What do you call an affordable price in relation to mean, or median, purchasing power?
A quick web search finds a lot of one off dining tables in the USD700 to USD3k range in the US. Made to measure dining tables in the UK can be had for less than GBP800.
Median household income in the UK 2014 was about GBP24k gross, roughly GBP20k net (https://www.google.no/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...).
So a GBP800 table would be about two weeks of after tax income. Was it really so much less 200 hundred years ago?
Perhaps someone can find the data for 200 years ago and do a more sophisticated analysis.
I'm going to make a call on that claim. Keep in mind that 200 years ago was 1817, well before the rise of the middle class. I bet that far fewer people could afford the luxury of getting a table even approaching the quality of an Ikea table, let alone what a few $100 extra will get you for a custom table today.
What's nice is it seems to offer a falsifiable prediction. Namely, that there are "super-experts" out there who consistently beat machine learning algorithms. Even if they aren't numerous enough to bring up the mean. Do the current studies show that?
I chose the financial markets because you could say that it is the perfect competitive space for this kind of evaluation, though I wouldn't be surprised if Centaurs or humans existed in other areas as well which are better than machine learning algorithms. Still the point stands that for people in the 91st to 98th percentile a lot of value will probably be lost when humans start going away from practices in droves. Another acceleration for the 1%.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...