alt Hacker News> But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished
How is that Baumol's argument? How is 'outcome' vs 'process' relevant to his argument at all?
'Cost disease' is just the foundational truth that the cost of the output from industries with stagnant productivity will increase due to the fact that the workers in that industry can be more valuable in other industries, reducing the number of relative workers in the stagnant industry.
If you want to make the output from a stagnant industry available to a broader spectrum of the population then you have to improve the productivity of that industry.
I think he means that when you go to watch the symphony orchestra, you are going to watch a bunch of people sitting with their instruments, manually playing them.
There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.
You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.
You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.
You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.
The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.
By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.