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"So let’s not pretend that the Star Wars series is this great piece of entertainment.
Instead, let’s call it what it is: A monument to George Lucas pleasuring himself. Which, you know, is fine. I’m happy for Lucas; it’s nice that he was able to do that for himself. We all like to make ourselves happy. But since he did it all in public, I just wish he’d been a little more entertaining about it."
"These are the ones without champions and also without real cultural existence in the U.S. The reality of working class life is invisible, or close to it, in the nation’s corporate mediated sociopolitical culture. When is the last time you saw a decent, widely watched network sitcom or drama about any among the faceless Americans Blow tried to remind Times readers about?"
A simple test: If your fairy godmother appeared and offered to make you famous, can you honestly maintain you'd say "no thanks"? The reason you'd take her up on it is that you know that if you were famous you would have achieved what you, and all of us in this society, believe to be the very purpose of life: you would have fulfilled your destiny. Finally, that nagging feeling of being one step away from happiness would go away, because you would have taken that last step.
I've talked about "shadow values," the fact that the world of entertainment allows us to indulge and cultivate values that we deny. The two topics are related, of course. That is, the world of entertainment allows you to indulge your fascination with celebrities while denying that fascination at the same time.
Does entertainment disguise something?
For all that has been written on individual pop icons and sitcoms and the liberating or oppressive power of popular culture, basic questions remain unanswered. What do we know about the overall effect of living in a society in which entertainment is so central?
The basic problem facing most labor markets is that workers can neither commit to long-term wage contracts nor can they self finance the costs of production. I study the effects of these imperfections when talent is industry-specific, it can only be revealed on the job, and once learned becomes public information. I show that firms bid excessively for the pool of incumbent workers at the expense of trying out new talent. The workforce is then plagued with an unfavorable selection of individuals: there are too many mediocre workers, whose talent is not high enough to justify them crowding out novice workers with lower expected talent but with more upside potential. The result is an inefficiently low level of output but higher wages for known high talents. This problem is most severe where information about talent is initially very imprecise and the complementary costs of production are high. I argue that high incomes in professions such as entertainment, management, and entrepreneurship, may be explained by the nature of the talent revelation process, rather than by an underlying scarcity of talent.
in list: Economic Crisis
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If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes beserk about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next. And be worried, quite worried, about a society for whom anger is a form of entertainment.
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