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Comment by rdmcfee | Hacker News Reader

It seems that we need to map and better understand the relationship between innovation and demand. If our basic needs (food, housing etc) can be satisfied for a fraction of what they used to cost due to innovation, where will the excess demand come from? We're left with population growth as our only growth factor.

If our basic needs as a society can be met by a small fraction of the working force due to innovation then we're left trying to expand the definition of what our "needs" are to create demand for the remainder of society.

As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago. It's the relationship between innovation, needs and demand that I find most intriguing.

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>As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago.

Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare, education and housing.

I'd happily ditch my smartphone if I could reverse the price increases on those things.

>Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare, education and housing.

Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be least disrupted by technology.

The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Healthcare costs may be drastically increased in the US (although just $60/mo here in Canada) compared to what they used to be but the offering has changed completely as well.

>Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be least disrupted by technology.

Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry isn't. Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.

>The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Generic antibiotics may be a few cents a pill for a hospital but that's not what you end up paying for it as a patient in the US, and to get the prescription you have to see a doctor and the price of THAT has gone up, and the doctor will also do tons of useless tests (which increases the price still further).

> Education is (see coursera), but the "educational reputation" industry isn't. Technology isn't killing off the rep of a harvard degree.

Coursera is not disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. Github is disrupting the reputation of a Harvard degree. There are plenty of businesses today that have absolutely no concern for your education of you have alternative proof that you can put out solid, high-quality results, and it's the internet's high information density that's making that possible.

Github has helped make programming a bit more meritocratic I guess, but it's not like it's destroyed the relative value of a degree from Stanford or Harvard.

And it's only made headway in computer science jobs.

'Educational reputation', as any reputation / keeping up with Joneses / holier than thou race - it is a zero sum game, where rank matters but the absolutes don't.

If at some point we find out that gemstone prices are rising because people are competing about who will wear the biggest gems - then gem prices aren't a problem that needs solving but just a posturing/signaling game about who can waste the most resources.

If 'educational reputation' bubble bursts, then noone loses - if we can get good mass scale education without the reputation, then we get the societal benefit of education anyway; and the brand on the sheepskin is just analogous to the posturing with huge gems, people will compete on outspending each other to get the prestigious title, but that's okay.

Education may be on the brink of a massive wave of disruption. Websites like Coursera are the more obvious and visible examples of this disruption, but a more subtle but more powerful example are the significant number of tech workers who were self taught using tutorials and other internet resources to get the necessary job skills. Coupled with the exploding costs of higher education (at least in the US), I wouldn't be surprised if the education landscape looks very different in 20-30 years.

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