Then SF has become, at least sometimes, mass market.
I do think mswas has a good point that educated consumers tend to like niche market stuff. And unfortunately, it’s not as available as mass-market stuff because of the current business climate, which ultimately demands that you be mass market - that you be in the cash-generating business first, and the selling or service business only after that. Either you dominate your segment, grow constantly, and put your shareholders’ interests ahead of your customers’, or you go broke.
I don’t think educating people is good for market capitalism as we now practice it. Educated people tend to think more critically - although we’re working on that. Maybe in a few generations we’ll have reversed that trend so that they can be depended on to support the mass-market, high-volume model, and buy whatever we need to sell.
It happens, sure. But people like Gene Wolfe, who when they release a book are prominently featured on the rack at B&N, still tend to sell like 50-100k copies. And he is generally presumed to be a Titan in his field.
Also, Feast for Crows is fantasy, not Sci Fi. I’m having trouble thinking of a recent Sci Fi novel that hit the bestseller list. Daemon, but that skirts the crime/spy thriller genre. I think fantasy novels tend to do better than Sci Fi in the mass market, but I don’t have figures in front of me obviously.
That is barring some tie-in. I am sure the Halo books sell a pretty decent number of copies.
Actually the market is moving more in the direction of all-niche no mass market. It’ll take a while but it’s starting. Mind you, niche can still mean millions of consumers.
I posted a thread about a factory in Massachussetts making Open-Source cars, but no one really seemed particularly interested in it.
Spurring the creation of better products: Yes, see Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction. It’s not limited to products, it’s also processes, management systems etc.
Education: Some types of education can improve the process but it’s not required for creative destruction to occur. To take two examples: Watt’s steam engine replaced muscles/air/water and the light bulb replaced oil lamps when most people were very little educated by today’s standards.
You don’t need to be literate to know that a VHS tapes 3 hours and a Betamax 1 hour or that image quality is better on DVD than VHS.
“The theory of the Invisible Hand states that if each consumer is allowed to choose freely what to buy and each producer is allowed to choose freely what to sell and how to produce it, the market will settle on a product distribution and prices that are beneficial to all the individual members of a community, and hence to the community as a whole. The reason for this is that self-interest drives actors to beneficial behavior. Efficient methods of production are adopted to maximize profits. Low prices are charged to maximize revenue through gain in market share by undercutting competitors. Investors invest in those industries most urgently needed to maximize returns, and withdraw capital from those less efficient in creating value. Students prepare for the most needed (and therefore most remunerative) careers. All these effects take place dynamically and automatically.”
(Bolding added)
You can read through the Wealth of Nations online. It’s fairly clear through the whole thing that his intent is to show the natural order of business tends to benefit everyone, and he is simply analyzing why this is so, so that further analysis and reasoned modifications can be made.
The premise that rationality is assumed is day one in Macro 101. The fact that actors constantly muck up that premise is day one in Macro 1101. It comes up in macro classes, micro classes, econometrics, and game theory. I concentrated in environmental economics and yep, it’s there too.
Sorry for the cite-lessness, but all my econ texts are in the attic and “rationality” “assumption” and “economics” are far too broad for Google to do anything with. But it’s really basic stuff.
Actors break rationality all the time, preferring A to B and B to C and C to A, expressing varying preferences based on unrelated changes, acting against interest without any form of reward, holding unrecognized preferences, etc. I think the hackneyed example is mis-valuation of something already own.
That actors do not always act perfectly rational is no more damaging to capitalism than the lack of perfect information, and stating that neither perfectly rational beings nor perfect information exists is a triviality.
While there are all sorts of cases where actors only seem to break rationality (and determining which is which is not always straightforward), playing the smug “typically misinformed and superficial” card is, well, smugly misinformed and superficial.
And ‘normative hell’? You took umbrage to a footnote? One that clearly stated that, like frictionless vacuums in physics, the rational actor assumption is useful and typically outside the need for consideration?
I still think you are confusing “best interests” with rationality.
Actually, rationality assumptions and economics are incredibly easy to look up and google gives helpful answers. Rationality assumptions are tested quite frequently. For example, here.
The way you talk about rationality requiring perfect information, it seems like your textbooks were written in the 19th century.
Despite some exceptions, acyclicity (or at least similarity-based decision making) has held up very pretty experimentally. Rationality does not typically require independence of irrelevant alternatives, so “unrelated changes” are not really a problem. We don’t even require IID in politics. Look at the election rules in France for a good example.
The mis-valuation of things we already own is not a failing of the rationality assumption. It is a mis-specification of payoffs. Here is where some of the interesting work gets done these days. Conforming the structure of payoffs to reality is a very good thing. Like I said above, they are very often not symmetric as is typically assumed.
As you say this is indeed trivial, but at least it is true.
I may be smug, but I am not misinformed. I just have somewhat lost my patience for gross mischaracterization of the actual content of rationality and its consequent abuse by people who cannot be bothered to understand it. This is by no means directed at you, who can at least do something more than howl “economics doesn’t work because people aren’t rational! so there!”
I would like to shoot whoever chose “rational” as the watchword of the discipline. It has caused endless and pointless confusion.
I didn’t even mention your footnote because it does not concerns me. I took umbrage to your contention that, for example, rationality requires perfect information. This hasn’t been assumed of economic actors since the dark days before the development of non-cooperative game theory. I took umbrage because it is simply wrong and spreads misinformation. Sidetracking an economic discussion with such things usually does lead to normative hell because rationality itself, used colloquially, is normative.
I appreciate you going to the trouble of finding a cite, but this in fact says the opposite of what you claimed it did. What you said was:
For one thing, “the market” and “capitalism” aren’t the same thing (and I think you’re also confusing those terms with the concept of “economics” as a science. Economics is not capitalism.)
Getting around that, however, what the invisible hand theory states is that the market will arrive at socially beneficial results. It does that by virtue of a natural process - not because of an explicit goal to improve the world. If you think that’s what it’s saying you’re almost perfectly misunderstanding the point. The theory underlying the benefit of free markets is that positive results will come from NOT planning things, from NOT having an overarching goal; instead, each participant is seeking out a result that will maximize their own utility, not society’s.
It might sound like I’m nitpicking, but I’m really not; the distinction between self-interest and common interest is enormously important in modern economics.
An excellent comparison would be evolution and the theory of natural selection. Natural selection results in species that are ideally suited to exploit their environment and reproduce. It’s so good at this, and has produced such amazing, interesting, and complicated organisms that you’d almost think evolution was TRYING to make human beings and other amazing animals and plants. But there’s no “plan” to it. Evolution doesn’t have an overall plan or a goal. Instead, the individual animals have a plan and a goal; Keep surviving, keep reproducing. It just happens, and as a result of individuals doing what they do and mutations happening, life grows and changes.
And of course, the theory you’re citing is simplistic to the point of describing chemistry as “stuff has atoms in it.” Adam Smith was a great thinker but “The Wealth of Nations” is not the Bible. It’s the BEGINNING of the discussion of economics, not holy writ that can’t be challenged. Economics is a science and we’ve come as far from Adam Smith as physics has come from Sir Isaac Newton.
Do you have a cite for this? The fact that bookstores give equal shelf space to both genres makes me think that they sell in similar volumes. There are a few titles that sell a ton, but most probably don’t sell all that much. We knew a mystery writer who was definitely not rich.
Only after Star Wars came out. Before then, blockbusters were typically historical epics, like Cleopatra or Lawrence of Arabia, and sf, except for 2001, was fairly low budget.
Capitalism is a branch of economics. Economics is the study of economies, which one undergoes for the sake of finding ways to improve the world. By simple act of being economics, its purpose is to improve life.
Capitalism arose by the analysis of what happens in a free market where people were able to act as independent operators with, more or less, complete freedom to trade with whomever they wanted at whatever rate they wanted, and discovered that this resulted in a market whereby even the greedy end up benefiting everyone. Noting that it’s quite likely that we’re all selfish to at least some extent, this course of economy is one where you end up with an entire populace working to help each other without overt need to lead it.
Noting that fact is useful. Going to the effort of pointing it out to the world and its governments is undertaken with the goal of improving the world. Letting people know about the Invisible Hand allows them to better manage it so it is more efficient. But there is no rule that you can’t try and improve the efficiency of the Invisible Hand, since we’re talking about economics not God’s Almighty Wisdom.
I’ll agree with you disagreeing with yourself. NASCAR is niche. Porn is getting niche. Romance novels are niche. At least some of the followers of these genres are not highly educated. On the other hand, books are getting to be a niche market these days.
Well I’m using the term in the way it’s used in the Entertainment Industry. Lost for instance, would be considered mass-market. You could call it niche, because the only people who watch Lost are the people who watch Lost, but that’s not very useful or descriptive. NASCAR is also mass-market because it has a very broad appeal.
I didn’t disagree with myself in any way. I just pointed out how the Entertainment industry works today, and how the trends of the way the Entertainment industry is going, are working.
The rise of DIY culture, and the lowering of the barrier to entry for advanced tools are increasing the options. This is why I pointed out Open-Source cars. You can get your car customized in a way that getting a Cadillac with a sun-roof isn’t even close to being custom. In short you can pick your car based on a series of options and have it built for you by a factory, piece-meal. This is the overall trend that I see occurring in the long-term.
That does not contradict in any way, that the major mass-market venues such as TV networks are still stuck in the model that has been the foundation of their success for three-quarters of a century.
Sci Fi novels in general sell quite a bit, but that doesn’t mean that Sci Fi novels individually sell a great number. No, I don’t have hard statistics for you. I’ve just seen figures that people like Gene Wolfe sell 50-100k books. Next to the figures for ‘Heat Wave’ the novel based on the hit show Castle, that’s very niche. But in the Sci Fi world, Gene Wolfe is a heavy hitter. Of course, Neal Stephenson can sell millions of books.
Capitalism is no more a “branch” of economics than it is of physics.
Every single person who’s ever studied economics did it to improve the world? Nobody ever studied economics for personal satisfaction? Curiousity? Because they needed the credit? To sit next to a hot girl they knew had signed up for it?
No, capitalism “arose” because people wanted to take some stuff and turn it into other, more valuable stuff.
Gene Wolfe, whom I love, is perhaps too sophisticated to be mass market, even within sf. Anything based on a TV show is going to sell well by definition. I think niche is defined by subject and/or genre, not sales. I don’t know if you consider Star Wars books niche or not, but I assume they sell really well as a whole based on the vast amount of shelf space they get. But my point is that both mystery and sf have a few big sellers and a lot of moderately selling books. Most of the mysteries my wife reads are later books in series which I doubt sell a lot, certainly not relative to Dick Francis. I don’t know if the sales amounts match, but I bet the distributions do. (Not counting the Star Wars and Star Trek books, since mysteries don’t have a similar set of franchises.)
