A string quartet still needs exactly four people
Manufacturing got a thousand times more efficient since 1826. Playing Beethoven did not — and that gap is why everything you can't automate keeps getting pricier.
In 1826, a string quartet took four musicians about 40 minutes to perform. Today it still does. No app, no assembly line, no efficiency consultant has found a way to play the same piece with three players or in half the time without simply playing a different, shorter piece.
Meanwhile a car factory in 1826 was four people building a carriage by hand over weeks. Today robots and a skeleton crew build a car in about a day. That gap — one sector where output per hour barely moved, another where it exploded — is the puzzle economists William Baumol and William Bowen named in the 1960s while trying to explain why orchestras kept losing money even as the economy grew.
Their answer: musicians' wages still have to rise, because a cellist can always quit and take a job in a sector that did get more productive. So the price of a ticket climbs for reasons that have nothing to do with laziness or inefficiency on stage. The same math is why a haircut, a therapy session, and a semester of college have all gotten relatively more expensive for decades, even in economies that are, on every other measure, richer than they've ever been.
The things resisting automation aren't failing to modernize. They're just the parts of the economy still being done by hand, on purpose, because a hand is the point.