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William Baumol famously introduced the “cost disease” according to which the relative price of services vis-á-vis manufactured goods keeps rising because of a negative productivity differential between services and manufacturing industries. Empirical evidence strongly supports the predictions of Baumol’s model of “unbalanced growth” as we show in this article. Baumol was convinced that the cost disease need not have fatal consequences for growing economies as they can afford to earmark ever-higher shares of GDP to pay for services like healthcare and education if the overall “pie” keeps growing. Then, consumption of goods may rise as well even if its share in GDP steadily declines. However, income inequality has surged since the 1980s; and the rising price of vital services means that lower-income strata may be increasingly unable to pay for them. In this article, we develop the nexus between the cost disease and rising income inequality and sketch the ensuing challenges for social policy.

The law-oriented short stories and novels of lawyer/English professor John William Corrington are receiving increasing attention from legal scholars. However, no one has analyzed the science fiction screenplays he co-wrote with his wife, Joyce, from a legal perspective. This article analyzes two such screenplays and concludes that they are “Socratic” texts whose narrative structures and epistemological processes work in much the same way that the traditional participatory exchange works in law school. My analysis explores the links between law, allegory and science fiction as intersecting methods to imagine the possibilities for the future.