Services are more expensive than goods - and the "gap" is only growing. Thus, according to the US Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), over the past 20 years, the prices of primary intangibles have increased by more than 70%, while secondary tangibles (electronics, clothing, home appliances, etc.) have only increased in price by 10-15%, and some categories have generally decreased in price. To put it nicely, this is "Baumol's price disease" (he was such an economist), but to get to the point, the production of services is very inefficient compared to the production of goods. The conveyor belt, the standardization, the robots made what was once assembled manually and for a long time, and now the current semi-automatic and automatic "lines" turn out millions of copies in minutes, reducing the cost to pennies. In the "toilet" - Alas and Ach. To play a Mozart quartet, heal a tooth, give a haircut or teach a child math, today you need the same amount of living human time as you did then. You cannot "speed up" a psychotherapist or hairdresser twice without losing quality. Contingent "factories" get rich due to an increase in volumes and a reduction in the number of employees (which allows them to pay decent salaries to those who remain), but also the average "cafes with clinics" want to catch up, so that hired baristas and teachers are not completely disappointed with their wages. And since it is physically impossible to provide a "double volume" of services per hour, there is only one way out - to pass these costs on to consumers and constantly raise the final price tag. Of course, they are already trying to treat this "price disease", because today it is not the same as before - not only with words, but also with life-giving numbers. Recorded online courses, automated platforms and streaming are breaking the trend, turning, for example, a "learning service" into a digital product that can already be extended to millions of people without the participation of a lecturer.

Services are more expensive than goods - and the "gap" is only growing. Thus, according to the US Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), over the past 20 years, the prices of primary intangibles have increased by more than 70%, while secondary tangibles (electronics, clothing, home appliances, etc.) have only increased in price by 10-15%, and some categories have generally decreased in price. To put it nicely, this is "Baumol's price disease" (he was such an economist), but to get to the point, the production of services is very inefficient compared to the production of goods. The conveyor belt, the standardization, the robots made what was once assembled manually and for a long time, and now the current semi-automatic and automatic "lines" turn out millions of copies in minutes, reducing the cost to pennies. In the "toilet" - Alas and Ach. To play a Mozart quartet, heal a tooth, give a haircut or teach a child math, today you need the same amount of living human time as you did then. You cannot "speed up" a psychotherapist or hairdresser twice without losing quality. Contingent "factories" get rich due to an increase in volumes and a reduction in the number of employees (which allows them to pay decent salaries to those who remain), but also the average "cafes with clinics" want to catch up, so that hired baristas and teachers are not completely disappointed with their wages. And since it is physically impossible to provide a "double volume" of services per hour, there is only one way out - to pass these costs on to consumers and constantly raise the final price tag. Of course, they are already trying to treat this "price disease", because today it is not the same as before - not only with words, but also with life-giving numbers. Recorded online courses, automated platforms and streaming are breaking the trend, turning, for example, a "learning service" into a digital product that can already be extended to millions of people without the participation of a lecturer.