This brings us back to William Baumol and his point about the difference between invention and innovation.
The industrial structure that fosters productive innovation best is oligopoly, argues Mr Baumol.
Innovation is a growing source of such product differentiation, says Mr Baumol.
But Baumol defines innovation as getting that spiffy new thing into the hands of people who will use it to do things.
In the 1960s the economists William Baumol and William Bowen identified the productivity problem at the root of the rising relative cost of higher education.
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Mr Baumol urges antitrust authorities to judge innovative oligopolists less harshly.
The most fundamental one remains the Baumol effect: labour-intensive services, such as nursing and teaching, have thus far proved as immune to productivity-enhancing technology as string quartets.
And as Baumol went on to point out productivity increases (the flip side of innovation) turn up faster in market based systems than in centrally planned ones.
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But Mr Baumol focuses on industries in which the cost disease is rife because human interaction is important, such as health care, education and the performing arts.
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Mr Baumol reckons that, on average, less than 20% of the total economic benefits of innovations go to those who invest directly or indirectly in making them happen.
This is at the heart of a lot of the work of William Baumol, trying to untangle what it is that makes some societies innovate furiously, others not so much.
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Pioneered by Alfred Kahn, George Stigler and William Baumol, it has sought to understand the nature of innovation, technological advance, consumer welfare, and competition in industries with just a few providers of goods and services.
Assuming that Professor Baumol is correct (and I certainly think he is but what does that matter?) then we should gain both the equity of all having access to health care while also enjoying the greater increase in productivity, in innovation, that markets do bring.
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