OK, so I got up early and banged out a few hours worth of work (editing, the kind of work that I can only do first thing in the morning, ugh), and then went to the gym … just got back, picked up my WSJ on the way back in, and saw this headline (subscription required):
Behind Surging Productivity: The Service Sector Delivers … Getting More Mozart for Less
The article then goes on to discuss how firms are reducing costs in the service sector, and it starts with a story about how the Opera Company of Brooklyn is using only 12 musicians in the orchestra, and a computer will play the remaining parts of the score.
Very interesting, I said to myself; I’ll have to post something on it and see what Tyler Cowen has to say about it.
I sit down to my computer, and checking before I started this post, I found that Tyler had already delivered, complete with links to other commens by Arnold Kling.
Technology helping service provision overcome Baumol’s “cost disease” … there are several examples of such phenomena throughout history, but data are scarce and services were not historically as important a share of economic activity as they have become.
So this, as Radar would have said on M*A*S*H, is highly significant.