On a more cynical perspective, capitalism is effective at extracting the most money from consumers. People will pay almost anything for the really essential things: health, housing, air, food and water. Education is essentially the only reproducible way to pay for all of the above.
Therefore, any sufficiently late stage capitalist society has extremely high costs for all of those areas: it's just the stuff people will pay the most for.
It basically means that you’re much more willing to pay a large price for a product you need and which has no substitute than for a commodity product. Which is why stunts like multiplying the price of a drug by 1000 regularly make the news.
Note that this is purely about price (ie the value you assign to the product) and has very little to do with its actual cost.
Furthermore, since you have no incentive to lower your price (indeed, you can hike it up any time you need to show more profits), well there’s no incentive to improve the underlying production process (ie lower costs) or improve the product. This goes IMO a long way in explaining the college and healthcare examples in the article.
Nope, I meant literally by 1000. I was thinking of Martin Shkreli but some googling shows he merely multiplied the price of the drug by 55 (although I think others have done worse since then)
Therefore, any sufficiently late stage capitalist society has extremely high costs for all of those areas: it's just the stuff people will pay the most for.
Don't quote me on this.