Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last

Re:Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting t... by cjy on Sunday December 12, 2010 @07:16PM (#1998610)

You miss lacker's point, labor intensive goods actually become more expensive as society becomes more productive. Check out Baumol's Theorem on wikipedia.

Basically, as technology makes us more productive in a lot of industries, the opportunity cost of work that cannot be easily made more productive become very high. So, we can expect the cost of things like nursing care to get more expensive over time.

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Re:Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting t... by dstein on Sunday December 12, 2010 @07:34PM (#1998661)

I don't really argue with that theorem at all. Perhaps manual labor and and raw materials will always go up, while energy, information and technology will always go down.

But if nurses cost too much, once we start applying technology to that problem, we could probably find ways to dramatically reduce the cost of nursing health care. Eg, robots, tele-doctors, cheap home healthcare etc.

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