
Some Thoughts on the Cost Disease - dsr_
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/331
======
marchenko
This article also hints at one of the reasons why humans chafe at economic
inequality, and a rising tide lifting all boats is not enough to produce
utopia: there are some resources - desirable reproductive partners, status,
land (esp. near others of high status) - which do not become more widely
available as prosperity increases. The pursuit of these goods can even become
more immiserating in a society with large differences in relative status, as
the coveted attention of others flocks to global superstars rather than local
stars. The author shows that these approximately zero-sum goods can be largely
reduced to "attention".

~~~
meric
And if we assume attention is valuable, while everything else is valueless,
we've been pretty good at destroying what's valuable for what's valueless in
the past century.

Some of us pour our attention into games and movies instead of sharing it with
those close to us.

Some of us pour our attention into hour long commutes where we spend our
utmost effort not to give attention to anyone near us - it might make them
uncomfortable.

Some of us pour our attention on those who already have a lot of it, who
cannot possibly return it to us - famous youtube personalities, celebrities,
porn stars even.

We spend our time fine-tuning our processes to be as "efficient" as possible,
from the queue in the supermarket, to the queue in the fast food restaurant,
to reduce our shopkeepers and waiters to mere actors following a script
efficiently, and in some cases, completely replace them with machines.

We make our workplace a place where colleagues gather for majority of their
lives, but make it difficult to form enduring long term friendships.

We spend lots of time worrying about economic inequality but much less time
about attention inequality. The only relevant policy we do have is subsidised
psychologic care.

It's inhumane to deny human food, that's why we provide welfare. It's inhumane
to neglect a child's need for parental love, which is why we place orphans in
foster homes (not perfect). And what about adults, what do we do about
attention inequality in terms of family, friendship, and sexual partners? We
just sort of leave it up to them to figure it out, and then when we read about
suicides in the paper, we write a comment "if you feel this way please seek
help immediately".

This is a summary of what I find wrong about modern society, and I have no
solution besides enjoying the giving of time to those close to me when they
ask for it.

We've become a lot more efficient trading away our attention for physical
goods that don't really matter to us except to trade in a zero sum game for
more attention.

~~~
dsjoerg
I'm excited to see the phrase "attention inequality". I've had similar
thoughts for a few years and suspect that's a fertile line of inquiry.

I haven't gotten far enough along in thinking about it to say anything very
clear, but I think the relationship between our attitudes about wealth
inequality vs attention inequality is important and telling.

To many who don't think deeply, wealth inequality is terrible while attention
inequality is natural and no big deal.

The two kinds of inequality cause each other, which is also interesting. But
mostly I'm interested in how our attitudes about one kind can or cannot, must
or must not, apply to the other.

EDIT: To circle back to your point, I disagree that attention can be
"destroyed". I prefer to say that attention can never be destroyed, only
shifted from one thing to another. So if you are ignoring your family and
playing video games, you have not destroyed your attention, you have instead
shifted it to the video game (and its creators).

~~~
meric
True, everyone has 24 hours a day, though what I really mean is the utility of
that attention can be destroyed - the utility of 10 hours of your attention
for the video game creator is measured in tens of dollars but could be
priceless to your children.

And I'm happy you are excited to see this phrase. :-)

------
NLips
The whole chicken / beef thing has been misunderstood by the author - chicken
was never the expensive alternative to beef. The author seems to have been
masively misled by the (false) quote of Hoover "a chicken in every pot and two
cars in every garage". Hoover never said this. My best reading of the history
seems to be:

16th century: (Henry IV) "If God keeps me, I will make sure that no peasant in
my realm will lack the means to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday!"

1928: (Hoover) "The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail
to the full garage."

1928: (Republican campaign flyer) Title "A Chicken for Every Pot", text
includes "Republican properity has... put the proverbial 'chicken in every
pot'. And a car in every backyard, to boot."

It's clear that in 1928 chicken wasn't an the indicator of wealth that the
author things; it was (as the flyer says) proverbial.

~~~
NLips
For reference, the 'smell test' that lead to me thinking twice about this is
the energy cost. Small animals don't have to live as long to reach full size,
so you don't need to spend as much energy (food) keeping the existing mass of
the animal alive while it's growing new mass. That's why (very roughly) the
cost of common farmed meat is normally chicken -> pork -> beef.

~~~
vilhelm_s
It seems the main reason chicken was expensive was that it was seasonal and
labor-intensive. Someone on reddit writes:

> Chicken, and eggs, were until the mid-20th century, a seasonal food. Chicken
> more than a year old is very tough, requiring hours of roasting or boiling
> to get a fairly tasteless end result. Most chickens lay their eggs in the
> spring and summer, petering out over the year. Old recipe books will have
> different instructions for "December" versus "April" eggs, given the quality
> of the yolks, which didn't used to be the uniformly pale color that
> industrial eggs look like now. So when the eggs would hatch, the young males
> would be culled and eaten right away by households, but the variety of cuts
> were few and the market to sell chickens incidental. Let's fast forward to
> the twentieth century. Unlike cows and pigs, who are irregular but large,
> chickens resisted the assembly line innovations of industrial production
> because they were irregular and small, which means they needed lots and lots
> of labor to process them.

([https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_did_chicken_beef_and_pork_become_the_three/ccqd3fu/))

------
im3w1l
"As the only thing that can be expensive in the final Strong Heaven, attention
predictably gets more expensive in a culture that moves more and more toward
general post-scarcity. "

So the world's first profession would also be its last. How fitting.

------
dsr_
The key sentence, for me:

"The pattern of Cost Disease seems to be related to things that inextricably
require the unsubstitutable labour and attention not just of human beings but
of human beings somehow comparable to the buyer."

~~~
kalleboo
It doesn't explain the insane cost increases in the US though, if you follow
the links on Cost Disease in the OP, there are sources that show only minor
increases in salaries (the cost of labor)
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-
cost-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-
disease/)

It also doesn't explain that _only_ the US has these insane cost increases. It
all comes down to the weird political and regulatory climate in the US. You
can't draw any conclusions on the broader human condition based on such an
outlier country.

~~~
fanzhang
It's often cited that in Europe the sticker prices of both healthcare and
education are lower. However that's because most of it is being subsidized by
the state; it would be interesting to see whether the total societal costs are
similarly rising everywhere for a comparable education or comparable
healthcare (e.g. ER visit for broken arm).

~~~
Symmetry
No, the figures Scott cited include state subsidies. It's indicative that
Britain, spending the same amount of money divided by total population, can
provide healthcare to everyone for the same amount of money the US spends on
Medicaid and Medicare for providing it for just the old and poor.

------
zkms
I feel like a nontrivial root cause of cost disease is USian land use
restrictions that make real estate pathologically expensive. The devastating
effects of bad zoning policies end up severely driving the cost of real estate
-- and real estate prices, both for housing and business/industry, end up
affecting a whole lot of operational expenses for both employees and
corporations (which then in turn affects prices).

(It's not just simply "regulatory burden" in general (except maybe healthcare)
as explained in [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-
cost-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-
disease/) \-- there's hella many industries and services and goods affected by
cost disease, and the regulatory burdens too much to be a root cause -- real
estate / housing costs is a more likely common cause)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _USian_

Is this a regional thing (Assuming it's a synonym for American. Google tries
to correct me to Usain Bolt, then brings up a page of Usian Bolt typos.)

~~~
CalRobert
USian is a term adopted by English speakers who wish to more clearly
distinguish between things related to the United States (the political
entity), and things related to the Americas (the geographical entity(ies)).
Motivations can range from a desire for precision in speech to a recognition
that claiming the term "America" for one country, when in fact it is two
continents with dozens of countries, isn't terribly considerate. People from
Canada, Mexico, and Chile can all legitimately say they are "American", just
like both Germans and Spaniards are "European", but using the term extensively
to mean "people or matters related to the US" makes this less viable.

Note that in Spanish the term Estadounidense (note the similarity to "Estados
Unidos") exists, though I don't know how much it's used.

Of course, it's an uphill battle, especially when you consider that the
official name for Mexico is Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

~~~
aninhumer
I'm not really sure I see the point. If you want to refer to the two
continents, you can say "The Americas".

~~~
CalRobert
The point is that saying someone or something is "American" shouldn't cause
one to assume it's from or of the US.

~~~
zeveb
> The point is that saying someone or something is "American" shouldn't cause
> one to assume it's from or of the US.

That's seems like it's a pretty silly sentiment, since in common English
speech that's _exactly_ what 'American' implies.

As you yourself note, USian could just as easily refer to someone from the
United States of Mexico.

I personally think it'd be salutary for our republic if my fellow Americans
would refer to themselves as New Yorkers, Californians, Georgians, Texans &c.
rather than as Americans (just as Germans, French, Dutch, Danish refer to
themselves), but that's a different discussion altogether.

~~~
CalRobert
I actually prefer to call myself Californian in most contexts. I also think
the word "state" is diluted by the US.

Anyway, I'm not really advocating for one side or the other. In common usage
"American" definitely relates to the US most of the time.

I can understand the annoyance of people from other American countries,
though. Surely Nigerians, Eritreans, etc. would have a reason to be frustrated
if "African" came to refer particularly to "South Africa" and not to the
continent.

------
jwatte
The title of the blog is "people before ..." And the writer doesn't understand
the social signaling of clothing? Like, at all?

First, clothing is really personal, and funding a second skin that "suits me"
and "fits me" requires much wider selection than a rack of time socks can
supply.

Second, anyone with a social job that depends on status, or who is in the
marriage/mate market, or who works in a job that may wear on clothing but
still needs to be presentable, will need more than a few hundred dollars a
year for clothing budget.

"The cost disease of the service sector" is a well known economic theory (I
leaned it in economics 101 in the '90s) and the real insight should probably
be that, as we get better at making stuff, the scarce resource becomes
educated human time, but we are still locked in a value model that mainly
measures "stuff."

Once robots make all the stuff for basically free, we have to totally change
how our society operates its economy. That's fairly close in time, yet nobody
is really even making up the words we'll use to talk about the issue yet.

~~~
douche
Thank flying spaghetti monster I work in a profession where you can get by on
free conference t-shirts and a couple new pairs of jeans a year.

~~~
Tycho
Why do you need new pairs of jeans every year? I don't think I've ever had to
discard jeans except from growing out of them. They are made of tough
material.

~~~
Amezarak
Maybe you're buying better jeans than I am. After about a year mine develop
holes in the seat, particularly around the pockets. Sometimes they get torn
before that, if I get wet and then get them caught on something.

~~~
throwanem
Tears are easily stitched or patched. Pockets coming apart is trickier;
restitching over a patch of strong material can work, but only for a while,
and more of the fabric disintegrates every time they come apart again.

And, no, you needn't, and it is inarguably more efficient of time just to buy
a new pair. But it can be a pleasant hobby, and I think that as much as
anything proves the original article's point.

------
skywhopper
Health care is a pretty simple one to explain. In addition to the fact that
technology doesn't bring massive productivity increases to a field that
requires human-to-human interaction, the fact is that health care today is a
much much more extensive undertaking than it was 50 years ago. We have much
better drugs, much better treatments, and much better diagnosing tools.
There's also the paradox that better health care means longer lifespans which
means greater health care expenses. When chronic conditions can be managed
instead of quickly becoming terminal, that's a win, but it also means that the
health care costs for that human go way way up. There's corruption, rent-
seeking, patent abuse and monopoly effects, too, of course, not to mention a
balkanized health insurance market. But the basic fact is that we get a lot
more from health care industry than we ever did in the past, so you'd expect
that that portion of the economy would be much bigger than it ever was.

~~~
3pt14159
Plus a large portion of the public in America doesn't pay for healthcare
directly (they either get employer-based health insurance or declare
bankruptcy) so it distorts incentives while retaining the profit motive.
Furthermore American society is seemingly setup to avoid exercise and healthy
foods at any cost.

The Japanese are just as wealthy, older, and they smoke more, but they have
better health outcomes and they spend almost a third per capita on healthcare.
Chile spends about a ninth on healthcare and their average life expectancy is
a full year more than the USA.

On top of all of this is the fact that people can get into debt at 1%
interest. Hard to be cost-conscious when dear old gran needs a $20k (only $50
per month!) treatment to live another three months. Same thing happened to
education.

~~~
specialist
Key part about that _distortion_ is that it hides the rent seeking.

~~~
3pt14159
The rent seeking of drug companies and over-regulation?

~~~
specialist
Forgive me, I'm unclear how we went from insurance company malfeasance to
regulatory capture by Big Pharma.

------
jaggederest
I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of a shift of the theory
of value from subjective to objective: considering things like education in
terms of objective value, you can just total up their cost in hours of
people's lives, rather than trying to consider them purchased on a market.

Or, if you prefer, fixing the basis for pricing on the effort involved rather
than the exchange value.

------
lmm
> Yes, that's Haruhi Suzumiya. But it's also someone in a much older franchise
> you might have heard of.

Let's not be coy. Does the author mean God here? Or something else?

------
uiri
Meta comment: "bc.ca" is one of those along with "co.uk", "co.jp", etc. where
anyone can register a third-level domain underneath it. The domain for this
submission really should be sooke.bc.ca

~~~
schoen
The HN code should import and use the Public Suffix List or a library that can
make use of it.

[https://publicsuffix.org/learn/](https://publicsuffix.org/learn/)

~~~
teddyh
Yes. I suggested it two years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911044)

------
guard-of-terra
There exist some SF set in Strong Heaven, but it's mostly written in Russian
:)

~~~
throwanem
Here's a bit that is not: [http://localroger.com/prime-
intellect/](http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/)

I found it not wholly unsatisfactory, although a bit rough in spots - on the
other hand, it both prefigures and subverts the Rapture of the Nerds _avant la
lettre_ , so I'd be willing to excuse quite a bit more than is actually
required. Definitely worthwhile, especially if you also found the whole
"Singularity" thing grating.

