The Great Productivity Puzzle
Something that&#x27;s puzzled me for a while: why haven&#x27;t we hit &quot;peak office&quot; yet?  Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt.  But that&#x27;s not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices.<p>Are marketing cost and G&amp;A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of cost of goods&#x2F;services sold?  Perhaps it&#x27;s the overhead of capitalism.  Advertising just moves demand around; where the savings rate is low, it can&#x27;t create it.  There are a surprising number of products, from movies to telephone service, where the marketing cost exceeds the cost of providing the product or service.<p>One problem with a winner-take-all economy is that the cost of competition goes up, because being slightly better at the margin becomes more expensive.  It&#x27;s like sports; the additional input required for 1% more performance is a lot more than 1%, once you&#x27;re close to the record.