This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for refocussing general attention from the characteristics of cost disease (i.e. widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is...

This article explains that the most important aspect of W. J. Baumol's idea of cost disease is the fundamental intuition that there are some types of labor's contributions that are irreplaceable by new technologies. These contributions are indentified as “creative inputs”: original ideas,...