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- Hacker News
- This was pretty interesting. But the part I didn't get is where its stated that things got more expensive, but we consume more of them because we got richer.
Is this not just inflation? If everyone got paid more and everything got more expensive, are we not essentially level?
by Gigachad - It seems maybe you mixed up non-fungible value-bottlenecking human services with "everything".
Many things can get cheaper, some things get more expensive, and median person gets more wealthy and buys more of both.
In reality, yes, inflation plays a role in this, but the article is pointing to other patterns layered on top of it.
On average, over long term, despite inflation, people can afford way more good and services.
by FloorEgg - > With widespread AI adoption we plausibly could consume 10x or more of the service: Legal services, for example, plausibly fit this bill.
A ten-fold productivity gain in legal services sounds simply awful for society. Imagine the time and money sink if everyone can sue you for every frivolous thing because AI can prepare and file the paperwork instantly without needing a lawyer. You'll need your own AI to defend against the onslaught of legal disputes.
Every contract for jobs and every terms & conditions for services will be 10x longer because AI has a much higher complexity threshold compared to a human. My belief is that one reason tax returns became much more complicated in the last ~30 years is because of tax preparation software. In the era of paper tax returns, there was a limit to the complexity that an individual or even an accountant could handle, so there was a limit on how complicated the government could make it.
Most normal people rarely need a lawyer in their lives. With AI's productivity explosion in the legal services, you're going to need legal services every day. Your neighbor wants to borrow your chainsaw? Your AI legal agent will negotiate a liability waiver with his AI agent.
by mysterypie - Id blame the complexity of tax returns more on lobbying. Everyone wants their own industry custom exemption and that in turn creates holes that need to be patched etcby Havoc
- There are a lot of fields where efficiency gains tend to be illusory. No one expects some new innovation in marketing to cause spending to plummet because of the efficiency gains. People have been genuinely innovating in marketing for a long while, and it's never happened. If anything, it seems to inspire more spending.by nitwit005
- There is a simpler explanation - HVAC jobs are directly influenced by the push to covert everything to heat-pumps. And good heat-pumps are expensive. So when you install a $15K to $25K, installation fee also goes up. I am surprised Solar isn't up there. Panels are cheap, install is what we pay for 10 years+by harikb
- An AC is a heat pump too.by cake-rusk
- Good mini splits aren't expensive. They're expensive because HVAC installers are fleecing US consumers.
A majority of mini splits are made in China and are inexpensive and reliable because they're so pervasive in Asia. Most are rebadged Midea or Gree.
You can get a decent mini split for <1.5K and install it yourself for $200 in tools.
by turtlebits - It's not even that. It's that rich people are the only thing the trades are catering to now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT_uSJVCYds
Example of a solar install that was under $20k via DIY - maybe took this guy 1-2 weeks of full-time work. But he was quoted $90k and he did most of it himself - only hiring a backhoe operator to move some dirt around.
We're at the point where the trades are only going to cater to rich/desperate people because the margin they'd make on a job that is DIY-able (and charged a fair price) is not worth it to them. Why do 5-6 low margin jobs when you can do 1 high margin (rip-off) job? Your only competition out there is someone with the will to do it. Builders in CA are massive ripoffs as well.
I think the only way you bring costs from trades down is by having all your workers in-house - which is only doable for corporations. Your average homeowner is just fucked and is gonna have to youtube everything.
by bradlys - The problem isn't tradework costing more, the problem is most people making less money thanks to wage stagnation and can't afford reasonable trade rates. Capital costs for the neccessary tools are also higher than ever.
I can build a house 4x faster today than my father could back in the day, or alternatively with 4x less labor, and yet he could buy a house, 2 cars, and support 3 kids on his single wage. Meanwhile I struggle to do more than just survive in my little shack house built from scrap on an empty plot doing the same thing.
The only jobs that earn me a decent wage is for corporations or for people near or in the top 1% of wage earners.
If the average person made more money I would have more work and more money. But as it is a lot of residential work would be of negative value to me at the prices people can afford, and with less work to do and farther and farther travel distances for it my prices must keep rising to stay solvent.
by AngryData - It's rules and legislation. The job of banging together reasonably serviceable form of shelter isn't that expensive. It's only expensive if you have to jump through a lot of hoops to use certified designs, materials, etc. deal with inspections, use expensive people for that have had training for wiring things together, etc.
Any slum in developing nations features lots of housing that people bang together out of trash. Very unsafe. But it works. We've been creating shelters for ourselves since prehistory. It's not that hard.
Millions of people live in slums. Upgrading that kind of housing to something slightly better isn't all that hard. Most people that a are a bit skilled can bang together a shed in their garden in no time at all. Putting a few solar panels on top isn't that hard either. And you can plug them into batteries easily. You can buy that kit on Amazon and run your power tools of that. All legal.
It's only when you want that in your house connected to the grid that cost suddenly balloons from a few thousand to many tens of thousands. Exact same technology. Maybe you'll use slightly more panels and a bit bigger battery. But now it's a lot of gate keeping by inspectors, electricians, certified equipment, etc. that come into play.
Same with houses. You can buy a recreational vehicle or caravan for a reasonable amount of money. Second hand these are very affordable. And some RVs can be quite nice to live in and even have AC. So, why are houses so expensive relative to RVs? Prefab housing has been a thing for decades. If you remove the wheels from an RV, it's basically a house. If you live in an RV, you are referred to as trailer trash. It has a stigma. But it's very cheap. Poor people do that. Because it's very affordable housing. That's why it's a popular option for people that would otherwise build slums.
- > if you automate 99% of a job, that last 1% the human has to do is incredibly valuable because it’s bottlenecking everything else.
The author is being (intentionally) naive here.
History and current research suggest that when technology automates the vast majority of a complex job, it can lead to the "deskilling" of the human worker.
This Lancet article (published Oct 2025) discovered that doctors were found to be less adept at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies after just three months of using an AI tool designed to spot them: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...
And the thing is, I think the above finding is pretty intuitive.
If AI performs 99% of a radiologist's diagnostic work, the human's role will very likely be reduced to a skill that is more routine, that requires less expertise, like a final check or something - and thus commands lower wages.
by absurd1st - Yet prices of these tests will not go down. AI and the companies that perform the test will see the rewards of eliminating these skilled jobs. The consumer will not see the savings.by KumaBear
- The inflation in health care cost is not down to Jevons in my opinion. The likelihood of AI job displacement is low because the demand backlog is high.
Robotics will reduce back injury rates and so reduce Nurse shortages, for example. Misdiagnosis rates cause increases in compensation claims so improvement in diagnostics reduce risk so insurance premiums(for hospitals) should go down or at least not rise as quickly compared to inflation.
Note that the cost of health is high even in the economies without the broken US health system, and we have the baby boom moving through which is a huge bubble of cost associated with age.
Not that there's no component of Jevons in this, but it doesn't explain everything.
A thing said to me in Argentina resonated: They pay doctors, nurses, pharmacists slightly more if they will do out-calls to elderly people in the community at large. The increase in staff cost to have home calls offsets the massive increase in care costs if these people cannot be cared for in their home and move into a managed care facility. It's partly an externality if you privatise healthcare: who cares if the state has to pick up the tab, right? But in a more integrated view of the costs here, its better to pay more for people to help keep the elderly in their own home as long as possible.
(elderly, intending to stay in my own home, not in the US health system)
by ggm - > From the article: If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.
I can't tell if that's the worst AI boosting analogy I ever heard or the most unwittingly accurate.
First of all, flat screen TV and plasterboard hole repair are in no way substitutable goods.
"Why is there a new TV behind the front door dear? The handle was bashing the drywall and it was cheaper than a handyman."
But okay, let's assume you accidentally but conveniently punched a hole right where you would want a TV. And you don't already have a TV there.
Who is going to wall mount this new TV in a home that can't do basic drywall repair?
by ZeroGravitas - > "Why is there a new TV behind the front door dear? The handle was bashing the drywall and it was cheaper than a handyman."
"Isn't the handle going to bash the TV now?"
"It's ok, dear; replacement TVs are cheaper than hiring a handyman"
- One interesting consequence of this is that your opportunity cost is now highest it's ever been. By choosing to post on Hacker News instead of spending my time better (perhaps even as simply as watching my daughter sleep) I am wasting more value than ever before. In days past, you were substituting something mindless for this. Today, by not spending your time with your family, or reading, or on your hobby or relaxing you are paying an ever more valuable slice of time on addictive social media like this.by arjie
- Just had our minisplit develop a leak after 7 years.
The shop recommended replacing it, as just the refrigerant is half the price of a new one if most has to be replaced, due to environmental taxes.
Basically a repair is guaranteed to be at least 50% of new price of NOK 23k ($2.3k) installed and can quickly approach 80+% if the guy has to spend time on it.
That made me wonder how on earth they make money on selling these things. And how effective that tax was, given it's pushing us to replace a unit that's probably fine for many more years with just a bit of TLC.
edit: fixed pricing brain fart
by magicalhippo - > ... on selling these things.
Or making those things.
I think it could make sense if that $2.3k mostly only accounted for Western labor involved rather than representing entirety of "real" costs. Like - just entirely making up - 1k to ship it from middle of the Pacific to nearby ports to you, 0.5k from the port to location of installation, another 0.5k to install, 0.3k for documents preparations and extra wood screws, 2.3k total. And $25k worth of man-hours in CNY to manufacture, which effect is isolated and contained within their own economic bubble.
I can't just believe in the "them subsidization" theory anymore, international prices just don't seem like compensating for anything. It feels like paying for energy costs of delivery systems rather than the product. It just doesn't make sense.
by numpad0 - New refrigerant rules went into place in January of this year. That alone tipped the scales on my AC compressor repair becoming an AC replacement.by wombatpm
- Here in Vietnam nearly all ACs are these minisplit type. It costs about 500,000VND ($19) to get one serviced, including replacement coolant. It's cheap enough that I get it done at least once or twice a year for all units (the coolant doesn't always need replacing but I get it cleaned and serviced).
I know the US and Vietnamese economies are very different, but something doesn't add up there.
by esperent - For a non-obvious leak it's pretty normal to recommend a new system at that age. The reason is that a tech's time is expensive, and finding a leak can take a lot of time. Then once it's found, if the leak is in the exchange you're looking at a fairly large replacement part cost.
At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes.
https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/us-ac-companies-move-...
by matwood - 23k seems like a lot, especially so if the leak is somewhere other than a hidden part of the line. Equipment cost is likely only a couple of k, and labour to replace without running new lines is maybe a few hours.
Please get a second opinion, especially if you can find a non-shop to give you one.
by tass - I'm not sure why everyone picks on radiology as the 'obvious' field that will get automated. So far it has been the opposite:
> In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1,208 positions across all radiology specialties, a four percent increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country, with an average income of $520,000, over 48 percent higher than the average salary in 2015.
Simply put, radiologists do a lot more than merely read scans:
> Radiologists are useful for more than reading scans; a study that followed staff radiologists in three different hospitals in 2012 found that only 36 percent of their time was dedicated to direct image interpretation.
Source: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-...
- Radiology seems like a good field for AI because it's easier to see what automation would look like in practice, since an MRI, CT-Scan directly produces data and which can be fed to an AI. How well this actually works, I have no idea.by _fizz_buzz_
- The article addresses this. It explains that if large portion of your job can be automated (and hence be done at little marginal cost) then the remaining parts of your job become more valuable.
Think of it like 'commoditize your complements'.
- > everyone picks on radiology as the 'obvious' field that will get automated.
Nah, pre-LLM, I think the obvious fields to pick on were lawyers, middle-management, and "email jobs" generally. That was a big miscalculation, since most people (especially engineers) do not understand the politics of power. Those jobs tend to jealously protect the power that they have and systematically dismantle what accountability they might be subjected to. Engineers in general are much more likely to democratize (and thus threaten) power, by creating things like accountability via metrics, at the same time as they mostly refuse to unionize. Radiologists have some unions, medicine generally enjoys a moat of credentials and certification. Things that SWEs in particular rejected while they said "come on over, anyone can code". I doubt radiologists ever suggested themselves that they should be measured on throughput, but SWEs actually did push ideas of 10x engineers and metrics like lines-of-code for years to argue they are productive enough to deserve raises.
- A radiologist read my brother-in-law's MRI and contacted him and told him to go directly to the ER and actually wrote up a referral to have him immediately admitted. This happened in the middle of the night since the radiologist was reading them on the night shift. He was admitted and operated on two days later (as he had to be prepared for surgery and have additional pre-op testing done).
No AI replacement is going to be doing that anytime soon.
by trollbridge - In a similar vein, studies have found that software engineers spend only ~30% of their time coding on average. Yet we're similarly meant to believe that AI is going to replace human engineers? Ironically this belief is often held by software engineers themselves, as if they don't realize that they do so much more than generate characters. Bizarre.
- That's a lot of economic theorizing, but to me, it doesn't seem to be substantiated all that well.
You can just as well argue that labor is getting more expensive in the West because of two non-market pressures. First, we have a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money. Second, you have consumer protection policies that make it genuinely expensive to, say, be a HVAC repairman. Educational requirements, permits, licensing, business insurance, waste disposal, etc.
On my neighborhood Facebook group, every time someone asks for recommendations for menial, minimally-skilled backyard labor, they always insist the person needs to be licensed, bonded, and insured. And then, they're surprised that it costs $10,000 to paint a fence.
by chemotaxis