You're describing what happens in uncompetitive markets (or for status goods, which have inherently weird behavior because they're a signaling mechanism that relies on waste and artificial scarcity as a mechanism of operation, but also inherently nobody actually needs them).
In an ordinary competitive market, margins are thin because sellers are fungible, so charging slightly less than the competition results in a disproportionate increase in sales because customers are just choosing the lowest price, and then sellers keep lowering prices until margins are thin because it's more profitable to get a $0.05 margin on a thousand units than a $0.10 margin on a dozen units.
Automation drives goods toward zero while destroying the wage base, as Ricardo warned: gains flow to owners (das capital) of scarce resources. Today that’s Ricardian rents on land, housing, zoning, healthcare, education. $2 TVs ain't gonna pay rent.
Antitrust decides who captures surplus, not how people access it once wages stop working. And UBI would just be stapling cash onto a broken distribution system. So what actually replaces labor as the primary claim on surplus?
The only truly scarce things are time and energy/matter. Everything else can be made from those.
Labor is essentially the sale of time. If labor becomes cheaper then energy/matter becomes the bottleneck. Except that there is actually quite a bit of energy and matter in the universe and the main bottleneck on collecting more of it is labor, so if labor gets cheaper then so does energy and matter.
The things you're pointing to are the things that are artificially scarce. How expensive is a housing unit if you can build a 100 story building on any lot and the labor to do that is cheap? Now how expensive is it if building tall buildings is banned and there is an intentional regulatory bottleneck on more people getting trade licenses?
If you still need human labor to build housing then people can get jobs building housing until housing gets cheap. If you don't need human labor to build housing then housing would already be cheap. Unless you have the government artificially constraining the housing supply, in which case you need to fix that. And the same thing for medicine and education.
> Unless you have the government artificially constraining the housing supply, in which case you need to fix that. And the same thing for medicine and education.
That is the meat of it. Zoning laws are why every city doesn't look like Hong Kong, even if it cost $1 to make a sky scraper. There are artificial limits on supply of doctors, and we don't pay teachers enough which is a whole other topic. If that's what we have to fix in order to make progress, I'm suddenly doubtful of how much progress will really be made in the face of the singularity.
In an ordinary competitive market, margins are thin because sellers are fungible, so charging slightly less than the competition results in a disproportionate increase in sales because customers are just choosing the lowest price, and then sellers keep lowering prices until margins are thin because it's more profitable to get a $0.05 margin on a thousand units than a $0.10 margin on a dozen units.