The thing that made it expensive stopped being true

Every object in your kitchen was once a miracle somebody wrote poetry about.

There's a site going around called Ordinary Abundance, built by Jordan Dworkin. It walks you through a normal apartment and tells you what everything in it used to cost.

Hearing a song you loved meant having a musician in the room. Ice meant cutting it from a pond and sailing it across an ocean.

I read it twice. The second time I stopped enjoying it and started taking notes.

Go look at it →

Here's the pattern underneath it. Things get cheap when the constraint that made them expensive disappears.

Not the same constraint every time. Skilled hands get automated. One-offs become programmable. Equipment that cost thousands ends up in a phone. Information nobody could get turns free. Freight gets quicker, or the economics of production change.

So here's the question worth carrying around. What's expensive right now for a reason that's about to stop being true?

And it has to be able to say no, or it's worth nothing. Look at what isn't in that apartment. No land. No childcare. No hour of a doctor's attention. What binds those is a different sort of thing: permission, inputs that stay scarce, somebody having to be in the room.

Telling the two apart is the whole skill. Run it and you get this.

Made to fit you. Straightening teeth meant an orthodontist bending wire by hand at every visit. Scan the mouth, print the trays, and it became something you order. That collapse keeps moving downstream into duller, more occupational corners. Custom insoles exist, but mostly for people willing to seek them out and pay for them. Nobody has brought that price to a warehouse crew on concrete eleven hours a day.

Batches of 40. 40 of something always cost more per unit than four thousand, so nobody made forty. The constraint was tooling, and tooling is what's gone soft. Markets too small to be worth anybody's time are suddenly worth somebody's. Think of every machine whose maker stopped making the part. A 1990s implement, one snapped bracket, and the only answer on offer is a new machine. Scan the broken one, make eleven, sell them to the eleven people hunting for it. Then find the next forty.

Knowing before it breaks. Diagnosis needed a specialist and their kit. A thermal camera cost thousands and lived in a case. It's a phone attachment now. When the tool gets that cheap, inspection stops being what you pay for after the damage and turns into a service on a schedule. 40 rental properties every autumn, the panel, the flat roof, the damp wall, a report the next morning.

Three different businesses there. One sells once, one runs a route, one is a person and a good record.

Now try housing, because somebody always does. Houses aren't dear because of hands or tooling. They're dear because of land, and what you're allowed to put on it. Nothing here touches either, which is why the answer is no.

So find something expensive this week. Work out what constraint holds the price up, then ask whether automation, manufacturing, cheap equipment, information or scale is quietly taking it away.

If it is, there's a business sitting in there. If it's something scarce that isn't moving, leave it and go find another one.

Reply and tell me what's expensive in your trade that shouldn't be.

WhoFiled catches the flip while it's happening. New companies forming around something that just got cheap, months before anyone writes it up. See what's forming →

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