Transport Costs and Artisanal Creation

The flooers of my house are made of wood. Ostensibly, these fir planks were laid down 95 years ago, when the house was built. (It is really cool to walk barefoot on floors that move and speak with your treads). I entertained the possibility this morning that they had, in fact, been put down recently in the hippy restoration of the house. But, upon examination, the old growth grain of the wood shows its age, as well as something else that triggered a deeper thought: The fir planks were picked out by the man who made this floor for their interesting grain (perhaps not-perhaps the center floor planks were meant to be covered with rugs, and so they were the mixed grain planks, which to me are more interesting than the clear grain - eye pleasing, that is). And the (I am Comrade divadab of the Anarcho-syndicalist league of Greater Whatcom) outer perimeter boards of the floor (some craft was put into the board pattern) are inlaid with mahogany. A very pleasing effect.
But the amount of labour relative to the cost of the material was high, by modern standards. The mahogany inlay is veneer, painstakingly cut out by hand, with chisel and pull-saw, across the grain. Why? Because mahogany was once much more expensive relative to the cost of labour than it is now (at least until mahogany gets rare - cost of transportation be damned!) due to the much higher cost of transportation in those days than, in an age of container ships, we have now. (It is cheaper to ship a container from Shanghai to California then it is to ship a container from California to New York). So the cost of this type of inlay would be higher now than then. Was labor really relatively cheaper then? Or was the job done by love, not by commerce? Or is the inlay a reflection of the old world, brought here from Norway in the flesh and bone? The hands and mind of a man schooled in an older world.....