Now I don’t know where the ideal level of timely cultural production is but I’m not sure why the market wouldn’t have already sorted this out. Publishers, studios and record companies are all profit driven organizations and if they could make more money just re-releasing old works instead of signing new authors and artists I think they would since it would save them money. Why shouldn’t we think the culture market is efficient?
I almost forebear from pointing this out but… we have very good reason to think that the culture market is not efficient. That is, the whole intellectual property regime constitutes massive government intervention & subsidy (as I specifically wrote). If Will Ferrell comedies weren’t copyrighted, how much worse do you think they would do against Shakespeare?
(I’ll note in passing that publishers like Folgers go to great lengths to make their Shakespeare editions copyrighted, by claiming editorial mending (eg. stitching together plays from the various folio and quartos), by adding in useless essays and retrospectives that the target demographic—students—will never ever read, and so on.)
But I couldn’t possibly read the Bible everyday without it seriously diminishing in utility for me.
The people who can do so were raised that way. The Bible shows that to a great degree, the quality and ‘endurance’ (depth?) of a work is subjective & culturally set. If you were raised in a culture that discouraged/didn’t-encourage new works, do you think you would still be literarily restless and footloose all your life? A different point: perhaps the Bible is not your ideal book, but do you think there does not now exist one for you?
Those students are only ever going to get paid for their work if there is a market demand for it and to the extent they spend time producing works when there isn’t a demand for it we should just classify that time as leisure time which benefits overall utility.
This seems to assume an efficient market again. But wages and employment are portions of the economy notoriously irrational/inefficient (eg. ‘wage stickiness’); if a student has spent 4 years learning creative writing (and even more for the masters), likely going into debt for it, are they really going to admit their mistake and work in some more remunerative field?
No, of course not, either out of sheer stubbornness (to do so would be to admit a massive mistake), or because they love the field. Ergo, an inefficiency where there is an oversupply of English majors. (I believe Robin Hanson has a similar theory: that there are too many musicians, resulting in near-minimum-wage average pay, because it’s glamorous/socially-impressive.)
I almost forebear from pointing this out but… we have very good reason to think that the culture market is not efficient. That is, the whole intellectual property regime constitutes massive government intervention & subsidy (as I specifically wrote). If Will Ferrell comedies weren’t copyrighted, how much worse do you think they would do against Shakespeare?
We actually can test this question. On the internet copyright laws are so poorly enforced that they might as well not exist. Do you think Will Ferrell movies are downloaded at a lower or higher rate than Shakespeare? Now maybe we think the reason for this is that Will Ferrell comedies are only available for free on the internet whereas Shakespeare is copyright free everywhere. But we can compare Will Ferrell movies to older movies that are still under copyright and they’ll still do better—maybe not always over the long term, but certainly in the period in which they are timely and relevant.
How exactly are copyright laws supposed to skew the market toward recent works anyway? Sure, it means the production companies need to produce new works and advertise them, but it basically counts as a tax on consuming any work produced in the copyright period. The fact that there is a thriving culture industry despite the existence of copyright termination should count as a reason to think there is a real desire for new production. We might think that the desire is just constructed by the industry through advertising—but the culture industry wouldn’t be different in this regard from any other industry.
The people who can do so were raised that way.
Maybe. But my argument is that they just think they’re reading the words of God. I think that reason is a lot more compelling but I’m not sure how to settle it. Are there non-religious works that draw the same kind of adoration? If I thought there was a book written by God I would read it as much as possible, too.
If you were raised in a culture that discouraged/didn’t-encourage new works, do you think you would still be literarily restless and footloose all your life?
Well that definitely isn’t going to make me want to read one book again and again. If the quality of new works decreased I probably would read old works more but only because of the quality disparity not because I would no longer have a desire to read good, new works. I do wonder though, if there is a neurodiversity issue here. I have pretty serious ADHD which might contribute to my having a steeper drop in returns from repeat consumption.
Re: The English major
You’re right. Though I think an English degree is mostly an inefficient because it doesn’t get used, not because it does. Still it is plausible that a resulting surplus of works drives the production price down...
Edit: I’m not sure I have a response. Or if I need one. It sort of depends on what would happen to the quality of work in a world without English departments which I find very difficult to answer.
Do you think Will Ferrell movies are downloaded at a lower or higher rate than Shakespeare?
Heh. I don’t see any feasible way to measure that!
Now maybe we think the reason for this is that Will Ferrell comedies are only available for free on the internet whereas Shakespeare is copyright free everywhere. But we can compare Will Ferrell movies to older movies that are still under copyright and they’ll still do better—maybe not always over the long term, but certainly in the period in which they are timely and relevant.
Is it fair to simply ignore the long term? It’d be kind of strange to hear advice that bonds are the best investment around ‘because stocks aren’t paying you anything right now’.
The fact that there is a thriving culture industry despite the existence of copyright termination should count as a reason to think there is a real desire for new production. We might think that the desire is just constructed by the industry through advertising—but the culture industry wouldn’t be different in this regard from any other industry.
A local but not global optima? I just read Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will, and it really seems to me like hyperbolic discounting might explain why people go ‘ooh, shiny!’ about new works though they shouldn’t want to pay the copyright tax.
If the quality of new works decreased I probably would read old works more but only because of the quality disparity not because I would no longer have a desire to read good, new works.
Would you really? In your life, there has surely been a year or two where quality of production has dropped (art isn’t so reliable & consistent as to only improve every year); did you shift your reading habits?
Is it fair to simply ignore the long term? It’d be kind of strange to hear advice that bonds are the best investment around ‘because stocks aren’t paying you anything right now’.
I’m only ignoring the long term because I’m looking for evidence that the rate at which the market produces new, timely works is reasonably close to what the demand for such works is.
Would you really? In your life, there has surely been a year or two where quality of production has dropped (art isn’t so reliable & consistent as to only improve every year); did you shift your reading habits?
My fiction reading habits have very little to do with timeliness concerns. I read new fiction when an author I like produces it. Otherwise my reading is focused on genre books (science fiction like everyone else here) and classics. The only temporal criteria in my reading involves preferring books written recently enough that the style isn’t so dated it slows me down. There are some occasions for preferring timely topics, for sure. But the frame for timely in these cases tends to be about 5-10 years so my reading habits won’t actually vary from year to year. I don’t even have enough information about books to even make good selections until end-of-the year lists come out. And that is part of the problem. There is very little information around that lets one compare books (and music and movies) in any systematic way except in relation to other works that came out that year. Once in a while there is an instant classic but it is had to know what the choice works of year are until a couple years later.
In short, reading habits don’t correspond to quality of output by year b/c 1) I lack the information to adjust habits accordingly and 2) the time frame for recent is quite a bit more than a year so there is no need to adjust habits accordingly.
I’m only ignoring the long term because I’m looking for evidence that the rate at which the market produces new, timely works is reasonably close to what the demand for such works is.
Indeed, the publishing industry thinks nothing of pulping millions of unsold (or libelous) books each year. And there was no outcry in 2003 when 2.5 million romance novels from the publisher Mills & Boon were buried to form the noise-reducing foundation of a motorway extension in Manchester, England.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/books/review/Schott.t.html
Even the Library of Congress doesn’t want to keep copies of everything:
I almost forebear from pointing this out but… we have very good reason to think that the culture market is not efficient. That is, the whole intellectual property regime constitutes massive government intervention & subsidy (as I specifically wrote). If Will Ferrell comedies weren’t copyrighted, how much worse do you think they would do against Shakespeare?
(I’ll note in passing that publishers like Folgers go to great lengths to make their Shakespeare editions copyrighted, by claiming editorial mending (eg. stitching together plays from the various folio and quartos), by adding in useless essays and retrospectives that the target demographic—students—will never ever read, and so on.)
The people who can do so were raised that way. The Bible shows that to a great degree, the quality and ‘endurance’ (depth?) of a work is subjective & culturally set. If you were raised in a culture that discouraged/didn’t-encourage new works, do you think you would still be literarily restless and footloose all your life? A different point: perhaps the Bible is not your ideal book, but do you think there does not now exist one for you?
This seems to assume an efficient market again. But wages and employment are portions of the economy notoriously irrational/inefficient (eg. ‘wage stickiness’); if a student has spent 4 years learning creative writing (and even more for the masters), likely going into debt for it, are they really going to admit their mistake and work in some more remunerative field?
No, of course not, either out of sheer stubbornness (to do so would be to admit a massive mistake), or because they love the field. Ergo, an inefficiency where there is an oversupply of English majors. (I believe Robin Hanson has a similar theory: that there are too many musicians, resulting in near-minimum-wage average pay, because it’s glamorous/socially-impressive.)
We actually can test this question. On the internet copyright laws are so poorly enforced that they might as well not exist. Do you think Will Ferrell movies are downloaded at a lower or higher rate than Shakespeare? Now maybe we think the reason for this is that Will Ferrell comedies are only available for free on the internet whereas Shakespeare is copyright free everywhere. But we can compare Will Ferrell movies to older movies that are still under copyright and they’ll still do better—maybe not always over the long term, but certainly in the period in which they are timely and relevant.
How exactly are copyright laws supposed to skew the market toward recent works anyway? Sure, it means the production companies need to produce new works and advertise them, but it basically counts as a tax on consuming any work produced in the copyright period. The fact that there is a thriving culture industry despite the existence of copyright termination should count as a reason to think there is a real desire for new production. We might think that the desire is just constructed by the industry through advertising—but the culture industry wouldn’t be different in this regard from any other industry.
Maybe. But my argument is that they just think they’re reading the words of God. I think that reason is a lot more compelling but I’m not sure how to settle it. Are there non-religious works that draw the same kind of adoration? If I thought there was a book written by God I would read it as much as possible, too.
Well that definitely isn’t going to make me want to read one book again and again. If the quality of new works decreased I probably would read old works more but only because of the quality disparity not because I would no longer have a desire to read good, new works. I do wonder though, if there is a neurodiversity issue here. I have pretty serious ADHD which might contribute to my having a steeper drop in returns from repeat consumption.
Re: The English major
You’re right. Though I think an English degree is mostly an inefficient because it doesn’t get used, not because it does. Still it is plausible that a resulting surplus of works drives the production price down...
Edit: I’m not sure I have a response. Or if I need one. It sort of depends on what would happen to the quality of work in a world without English departments which I find very difficult to answer.
Heh. I don’t see any feasible way to measure that!
Is it fair to simply ignore the long term? It’d be kind of strange to hear advice that bonds are the best investment around ‘because stocks aren’t paying you anything right now’.
A local but not global optima? I just read Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will, and it really seems to me like hyperbolic discounting might explain why people go ‘ooh, shiny!’ about new works though they shouldn’t want to pay the copyright tax.
Would you really? In your life, there has surely been a year or two where quality of production has dropped (art isn’t so reliable & consistent as to only improve every year); did you shift your reading habits?
I’m only ignoring the long term because I’m looking for evidence that the rate at which the market produces new, timely works is reasonably close to what the demand for such works is.
My fiction reading habits have very little to do with timeliness concerns. I read new fiction when an author I like produces it. Otherwise my reading is focused on genre books (science fiction like everyone else here) and classics. The only temporal criteria in my reading involves preferring books written recently enough that the style isn’t so dated it slows me down. There are some occasions for preferring timely topics, for sure. But the frame for timely in these cases tends to be about 5-10 years so my reading habits won’t actually vary from year to year. I don’t even have enough information about books to even make good selections until end-of-the year lists come out. And that is part of the problem. There is very little information around that lets one compare books (and music and movies) in any systematic way except in relation to other works that came out that year. Once in a while there is an instant classic but it is had to know what the choice works of year are until a couple years later.
In short, reading habits don’t correspond to quality of output by year b/c 1) I lack the information to adjust habits accordingly and 2) the time frame for recent is quite a bit more than a year so there is no need to adjust habits accordingly.
Close enough for government work, I suppose:
Even the Library of Congress doesn’t want to keep copies of everything: