The Baumol effect is paying more for the same productivity, which can feel like a disease when you have to pay more and more for the same in some area for services relative to goods to the point where you end up pathologically preferring goods over services.
The JFK-popularized term defending a special interest project trickling down benefits to a wider community isn’t really what it feels like to someone in a coastal US city and who is trying to hire an electrician or baby sitter and finding they are priced out of the market.
The Baumol effect means that as society gets richer and GDP goes up, orchestral musicians or wait staff or any other profession whose productivity which which enjoy but whose productivity largely hasn't changed since the 19th century get paid more.
The "disease" is equivalent to a rising tide raising all boats or the lack of commodification of certain forms of human labor.
The "cure" for baumol's "cost disease" would be an explosion in income inequality.
But if we had robotic wait staff then that would be a net benefit for society, and the human former wait staff would go and do something else that's slightly more valuable for an amount of pay that's either slightly less or slightly more depending on the effect of automation on the whole economy, probably slightly more in the long run. This is the story of industrialisation!
Thought experiment: would it be good if we replaced mass transit by individual taxi drivers, because there would be so much demand for those taxi drivers that their boats would be lifted?
No, coz people like to be served in restaurants by humans.
Horn and Hardart pioneered the automated restaurant concept and while they were popular during the great depression when belt tightening was a sheer necessity, once growth and good jobs returned they died out.
Now that wealth inequality is back with a vengeance wait-staff automation is back with a vengeance.
The JFK-popularized term defending a special interest project trickling down benefits to a wider community isn’t really what it feels like to someone in a coastal US city and who is trying to hire an electrician or baby sitter and finding they are priced out of the market.