Yeah maybe I didn’t frame the question well. I think there are a lot of good arguments for why it should be superlinear but a) the degree of superlinearity might be surprising and b) even if people at some level intellectually know this is true, it’s largely not accounted for in our discourse (which is why for any specific thing that can be explained by an increasing premium-of-life people often go to thing-specific explanations, like greedy pharma companies or regulatory bloat or AMA for healthcare, or elite preference cascades for covid, or overzealous tiger parents for not letting their kids play in forests, etc).
I agree re: healthcare costs, Hall and Jones presents a formal model for why substantially increased healthcare spending might be rational; I briefly cover the model in the substack post.
Yeah maybe I didn’t frame the question well. I think there are a lot of good arguments for why it should be superlinear but a) the degree of superlinearity might be surprising and b) even if people at some level intellectually know this is true, it’s largely not accounted for in our discourse (which is why for any specific thing that can be explained by an increasing premium-of-life people often go to thing-specific explanations, like greedy pharma companies or regulatory bloat or AMA for healthcare, or elite preference cascades for covid, or overzealous tiger parents for not letting their kids play in forests, etc).
I agree re: healthcare costs, Hall and Jones presents a formal model for why substantially increased healthcare spending might be rational; I briefly cover the model in the substack post.