Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Dinkscrump Linkdump (08 Feb 2025)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Foxx Nolte's "Hidden History of Walt Disney World" (15 Jul 2024)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: It all started with a mouse (15 Dec 2023)"
Few labor markets are as dysfunctional as the market for creative labor. Writers, musicians, graphic artists and other creative workers often produce because they feel they have to, driven by a need to express and discover themselves. Small wonder that creative workers are willing to produce art for lower wages than theyâd accept for other types of work. This leads to a vast oversupply of creative work, giving publishers, labels, studios and other intermediaries a buyerâs market for creative labor.
For the most part, arts policy pretends this isnât true. When economists and business-people talk about labor markets, they lean heavily on the neoliberal conception of ârational economic actorsâ who produce when it makes sense to do so, and move on to another form of work when it doesnât. Homo economicus is a nonsenseâââbehavioral economics has repeatedly demonstrated all the ways in which âeconomic actorsâ donât behave the way economic models predict they willâââbut itâs especially absurd when applied to creative labor markets.
This is Part VI in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneylandâs changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems. In Part III, I described how every fix for long lines just made the problem worse, creating complexity that frustrated first-time visitors and turning annual passholders into entitled âpassholes.â In Part IV, I look at the legal and economic dimension of different pricing models for managing aggregate demand. Part V looked at the paternalistic misdirection and subtle design cues Disney uses to manage aggregate demand.