>The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates Rates are tangential, IMO. College educated white collar profes

>The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates Rates are tangential, IMO. College educated white collar professionals are the managerial class. They. Are. Us. The fact that we don't all have "manager" in our job title at any one time is not a meaningful distinction because the minority who do at any time get their ideas and their values and their norms from the whole culture. The problem is in the mirror. It is our cultural values and norms that have created this situation in the same way that if we positively valued patronage and nepotism we would have only ourselves to blame when every bureaucracy wound up chock full of incompetents who knew a guy. The reason your plumber has so much overhead is because that's what the cultural norms demand. Our culture is allergic to being responsible for mistakes and taking credit for one's self so we've created a culture of diffusing responsibility as much as possible wherever possible so that everyone has plausible deniability when things go wrong and everyone shares credit when they go right. Being able to shift and spread blame around when the job isn't right or the invoice isn't right is a valued cultural norm and behavior expected of business in the same way that a concrete crew in Iraq says a prayer before the pour. >FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. Yes that's exactly what's happening across our economy. Depending on your industry it may be more or less sanctioned by your employer but favor trading is becoming more and more normal. It used to be that professionals used to only trade with each other, the electrician wires the plumbers house and vise versa. I think over the last 20yr it's expanded, the electrician wires the plumber's mom's house and the plumber's mom makes her other son do some mechanic work for the electrician's brother. The bigger the cost of compliance with regulatory and cultural norms the more incentive there is for this kind of economic activity to exist. Kind of like how high tax rates on legal weed keep the dealers in business. The cost savings are just so great that the sketchy system is still viable.