Michael Rushton
speaker
30 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Michael Rushton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Their insight was regarding technical change, and in particular, in what sectors can you have labor-saving technological change, and in what sectors is that going to be very difficult to achieve? When they looked at the live performing arts, they said, well, here is an area where labor-saving technological change is going to be really rare. You can't reduce the number of players in your orchestra.
You can't reduce the number of casts you need to put on a performance of Macbeth. And wages have to rise with the rest of the economy, which means constantly your costs are going to be rising. And in theaters right now, we see that. If you speak to any theater producer who is saying, well, we're struggling to get by, one of the first things they say is, our costs keep going up.
And the main cost that they face is labor. You have to pay your performers. You've got to pay your crew. You've got to pay your back office staff. And it's just really hard to save on those kinds of numbers.
10 out of 10. We see the pressures of cost disease in all of the sectors that Bommel and Bowen mentioned where you can't really save on labor. Education would be one example. A teacher can only handle so many students at a time and teachers' wages have to rise with the rest of the economy or nobody's going to want to be a teacher anymore.
Healthcare is another example, and it's an interesting one because we think, well, there's been lots of technological change in healthcare. We have all these machines now. We have all these new pharmaceuticals. That's very, very true. But a large part of your healthcare costs are labor, paying nurses, paying technicians.
You can't just say, well, one nurse can handle 200 patients at once now because of technological change.
I think there is a communication issue. The first thing is actually calling it cost disease. What is it resulting from? It's resulting from our getting richer. You only have cost disease because the economy as a whole is becoming more productive and real incomes are rising. So that seems like an odd disease where you say, yes, we're all getting richer.
What cost disease is referring to is that productivity changes are going to be different across sectors. Over time, manufactured goods have become far, far cheaper. Raw food production has become cheaper. Transportation has become cheaper. Other things that involve personal services are going to get more expensive. Haircuts. Teaching, massages, live theater.
Agatha Christie famously remarked that when she was young, she never thought she would be so rich as to be able to own her own motor car and so poor that she wouldn't be able to have servants.
Yes, we are getting richer and we have more income to be able to spend on education, health care, personal services and the arts because other things in our economy have become so much cheaper.
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