| Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die. I quite agree with that. Weaponized viral clickbait most especially. what you do is not valuable to anyone. Unfortunately for that premise, there are far, far, far too many counterexamples of those who've created hugely valuable works but have died destitute. Looking beyond the strictly entertainment arts, just addressing a common trope of capitalism: that it's an engine of and greatly rewards innovation. The tale of the unrewarded genius is legion, one set of substantiation is presented in Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms looking at key inventors of the early Industrial Revolution: John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, Reverend Edmund Cartwright, Eli Whitney, and Richard Roberts. Of the list, Kay, Hargreaves, and Roberts died in poverty. Crompton and Cartwright were granted substantial payments by acts of Parliament (£5,000 and £10,000 respectively), Whitney made money through arms sales to the U.S. government, and of the lot, only Arkwright earned significant wealth, half a million pounds, after his patents stopped being honored by other manufacturers. See also numerous authors, musicians, artists, playwrights, etc., who've created masterworks but were underappreciated in their own day. That said, I do agree, somewhat, that the Universe does not owe you a living at your chosen task. But a bigger issue is that information and markets are very poorly matched. Market mechanisms work best where goods are uniform (either individually or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market price. Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions. ⚫ Quality is highly variable. ⚫ Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors (e.g., pay-to-publish journals, "friendly" colleague peer reviews, discussed recently by +Joerg Fliege). ⚫ Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice. ⚫ Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing. ⚫ Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low. In fact we're utilizing a system which was specifically created to reduce those costs still further, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, developed to transmit physics papers between CERN, SLAC, and other related facilities. ⚫ Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. In the case of Dr. Grimm, those who would benefit by treatment of conditions informed by his research. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", or weapons research. https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/7Eer... |