Misunderstanding the problem, politicians often prescribe the wrong cures
compensations of ageing is the right to bore youngsters with stories of the prices of yesteryear. Once upon a time a ticket to the cinema cost just five quid, and a hogshead of mead but a farthing. Of course, savvier youths know how to debunk such tales. Adjust for inflation and many things are cheaper than ever. Since 1950 the real cost of new vehicles has fallen by half, that of new clothing by 75% and that of household appliances by 90%, even as quality has got better.
There are as many explanations for the ballooning cost of such services as there are politicians. But as a newly published analysis argues, many common scapegoats simply cannot explain the steady, long-run rise in such prices relative to those elsewhere in the economy. In “Why are the prices so damn high?” Eric Helland of Claremont McKenna College and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University write that quality has improved far too little to account for it.
Baumol’s earliest work on the subject, written with William Bowen, was published in 1965. Analyses like that of Messrs Helland and Tabarrok nonetheless feel novel, because the implications of cost disease remain so underappreciated in policy circles. For instance, the steadily rising expense of education and health care is almost universally deplored as an economic scourge, despite being caused by something indubitably good: rapid, if unevenly spread, productivity growth.
Neither do high prices necessarily need fixing. Many proposed solutions would be good for growth but would not solve the cost-disease problem. Boosting the supply of labour by increasing immigration could depress costs in both high-productivity sectors and low-productivity ones. But the price of a college education in terms of sedans would remain eye-watering. Innovation in stagnant sectors, while welcome, would shift the problem of cost disease elsewhere.
The only true solution to cost disease is an economy-wide productivity slowdown—and one may be in the offing. Technological progress pushes employment into the sectors most resistant to productivity growth. Eventually, nearly everyone may have jobs that are valued for their inefficiency: as concert musicians, or artisanal cheesemakers, or members of the household staff of the very rich. If there is no high-productivity sector to lure such workers away, then the problem does not arise.
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