Mark Moss breaks down why AI makes manufactured goods cheaper but can't touch the cost of tuition, childcare, and medical care, which have jumped 125%. The problem isn't technology. It's zoning rules, licensing restrictions, and limited land that AI can't fix.
Let's take the bottom half first because you already know, right? Manufactured, reproducible, scalable things, right? If a machine can make it, then of course a better machine can make it cheaper. And if a better machine can make it cheaper, then the price can continue to fall forever. Okay, this is the half that Elon is describing. And AI starts to just kind of pour gas on the fire on that, right onto this. And he's completely right about this side of the chart. But the other half, all right, so the other half is tuition, school fees, childcare, medical care services. Those are up 125%. And the thing I want you to notice in this chart is that the 2 red lines, they beat the average, all right? These aren't just expensive, they're outrunning the thing that they're a part of. And now you can ask yourself, like, what are they actually bottlenecked on? Why is the supply-demand out of imbalance there? Well, Well, it's not intelligence. It's not compute. They're bottlenecked on land. We can't get any more land. They're bottlenecked on licensing. They're bottlenecked on who's allowed to even practice. They're bottlenecked on who's even allowed to build, how much power comes out of the wall. And you can't solve a zoning board by making the model smarter. Well, maybe you can. I sure hope we can. Hope to be proven right— proven wrong on that. But which gives you this. All right, the television is cheap, computers, peripheral, it's cheap, but life is not. Life is expensive. That's not a contradiction, that's the architecture. That gap, this gap right here, is going to keep widening because the same force that's crushing the left side has almost no grip or no control to change what's on the right-hand side.
