"Dr. Baumol’s insight in the 1960s was that costs inevitably rise fastest for things that are difficult to automate, including medical care, garbage collection and the live performance of a Mozart string quartet.
It came to him in the middle of the night.
“It was 4 in the morning,” he recalled in an oral history. “I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up! I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again.” His theory became known as Baumol’s Cost Disease."
An excerpt from the article:
"Dr. Baumol’s insight in the 1960s was that costs inevitably rise fastest for things that are difficult to automate, including medical care, garbage collection and the live performance of a Mozart string quartet.
It came to him in the middle of the night.
“It was 4 in the morning,” he recalled in an oral history. “I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up! I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again.” His theory became known as Baumol’s Cost Disease."