Pluralistic: Foxx Nolte's "Hidden History of Walt Disney World" (15 Jul 2024)


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Pluralistic: It all started with a mouse (15 Dec 2023)


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Pluralistic: 30 Apr 2022


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Pluralistic: 06 Feb 2022


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Pluralistic: 03 Jan 2022


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Pluralistic: 23 Nov 2021


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Take it back

Copyright reversion, bargaining power, and authors’ rights.

Stationers’ Register entry for the transfer of Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and twelve other books in 1607.

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 they’d accept for other types of work. This leads to a vast oversupply of creative work, giving publishers, labels, studios and other intermediaries a buyer’s market for creative labor.

For the most part, arts policy pretends this isn’t true. When economists and business-people talk about labor markets, they lean heavily on the neoliberal conception of “rational economic actors” who produce when it makes sense to do so, and move on to another form of work when it doesn’t. Homo economicus is a nonsense — behavioral economics has repeatedly demonstrated all the ways in which “economic actors” don’t behave the way economic models predict they will — but it’s especially absurd when applied to creative labor markets.

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Pluralistic: 23 Aug 2021


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Disneyland at a stroll (Part VI)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing.

Guests are seen boarding/exiting the original Mad Tea Party in Disneyland’s Fantasyland in this undated photo from around 1960.
Evan Wohrman/CC BY-SA

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 Disneyland’s 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 “passholes.” 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.

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Expectations management (Part V)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

A giant nighttime crowd at the foot of Disneyland’s Main St, USA, looking toward the castle. Image: Mike Saechang https://www.flickr.com/photos/saechang/29066900230/ CC BY-ND: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/
Image: Mike Saechang/CC BY-ND 2.0

This is Part V 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 Disneyland’s 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 “passholes.” In Part IV, I look at the legal and economic dimension of different pricing models for managing aggregate demand.

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