Copyright reversion, bargaining power, and authorsâ rights.
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.
The pandemic housing bubble has multiple, complex causes. Among them:
A housing shortage resulting from a decade of anemic construction following the Great Financial Crisis and a wave of homebuilder bankruptcies;
Supply-chain shocks created by the pandemic, which was especially hard on âefficientâ industries, where financialization and monopolization drained vital industries of their cash and inventory reserves and turned them over to the richest people in America;
Generations of Americans have dreamed of owning a home, both to insulate themselves from the whims of their landlords and to create intergenerational wealth. Home ownership was a key driver of social mobility, allowing working class people to enter the middle class. A horrible ânatural experimentâ shows just how important property acquisition is to economic stability: redlining and restrictive covenants froze Black people out of the home-purchasing boom of the New Deal and the GI Bill, exacerbating and accelerating the racial wealth gap.
