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| Hatsune Miku, Pop Star of the People. hoangtush @ deviantart |
I honestly feel very conflicted. On the one hand, I am a huge believer in the power of decreasing supply costs to increase living standards, and the internet and its access to information and information-based services strikes me as a big deal. Resistance to the abundance of valuable services on behalf of its producers seems to me like a great way to entrench dying industries and inhibit progress; consider the replacement of auto manufacturing jobs with robots, and my argument in that kind of paradigm.
On the other hand, I really dislike the idea that valuable art, writing, music, etc., usually produced on small scales long before an artist catches on and often never reaching the profitability of some inferior work, would lose yet more financial leverage (as my grad-school colleague Erik Hoel shared).
One hope that i have is that the democratization of art production will spur the spotlighting of worthwhile artists; in a certain sense Biebs is the ultimate example of this, ironically enough, if only because as an overall package he was valuable to the market. Indie bands stand to benefit as well, and Arcade Fire's grammy isn't discouraging. Plus if it's true that personality, not product, is the marketable good, then the weird genius of Hatsune Miku at least changes the conversation, even if it's not clear how.
Another friend and former classmate, Jason Myatt, has kicked around an idea with me about a simple safety net that pays people to devote 20 hours a week to a demonstrated productive activity -- intentional pipe dream/thought experiment though it is from a current-implementation perspective -- to me suggests a possible solution. At least, it does so if only in the sense that, once global distribution of keep-you-alive supplies evens out and death by starvation/exposure could (if we chose) become a thing of the past, then the need to create policy to preclude literal starving artists would likewise diminish, and the question is only whether an artist would become rich and famous, etc. Capitalism survives, but not sell-enough-goods-or-die capitalism.
Pseudo-Marxist utopia though Jason's thought experiment might seem to be, it strikes me as valuable in this context precisely because it accommodates, in ways that a low-safety-net system does not, the possibility of marketplaces for products with almost no overhead. If everybody can, at baseline, stay alive and build lives for themselves reasonably well, then why would we need to have crazy arguments about structurally protective art distribution practices? Incentives could adjust in response to what people really want to spend their lives doing, etc., etc.
This post is a bit rambly, and I don't have a clear point I'm driving home. I'm just wondering if the solution to these economic problems is, in a sense, more fundamentally, formally macroeconomic than it is about the morality of art consumption and merit. I know we can never divorce ethics and policy, but I'm curious whether we can frame it a bit more practically.
I fully expect several of my points are ignorant and idiotic, and eagerly await my edification!
