I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about why the cost of living keeps rising, and a cause that may go deeper than simple greed, mismanagement or inefficiency.
In the last few decades, and especially the last few years, the cost of living in America and other developed countries has been rising faster and faster. In what seems like an especially cruel paradox, luxuries like electronics and fast fashion are cheaper than necessities, like rent, health care and education.
Is it because of capitalists hoarding all the wealth for themselves? Well, yes, but there’s another factor at work. It’s called “cost disease,” and it says that as our economy gets more automated and more efficient, the jobs remaining for humans to do should be getting more and more expensive. The question is what, if anything, we can do about it.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
Imagine the world before the Industrial Revolution. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy a ticket to hear a symphony. If you wanted new clothes, you had to pay a tailor or seamstress to sew them. If you wanted a new shovel, you had to pay a blacksmith to make it for you.
When everything was made by hand, there was fairly little difference in productivity, and therefore earning power, among these industries. One person could only produce one person-hour of work per hour, no matter what job they held.
But the march of technology has given rise to a divergence. Assembly lines, robotics, and other innovations have made some industries more efficient, meaning they can crank out more stuff faster for less money. With the rise of the internet, software companies can offer valuable products that aren’t made of anything physical at all. As we consume more and more, outsize rewards flow to these industries—mostly the owners of capital, but the workers as well.
However, jobs that require a human touch haven’t followed this trajectory…
You do get I read this, and no more?
I shan’t continue reading elsewhere.
Wow, AI surgeons? Those sound to me a lot like AI airplane pilots. I think that it’ll be a long while before my primitive suspicious distrust of those dies down enough for me to be able to use them.
I hope that this trend in lower cost of what was a luxury, air conditioning, now available to the poor of the developed world, can continue to finally become affordable to the global poor. Because, not to put to fine a point on it, soon they, and their domestic animals, are going to need it to survive.
What trend(s) do you think is/are keeping food prices so sky-high? A reason for produce, especially, costing so much more and going up so quickly, doesn’t really occur to me.
@ 2, garnetstar: I’ve had a lot of discussions lately about the cost of food. I think that one is multi-pronged. Farmers as a group are aging and needing more help at a time when their kids don’t want any part of the job. Anecdotally, a 6-generation farm not far from me sold the land for exactly that reason, and it’s now a new county high school. Another multi-generation, multi-relative fruit farm sold to a developer for the same reason, and is now a cluster of townhouses. Supply and demand–less supply, higher cost (we’re also seeing this with beef for climate reasons: in drought, farmers sell off their cows).
At the same time farmers can’t count on their kids to help and have to hire workers, this misadministration is busy persecuting the workforce who is willing to show up and do the job every day, at wages most native-born people turn up their noses at. So farmers find themselves paying more for the labor when they can get labor.
What’s also concerning me is the alarming rate of food recalls for contamination, particularly for produce. I suspect food production plants cut staff during the pandemic, and the remaining staff are not sufficient to keep the plants clean.
Yeah, I’d agree that, if food prices are going up, it’s because this administration is doing everything in its power to drive away the immigrant laborers who keep the food system running. Climate change causing wild weather swings in agricultural areas may also be part of it.
Katydid and Adam, thanks for the answers.
Sigh. I hope that I can afford produce as long as possible before it’s not possible to even grow any due to climate change.
The prices of almonds, chocolate, coffee, and olive oil all sharply went up a bit ago because of two successive years of poor harvests due to excessive heat. And, I like almonds and coffee and chocolate, but I need olive oil to live because my family is Italian.
Well, perhaps the Scandanvians will take up farming olives.
Olives are now grown for harvest in England.
Wow, that’s great! I hope that the industry prospers greatly.
I’m not kidding, I’ve never used anything but olive oil my entire life, and every day of my life, too.
So, the weather in England is warm enough for olives now? If so, soon the British will soon need air conditioned houses too.
Food-picking robots are currently under development. Not sure how far away they are from prime time, since I haven’t heard anything recently about progress. If those get off the ground, then the price of some foods will go down, probably? And bye-bye most of the remaining family farms. I’m sure that will cause at least a few issues on its own, even aside from further removing humans from the economy.
The problem so far with produce-picking robots is that some produce is harder to pick–for example, a lot of berries grow hidden in the foliage and are also easily injured if they’re not picked carefully. Technology isn’t there yet, and might not ever be. Meanwhile, a human being can be taught in very little time.
Anecdotes are not data, but some observations on the full text:
OK… but the first time I bought a brand-new car, it was pretty much the cheapest new car it was possible to buy, and its price was 23% of my GROSS annual salary. (before taxes and other deductions). 26 years later I’ve advanced considerably in my career and become much more senior, and my salary has gone up. If I wanted to buy the absolutely cheapest new car available in the UK today it would cost… 22% of my current gross annual salary.
(Side note: OBVIOUSLY that car has an internal combustion engine. I have no chance of being able to afford a new electric car, even if I wanted one.)
The auto industry is surely the ideal example of an industry where assembly lines, robotics and automation have made things more efficient and they can crank out things for less money. And yet in nearly three decades, the price of their products has gone UP – there’s no way I’d be able to afford a brand new car on an early-career engineer’s salary today.
Centuries ago, what was the largest PAYING crowd a musician could realistically perform to in one evening? A hundred, perhaps? In a large theatre, maybe five hundred? And how much would a ticket be?
I just idly tried to check the price of a ticket for the next concert at a venue I’ve been to before – the Manchester AO arena (the one Ariana Grande was playing when it was suicide bombed).
Once I’d disabled my VPN, closed a browser window, cleared my cache, passed a Captcha test and jumped through all the other fucking hoops you have to go through to prove you’re not a ticket-buying bot, I was able to establish that the CHEAPEST ticket I could get to see someone called Renee Rapp (no idea. Anyone?) was £135. This, in an arena that can hold TWENTY ONE THOUSAND people. Assuming all the tickets are that price (which is obviously ridiculous), that’s most of the way to three MILLION pounds takings for ONE NIGHT, which does not take any account of any drinks, snacks and merch that would get sold. Saying “productivity” for musicians hasn’t gone up is blatantly ridiculous.
Even if you’re not Renee Rapp (who I assume, since she’s playing this arena, is wildly famous – can’t be bothered to Google her), it’s possible to set up live online events for paying customers on platforms like Twitch, whereby it’s possible to have fans pay to watch you pay live even if they’re not present.
I think the issue is that being artistic (in any field) is NOT A PROFESSION, and anyone thinking it is is deluded. It’s a hobby. It’s always been a hobby. A tiny, insignificant minority manage to become rich and famous doing it, but that applies just as much to e.g. football, but nobody I know complains that when they go and play five a side or Sunday league that they aren’t getting paid.
Reality seems to disagree with you.
The economics module in my engineering degree introduced me to the idea of elastic and inelastic demand – sales of some products are sensitive to price.
Conversely, there is surely elastic and inelastic supply of certain services. If nobody got paid for putting up scaffolding, nobody would put up scaffolding – it’s hard, dangerous and tedious work. Nobody does it for fun, and it’s nobody’s idea of a vocation. By contrast, it is very, very obvious if you think about it even for a minute that people WILL play music, teach kids, and look after the sick not just for nothing, but at great cost to themselves. Expect such activities to attract high wages is delusional. Expecting the wages to track the cost of living is at best optimistic.
People don’t flock to “productive” industries. They flock to:
(a) what they’re capable of doing – most people aren’t capable, for example, of being a dentist, or a lawyer, or an engineer. A much larger proportion of people can play guitar, teach a kid to read or nurse someone who’s sick. Supply is and always will be higher for stuff more people can do.
(b) what they’re able to get into – and here’s the key: there are, for sure, industries that can be lucrative, for which the intellectual and personal requirements for success are widely distributed. It is therefore very, very important to the rich people who dominate those industries that their children – who they can’t guarantee will have the wherewithal to do difficult stuff like medicine, law, science or engineering – have a route into a career that will guarantee them generational wealth. So those industries must be carefully ringfenced to make sure none of the working class can get in. And they gatekeep those professions very efficiently.
The ultimate goal is technofeudalism – a tiny layer at the top of generationally wealthy aristocracy, and the rest of us peasants who basically own nothing.
Think about it. Things my father OWNED:
1. a house
2. a car
3. a phone
4. a large collection of music on vinyl and CD
5. the operating system and all the apps on his PC
6. a TV, for which he paid a flat licence fee (it’s the UK) so he could watch entirely ad-free TV
Things EVEN WELL OFF working class people now have:
1. a mortgage
2. a lease car
3. a phone on a contract that by the time they’ve paid off the cost of the handset will need replacing
4. a subscription to Spotify
5. Microsoft Office 365
6. a subscription to Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime… and the hope they don’t just delete whatever it is you’re in the middle of watching.
A large part of the reason college tuition is rising is, I believe, the proliferation of the idea that you need a degree to manage a McDonalds. Universities are incentivised to present as many courses as possible, because they’re all money-spinners, especially if they can attract foreign students who will pay higher fees and will work hard and won’t make a fuss about anything in case ICE come knocking. When 5% of the population has a degree, a degree means something. When 50% have a degree, it becomes meaningless. Kids are being conned into getting themselves into a lifetime of debt to do something that is NOT going to improve their chances of a “middle class lifestyle”, because the “middle class lifestyle” is being dismantled from above by the rich. Here’s a thought: allow universities to charge different fees commensurate with with the BOTTOM 25th quartile salaries being earned by the people who graduated from each course five years ago, and no more. That would focus minds somewhat. A degree in law would be expensive, but if you just want a degree in *something* there’d be an arts course you could get onto for cheap.
A fairer distribution of wealth would make “cost disease” DISAPPEAR. It’s being deliberately inflicted on us to reduce us to peasants. Your take is mild and fatalistic – more equal distribution and curbing the power of the 1% would make life CHEAPER for everyone, proportionally.
Time to start taxing them properly or building tumbrils.
@ 1 Morales
No. Nobody “gets” that and nobody cares. The blog is for people who like the blog. If you don’t – GO AWAY.
You obviously cared enough to post this, though not as a ‘reply’ in this threaded blog.
So at least one person cares, not to mention that to not get that is to deny reality.
A very clear message; I read what’s posted here, I don’t use it as a stub to go to another site.
Nothing to stop Adam from posting the whole thing here. Then I’d read the whole thing.
I’m just being honest. Not that you care, other than to post about it.
— anyway. I did read what I read, so that, when just reading local news, I thought of this blog post due to its relevance: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-17/brisbane-boat-living-marina-housing-costs/106224448
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Jordan Koursaris is living the dream, but his inner-city home looks a little different to the apartments and houses that overlook the Brisbane River.
After getting divorced in 2024, the 40-year-old moved out from his house and into an apartment, before deciding he did not like it.He then moved alone onto a 1966 boat he bought for $18,500 called Mary Rose.
Mary Rose is moored at one of the 76 berths at Kangaroo Point’s Dockside Marina, which Mr Koursaris said costs him $1,455 per month, including power and water.
“I do have a storage shed, that’s $150 a month, and I have a car space that’s $275 a month,” he said.
“So it’s less than two grand a month; less than $500 a week, and that includes all my expenses.”
Renting a unit in Kangaroo Point costs an average of $720, according to Domain’s December quarter data, with most renters also paying utility bills on top of that.
BTW, a current series on the ABC addresses this topic too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr7oj5_o5x8
@ 7 sonofrojblake
Lol. Citation very much needed. X-D
(I found my engineering degree a doddle. After decades of practice I may be able to play something passable on guitar – by rote. Forget improvising. Can’t imagine the responsibility of teaching a kid to read or nursing. Imagine in all seriousness thinking it’s harder to be a dentist, lol.)