Cost disease is not an economic inevitability; it's a governance design choice. We built an economy optimized for: legal insulation, credentialed mediation, moral theater, & political patronage. Every "ethics board", "ESG framework", & "compliance audit" is another metastasis of the same cellline.
Classic Cost Disease, Baumol’s original insight: In sectors where productivity doesn’t rise as fast as the rest of the economy, relative costs explode. E.g. a string quartet still takes four people an hour to play Mozart, while a factory makes 100× more widgets per worker.
But what’s happened in the 21st century isn’t just stagnant productivity. It’s anti-productivity: deliberate insertion of unmeasurable intermediaries that consume the gains of every technological advance.
Modern “compliance” systems turn productivity gains into paperwork. Every efficiency creates new “risk” that justifies oversight.
Instead of a quartet playing Mozart, you have: for each one musician, three auditors, two DEI officers, a grant compliance consultant, a data-privacy attorney, a “stakeholder engagement facilitator.”
Each one bills time. None improve the music. Each one is a slot for an otherwise useless person with an otherwise useless degree or skillset to pretend they have a dignified job.
The entirety of their job is the power to tell actually productive or useful people "no".