Mozart And Productivity

OK, so I got up early and banged out a few hours worth of work (editing, the kind of work that I can only do first thing in the morning, ugh), and then went to the gym ... just got back, picked up my WSJ on the way back in, and saw this headline (subscription required):

Behind Surging Productivity: The Service Sector Delivers ... Getting More Mozart for Less

The article then goes on to discuss how firms are reducing costs in the service sector, and it starts with a story about how the Opera Company of Brooklyn is using only 12 musicians in the orchestra, and a computer will play the remaining parts of the score.

Very interesting, I said to myself; I'll have to post something on it and see what Tyler Cowen has to say about it.

I sit down to my computer, and checking before I started this post, I found that Tyler had already delivered, complete with links to other commens by Arnold Kling.

Technology helping service provision overcome Baumol's "cost disease" ... there are several examples of such phenomena throughout history, but data are scarce and services were not historically as important a share of economic activity as they have become.

So this, as Radar would have said on M*A*S*H, is highly significant.