It's pretty fascinating to look at the impacts this has had in the last 2000 years, or even just the last 200.

Take construction work. Incredible improvements through power tools, gasoline-powered mobile cranes, etc. The productivity per worker has exploded. A lot of this has been captured by induced demand: we build bigger, taller, grander. But the improvements aren't distributed equally. Which means that crafts that haven't seen much improvement are now more expensive in comparison to everything else. Which has contributed to our buildings having less elaborate facades and becoming more "bland"

The same in clothing. Clothing has become dirt cheap. Even the poorest people can afford new clothing multiple times a year. But in the same transition we have gone from everything being custom tailored to most things only kind of fitting, being made for variations of the most common body shapes. Not necessarily because tailored clothing has become much more expensive (though higher labor costs from higher average productivity haven't helped), but because every other step has become cheaper and tailoring hasn't.

I wonder what we will say about the trajectory of software in a couple decades