Routers and porn

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Almost all of the discussions I am hearing about economics and politics seems to center on the various kinds of "lever-pulling" the government can do: tax policy, money supply, interest rates, etc.

While I don't doubt that this lever-pulling has a real impact on economic activiity, it doesn't seem to me to be what the creation of wealth is really about.  We add money to the economy and stocks go up.  Big deal.  It's just an anticipation of inflation -- not the actual creation of actual value.

Conversely, we might reform healthcare and education more aggressively.  Sure.  But it doesn't help to educate people for jobs that don't exist.  And physical wellness, whether we like it or not, is a function of wealth.  Drugs would cost money even if we nationalized pharma.   

If we look back through history, in fact, we will see that wealth has always been created be actual stuff: spices and silk, slaves and cotton, war production and automobiles, highways and consumer goods, routers and porn.

So I'm wondering what it is that the U.S. economy is actually going to produce to create wealth, jobs, tax revenue and human delight.  What will a 24-year-old community college graduate living in Dayton, Ohio be doing for a living four years from now?  Anyone have any ideas?

And can anyone tell me why this is not a more central topic of discussion generally?

Comments

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

The free market is fucked forever because the audience sees less and less difference between "professional" and amateur-produced media, in part because the audience's standards are not what they once were, and in part because the "professional" produced media's standards are not what they once were.

As an example of the former, why is an audience member going to pay any amount of money to read "respected" newspapers or to watch "artistic" films if their own standards for information and entertainment allow them to consider themselves informed by reading bloggers' opinions and entertained by watching YouTube clips of people falling down?

As an example of the latter, why is an audience member going to pay any amount of money for expensively produced news coverage or movies if those products' intelligence and entertainment values are even lower than the aforementioned bloggers and YouTube clips?

The emerging reality is that EVERYONE is now producing "news" and "entertainment" media, from CNN and Politico right on down to the high school kid with the webcam down the block, and the standards of BOTH the media consumers AND producers have eroded so far that they increasingly see no compelling reason to pay for the brand-name stuff, especially when the free stuff is often just as good, if not better.

You're assuming that people will WANT to pay money for the next Steven King in the future, when a) they can get the CURRENT Steven King without paying ANY money for his works online and b) you're talking about generations of consumers who are so addicted to Wikipedia and TV Tropes and every other form of critical summary site that many of them already dismissed King, and countless other creators, before the first time they even read their work, and c) an increasing number of them are more entertained by stuff like the creepypasta threads on 4chan anyway.

People pay money for professionally produced news media only if they believe that it offers more credibility than amateur-produced "news" media, and the sad irony is that the infighting among professionally produced news media organizations, in which they each try to paint their opponents as "biased" (and are often correct), has left the audience increasingly dismissive of ALL professionally produced news media.

People pay money for professionally produced entertainment media because they expect it to deliver something that amateur-produced entertainment media can't, and while that's good news for film makers like James Cameron who create innovative special effects, it's bad news for all the people who keep trying to cash in on the nostalgia gravy train by making remakes and reboots and sequels to preexisting concepts, because while that did indeed make box office bank for a while, its returns are drastically diminishing, as more and more fans compare those new professionally produced treatments to their own amateur ideas about how those revivals should go.

Do the producers of professional media require some recompense in order to do their jobs? Of course! Given my own job, I'd be stupid to say otherwise! The problem is that the audience DOESN'T CARE how much time or money or effort you put into your media product, nor about how much genuine creative merit it has, because if the audience WANTS it, they're simply going to TAKE it, even if it leaves the producers of that media so poor that they're unable to produce any NEW media. For every Radiohead, there's a thousand Wil Wheatons.

In short, the free market is fucked forever because the audience believes that it's entitled to get everything that it wants for free, and every mechanism that's been designed to require them to pay for it has not only NOT worked, but has in fact inspired GREATER piracy, as people start stealing shit out of SPITE.

Acting like you can force the emerging audience to behave by free market capitalist rules is like thinking you can force 4chan to behave like human beings — this is Lord of the Flies, and it's happening RIGHT NOW.

And my "vague notions" are received from my 14 years of WORKING in the media.