feddit.org

1 point

5 months ago

Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

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aidan@lemmy.world

1 point

5 months ago

Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

I mean, supposed to according to who?

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1 point

5 months ago

Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

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aidan@lemmy.world

1 point

5 months ago

But, tbh, that’s just some guys opinion

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1 point

5 months ago

That’s rather dismissive. Also vague. Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy’s opinion, or that you’re not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?

Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they’re losing interest in the conversation. It’s okay to walk away.

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aidan@lemmy.world

1 point

5 months ago

That’s rather dismissive.

I don’t mean it that way.

Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy’s opinion,

This is true yes, but back to the original topic

or that you’re not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?

This yes. I am saying nobody has any authority to assert what is or isn’t supposed to be highly paid, but it is fair to believe nobody should be highly paid.

Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they’re losing interest in the conversation. It’s okay to walk away.

I really do genuinely appreciate the consideration, I’m fine right now, but thank you regardless!

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1 point

5 months ago

When it comes to capitalist macroeconomics, as I understand it, wealth disparity is one of the big decay factors the government is supposed to monitor and correct for. Mind you, I learned MacEc in the mid 1980s but even after theory shifted from national economies to globalist economics (the free(-er) trade movement of the 1990s) wealth distribution, and the bow of that graph was supposed to be kept shallow.

There are a lot of ways to restore some balance, such as taxing rich people and investing in welfare programs and social safety nets. In the case of freelance musicians (and freelance investments, which allowed people of lower income classes to invest sooner) these are just paradigm changes that allowed more people to participate, with the expectation that more people would be moderately successful rather than a few people being ostentatiously successful. Fewer Bruce Springsteens, more John Coultons. This wasn’t contrived by government though, so it’s more of a happy accident.

And yes, Marx in Das Kapital notes that the ownership class invariably captures government and regulation which ends efforts to keep wealth more evenly distributed so we have situations like now (or like the Great Depression, a century ago) where a few people own almost everything and aren’t willing to let it go, even though the only thing they can do by hoarding their wealth is accumulate more wealth. And history has continued to bear this out, and to show that a well-regulated capitalist system is only temporary at best, which has driven me to believe we have to figure out something better.

Post-scarcity communism would be ideal, but we haven’t yet worked out how to get there from here, and really I’d be happy for anything that doesn’t turn into a one-party plutocrat-controlled autocracy held together by fascism and a nationalist war effort.

And sure, economics is a soft science so this is all just someone’s opinion, though the someones in this case are multiple smart historical figures who actually thought about it a bit. I’m not an economist, so I rely on experts who are.

PS: This is my attempt to either find common ground, or to lay plain what my position is and where it comes from. I’m not invested in you adopting it, but if you want me to consider a different one, I’ll need cause to do so.

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