While I'm thinking about art and commerce shit and about customers generally being shitty - One thing that really gets me about customer "sticker shock" is that people get genuinely shook when something obscure and unpopular costs more than a household name
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The fewer people are going to buy my book, the more money I have to charge for it "Niche" products objectively cost more per customer than bestsellers It's extremely simple arithmetic
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Indeed, if the world were actually fair, the difference would be more extreme Stephen King could charge 5 cents per copy and he'd be fine ($1.05 for the physical book, to recoup printing costs) Most indie artists could only be making a living wage if they charged $100+ per copy
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But the world, as I repeatedly get reminded, is not fair The price ceiling and floor here make it MASSIVELY unfair
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Bestsellers can keep on raking in "excess profit" at $9.99 a copy forever and become idle millionaires Indie creators can be massively in debt and still get someone who "loved" their movie and "wants them to succeed" be like "I'll pay full price for the DVD, that's $15 right"
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I think about this especially as a live theatre fan (and, formerly, performer) who is familiar with the sticker shock pretty much everyone gets when you try to get them to come to a show and they don't typically go to live theatre
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"$20 a ticket?! For a tiny independent community theatre production? That's as much as seeing Avengers Endgame on opening night! How much are your actors getting paid?!" They're getting paid nothing dude
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That's the price *floor* for live theatre, that's what you pay for a show that's only trying to recoup its expenses for rent and materials and a couple of full-time office employees, with all the talent being volunteers
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Live theatre that's actually run like a business where the actors are being paid something approximating a decent wage for their labor starts in the $50-100 range and goes up rapidly from there I'm sorry, but that's how much it actually costs
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The price can go down if you go to a very popular show in a big auditorium But since live theatre is not a movie and the labor cost of actually doing the show cannot be infinitely reproduced over thousands of screening rooms it cannot go below that $20 floor
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For most people who are used to watching movies this is just emotional sticker shock and they get over it For some people this really bothers them on a fundamental level Being upset that there are prices you can't drive toward zero is what they call "Baumol's cost disease"
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I really fucking hate that it's called that but Baumol was an economist and economists tend to be assholes so It's this complaint about "Why are there so many things where the price keeps on going up but the job they're doing is the same?"
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And the specific example he used was, in fact, live performers, specifically a string quartet "The concept of a string quartet hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years If they were engineers or programmers, they would've had to innovate in that time or be left behind"
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"Instead, violinists keep on doing the same thing and their salary just keeps up with inflation and the rising standard of living Why is this" Well, obviously, because there is no magic way to make playing a violin more "efficient"
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It will always take the same large number of hours out of a human being's limited time on Earth to practice the violin enough to be good at it It will always require the same amount of time and effort to rehearse for a concert and actually perform it
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Which means that, yes, violinists' wages have to "keep up" with wages in the rest of society if you want there to still be violinists It's not even about what violinists "need to survive", it's about opportunity costs
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If being a mediocre software engineer pays 100x better than being a world-class violinist then no matter how much you love playing the violin a fuckton of violinists will just quit and become software engineers and the orchestras will all just have to shut down
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There IS tremendous downward pressure on live performers' compensation, especially now that these days they are competing hard with recorded media as a substitute (and the price of recorded media has tremendous downward pressure from piracy)
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But the "cost disease" cannot be defeated Whatever "a decent wage" is for an average person in the society you live in - the highest wage you can expect to make for something that takes as much effort as becoming a violinist - *that's how much a violinist costs*
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You will never actually succeed at pushing the price of a string quartet down to the price of hiring someone to stock shelves at Wal-Mart Because if I wanted to do a job for those wages I'd do one that doesn't require learning to play the violin
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You can never drive the price of creative fields like this down to the low low levels you hunger for, you can't make a "string quartet sweatshop" with slave labor in China and sell concert tickets for $0.05 on Amazon All you can do is kill the creative field entirely
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And when you realize asshole economists really think of Baumol's cost disease as a *disease* - "WHY can't we drive these prices down lower through competition?" - and that plenty of asshole laymen unconsciously share this opinion even if they can't name it, it all makes sense
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The dickhead libertarian "exchange theory of value" as opposed to the Marxist "labor theory of value" The idea that price reflects nothing at all other than how much value it gives the customer, and bringing the worker's actual needs into the picture is "coddling" them
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"Your indie movie was only 50% as entertaining to me as a huge big budget Marvel movie so I should only have to pay 50% as much to rent it" "Prices for Broadway shows are out of control, live theatre is entertaining but not THAT much more entertaining than movies"
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"Why should I have to pay a full $15 for this indie game? It's barely half an hour of content If you're going to charge 25% of the sticker price of Doom Eternal then I deserve 25% of the total entertainment value of a AAA game"
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People in this piracy discourse turn into shitty libertarians real fast "Why do you think you deserve to make a living wage for your shitty books no one likes Do you think people with real jobs should *subsidize* you, like Marie Antoinette?"
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Yeah, actually, I do Baumol's cost "disease" just means we're not all in the position of sweatshop laborers That we deserve and can demand to get paid more the bare minimum - or nothing at all - just for turning in mediocre work
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All the assholes on forexposure_txt are trying to fight Baumol's cost disease "I don't think you should get paid just for working I think you should release your work for free and then *maybe* people can *decide* to pay you for your work, if it's *good*"
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And because some people really do love their art that much, people make the economically irrational choice to do so, and by so doing largely ruin their lives
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"So you're saying that in your ideal world people would all pay additional taxes and then those taxes should go to a salary for any rando who posts smut on AO3" Well I think all the randos should all get a salary for doing nothing (UBI) but that's beside the point
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But yes I genuinely do think moving the needle in the direction of that strawman is necessary The "participation threshold" for getting paid as a producer and having to open your wallet as a consumer should be much lower
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