If I increase the supply of something, its price should go down. And if I decrease the supply, its price should rise. Some markets do not seem to follow this pattern, however, with skilled labor in the US since 1970 being a famous example. As the percentage of college-educated workers has risen the U.S., the premium paid to the college educated has also risen. How can this be? One hypothesis is skill-biased technical change: the innovation that has occurred over the past few decades, computers included, has been complementary with the skills of educated workers. When might we expect innovation to complement certain factors?
An old and incorrect answer, previously discussed on this site, is that innovation will replace “expensive” factors of production. If labor is dear, for instance, firms will try to invent machines to replace labor. This intuition is wrong: in competitive markets, all factors are paid…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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