What does this remind you of?

[pktechgirlbackup]

There's a book called the Two Income Trap that I haven't read, but have read enough references to that I'm fully prepared to pretend I understand the thesis and take the risk of being violently wrong. The author posits that women entering the work place didn't actually make society any richer, because middle class families just spent all the money bidding up housing prices in good school districts. Every individual family does better (financially) by working more, but the population as a whole has just spent a whole bunch of time and frustration on nothing. I don't think this story is completely true, because it assumes the number of good schools are fixed, ignores the increase in space per person we've observed, and because I don't think 100% of the new income went to housing. But I find it entirely plausible that some of the gains were burned on positional goods and other zero-sum pursuits.*

It's not the same, but I see a parallel between this and the fact that productivity gains in medieval Europe and Asia translated not into higher standards of living but into more people living at the same standard of living. It's not a positional good because you don't get more "absolute value" than a living person not dying, but still, they were essentially on a treadmill. I think there's a Thing here but I can't figure it out, so everyone take this as an open invitation to tangent, in the hopes that one of us will figure it out.

*Especially if you ignore the benefits that don't show up in the GDP, like increasing equality for women and their ability to support themselves in the event of divorce or spousal death