How Cheap TVs Made Healthcare Unaffordable!

Everything is so cheap its making humans worthless.

Very insightful video. As some industries become more productive, the less productive industries face higher wage and lower price pressures. Local government jobs could pay a lot more if they incentivize good land-use. A dense and lively city raises a lot more tax revenue per acre than a city with low-density sprawl. And that dense city can employ gardeners, cleaners, transit agencies, and much more, whereas the sprawled city can't even afford to fill the potholes.

This video didn’t answer the question in the video title

Actually no, there is misinformation in this video. I've read the research studies. Most of the gains from tech efficiency increases have not gone to actual workers, they've gone to boss/mgmt. People actually doing real work (even computer/tech work) are not seeing that much more, not compared to the increases seen by those who jobs boil down to micromanaging others. Trickle down economics do not work at any level.

Also the cost of healthcare wouldn't be anywhere near as high if we weren't trying to squeeze as much profit as possible out of dying cancer patients. For profit healthcare should be illegal, and insurance companies should be abolished as unneeded. Healthcare would be affordable if it was just part of taxes and not for portfit, like in civilized nations.

Abolish money and you remove the mechanism the psychopaths use to control you.

Is something similar happening in the tech industry with AI?

This episode feels a little abstract

Wrong take, prices for most goods has risen while wages has remained stagnant even in high productivity sectors

One teacher managing 10 classrooms? Please do a video on how we could use economic language to explain the value of "connective work" (Allison Pugh, _The Last Human Job_) to people who refuse to value it. We tried MOOCs and by and large they fail...since many students don't thrive when they don't have a mutual personal connection to their teacher.

"AI could revolutionize industries!" makes me vom.
Yeah, so might wizards and magic!
Who cares! It's not real!
People are stuck in the AM/FM trap with AI.

AM/FM is an engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic."

Finally, an episode of Two Cents that isn't liberal brainwashing.

Wow! This episode was amazing 😮

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

So many things wrong with this video.

The main reason why healthcare and higher education have become so expensive is because they are third party payer systems. The people buying the service are not directly paying for it, so price and value are disconnected. They also have problems with price and product transparency. The cost increases in these institutions' budgets are primarily due to exploding administrative staff and amenities. Yes, there are shortages of nurses and doctors that drive up wages, but that is at best 4th order, far less significant than the armies of DEI directors, yoga coaches, private rooms, and gourmet food choices that are the main unnecessary cost drivers, and behind expensive technology like proton beam treatment and chip manufacturing labs, and let's not forget lawsuits. Ever hear the one of the patient who sued and was awarded $100M? That $100M is just a cost that is part of the (hidden) price, like laundry and electricity.

The analogy with theater is flawed. Theater has had ENORMOUS productivity increases, just like tvs and cell phones have had with manufacturing. It is called motion pictures and television. No longer is the audience limited to a few hundred to a thousand or so, but one performance can reach billions of people. The actors and directors of these productions include some of the highest paid people in the world.

That some people choose to watch a neighborhood theater club is bespoke. If you want to have your shirt made by hand picking cotton, spinning it on a wheel, operating a loom, and cutting and stitching, it will cost a whole lot more than the one you can buy at the store for $25 and won't be as good of quality.

I would say the "robots" in the play is actually more akin to the production of movies. It is one production that can have a much wider audience, much higher quality and be be do "automatically" after it is produced. I know your joke was tongue-in-cheek, but that also kind of proves why Hollywood actors can make so much, they are "more productive".

I think this is a flawed and convoluted analysis. Technology drives down the cost of mass-produced goods but also eliminates jobs and pushes DOWN wages after adjusting for true inflation (shadowstats not BLS). The idea that corporations pay their remaining workers more is pretty obviously wrong. The portions of the economy that don't scale wind up seeming more expensive due to inflation and suppressed wages. Healthcare is it's own unique dumpster fire in the USA, but a big part of that is that it's perfectly legal here to price gouge sick people for profit, and multiple predatory industries have festered as a result. The customer has zero negotiating power because 1. They are sick and they need the service, and 2. The price is kept secret until after the service is rendered.

The problem with this analysis is the proportion of production costs created by wages varies across industries and service sectors. For example, blaming higher healthcare costs on provider salaries really downplays the role of other organizations driven by profit, like insurance and drug companies, among many others. Worker pay represents a far smaller over proportion of costs.

I got a Tandy 1000 home computer in 1984, for about $2000 (in 1984 $).

theres about a million ways to make both health care, government administration and education more productive. problems is in the institutions running them and their monopoly to be able to charge what they want.

as always, economics confuses me. i pray that smarter people than i can figure out solutions to these ridiculous problems.

Way to ignore the actual reasons for expensive healthcare lol

The ABBA’s show in London is an example that yup, people are willing to pay for “robots” performing

Notice how the stagnant occupations are all socialist?

For all of the jobs mentioned, productivity doesn't increase because there is no incentive to increase productivity.

Government jobs are the worst example. Most government jobs could be automated. Look at Estonia and their digital government initiatives. But the bureaucracy is not incentivized by efficiency, but by increasing people's dependency on the government (a.k.a, clientelism) to justify the extraction of resources from the population (taxation).

Non-profits have a similar issue, they are incentivized by getting more of donors money, not by spending that money efficiently. Only private organizations whose existence depends on the quality of the product or service they sell and how much competition they have, care about productivity and efficiency.

Is it just me or Are they sharing lipstick?

So many people in the comments seem to believe in the free lunch myth 😂😂😂😂😂😂

The solution clearly isn’t artificial intelligence. The solution is to use the gains of the productive industries to finance the less productive but socially valuable industries and create culture that values human flourishing more than money

Wow an economic theory that actually explains something and is realistic observable and applicable to multiple things. Economics might ACTUALLY be a science.

An all android troop might not be appealing but AI gen CGI just might be. So we are doom as we continue to cultivate our robotic overlords

This does make sense! For example,a half a duplex home rent in 1981 in my area was $25 a week/$100 a month. Now,the same property rent is $1500 a month for the same property!!

I work in the arts/nonprofit/education sector and this was so relevant! Thank you! More content on these areas or fundraising would be awesome

Thank you!

I am watching this video for the purpose of disproving it! My conclusion is that you need to stop making excuses for the backwards healthcare and education systems that refuse to improve! Did you ever think that maybe healthcare and education are purposely inefficient and that is also why they are so expensive? Take for example one of the most common disorders, back pain! The truth is that the doctors don't really know what causes back pain or how to treat it, they just claim to!

Haven't watched this channel in a while. The guy has hit his mid life crisis hard 😂 sleeve tattoo and long hair at 40, you go, sir!

Hey guys I don’t know if this will reach you but if enough likes hit this comment it might move forward. I think a wonderful idea for a video would be explaining what a fiduciary does for the average person. Obviously it could be out of the price range of a middle class citizen but it would shed light on most investment companies marketing tactics to steal years off our retirement

This sucks.

My theory is that industries will maximize their revenue. If goods become cheaper, everyone else will increase prices to rob you blind of what you have left, up until you actually commit unaliving.

Healthcare has gotten more expensive because of all the things that are now possible and the expense of those tests/services/tools. Look at photos of a maternity ward from the 50s vs today. All of that equipment costs money to obtain, use, maintain, etc... Same thing with even the basic doctor's office. It no longer fits into the little black bag the country doctor would carry around to house calls. Or even all the stuff stuffed into modern ambulances. Each of those tools, whether it is the MRI machine, or the CAT scan, come from a limited supply of manufacturers and they charge a premium to get them (they are for-profit companies after all).
Same thing with the actual drugs. The generic market will always be 10-15 years behind the curve because of patents that have to expire before competitors can make the same drug and compete.

I do think this doesn’t really look at the quality of health care. So many of the new tools allow health care to help people that could not have been helped in the past. The problem is, people don’t really value saving the lives of people with sickle cell disease, lupus, or inflammatory bowel disease because death is cheap and the math about the productivity you lose from the system when people die or are disabled is hard.

Why the shade on baristas? Starbucks workers make like $15 an hour and they have to do a lot more than “just push buttons”. My friend worked as one and they constantly made her solo clean the store, make custom orders from scratch, manage the stock, and prep things.

Baby sitting isn’t that hard but it’s still real work and deserves decent pay.

Imo the easiest jobs are “skilled labor”. You’re getting paid for your education, not for breaking your back. Those types of jobs pay a lot more, too. But again, nothing wrong with that.

I believe TNG and Cmdr. Data established we would love Android Shakespeare.

This is an absurd argument only found in America. The solution if other jobs are actually productive is to pay more for required labor in other fields with those profits. That Singapore exists at all should dispel this notion.

Pbs? Ohh snap this is from pbs?! Yooo this channel lit!
Im subscribing!

I mean, there IS a well-known, well-researched, and well-and-truly HATED technique to correct for what is essentially a technological externality: tax non-human gains in such a way that they compensate for the competitive depreciation of human-supplied work. That is: if you collect a small tax on the TV that has been produced at incrementally-cheaper costs by leveraging mechanical advantage over individual human input, that can be disbursed to people working in "fixed-productivity" environments as a benefit or rebate to "even out" the compensation value of the services rendered AS THEY COMPARE to the value of the mechanically-produced goods. That's kinda the problem. When the productive capability of a machine outpaces the productive output of a human in INDIVIDUAL DISCIPLINES, the ENTIRE MARKET needs stabilization, or human-supplied services IN GENERAL will EITHER be priced out, OR become cost-prohibitive to produce without robust institutional support to subsidize it. A mechanical intervention that provides multiplicative gains to productivity in any SINGLE discipline increases the competitive cost of ALL OTHER human labor in ANY fixed-productivity discipline, relatively. For a market-based economy to meaningfully predict its participants' will, it requires money to flow to ALL parties in an EQUITABLY-DISPERSED manner commensurate with the needs and values of the dollar-voters (invisible hand, babeeeee), but GOVERNANCE is required to ensure the FLOW of those monies in an equitable and SUSTAINABLE way. Taxes solve the problem, but EVERYONE hates taxes :-\

I’m thinking universal basic income is the solution for this. Like UBI that’s low enough that people still have to work, but subsidizes the cost of the wages for everyone paid for by higher taxes placed on businesses with higher productivity gains from tech. Not taxes so high as to discourage productivity gains, but high enough to deal with the effect and pay the UBI

Dear Two Cents, I was wondering if you could look into the misconception of inflation. Inflation is good for the economy, but bad for the workers. Price stability or small deflation (-0.5%) seems better for the regular Joe. Would be nice to look into it as productivity wasn't passed to workers and the inflation numbers are quite cooked as they aren't cost of living numbers

I’d rather have affordable healthcare than a cheaper crappy couch that will only last 2 years max