[forgotaccount3]

> But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished

How is that Baumol's argument? How is 'outcome' vs 'process' relevant to his argument at all?

'Cost disease' is just the foundational truth that the cost of the output from industries with stagnant productivity will increase due to the fact that the workers in that industry can be more valuable in other industries, reducing the number of relative workers in the stagnant industry.

If you want to make the output from a stagnant industry available to a broader spectrum of the population then you have to improve the productivity of that industry.

[lordnacho]

I think he means that when you go to watch the symphony orchestra, you are going to watch a bunch of people sitting with their instruments, manually playing them.

There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.

You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.

You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.

You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.

The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.

By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.

[mullingitover]

The musical performance example is just one example. The general problem of services being resistant to increased productivity, however, is not restricted to this somewhat unique case. That's why I pointed to medical advice and education: when I need a medical consult or personalized tutoring, I don't specifically care if I have to lock down irreplaceable moments of another human being's life in order receive them.

It's misguided to focus on one special case of the cost disease problem where human by definition must provide the services, when most of the time this is not the case.

[lordnacho]

But it's not clear to me that medical and education are good examples of cost disease?

For instance, technology means cancer is more easily treated that it was in the past.

Education, I'm less sure about. A lot of the tech there is very new, it takes time for evidence to build up.