disease
#40The submission is titled with "Cost Disease", though the Wikipedia article has the more neutral term "Effect". But it is important to remember that money is a relative resource, not a real resource. If some sectors of the economy become drastically more efficient, and some do not, overall society has become wealthier , even if the prices in the latter sectors rise a lot.
If people are under or unemployed, do they now value leisure time higher? It's a slippery slope. You have to fix some things.