[taneq]

Hmm. Couple of thoughts on this one:

1) Our standards for products have grown exponentially. It probably does take more labour-hours to produce, say, a mid-range car today than it did in 1980, but that car does unbelievably more than the 1980 model did. Everything in it is controlled and monitored by software. It has navigation and safety and vehicle control and convenience and entertainment features beyond anything you could get even 5 years ago. It'd be astounding if it didn't take more time to build.

2) Wages in real terms haven't grown significantly in a long time. This translates to labour hours being relatively cheap, so companies can spend more hours on their products for the same R&D budget.

[Pandabob]

1) is true, but the gains seem to be eaten up by the fact that, increasingly a larger part of the economy is made up of service sector jobs that are harder to automate [1].

[1]: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...