The Size of the Pie

[rowyn]

This idea has been stuck in my head for a while now.

 

Yesterday, I was reading an article about DC's latest reboot; they now have only two women working on the 52 DC Universe titles (one author writing two titles, and one artist doing one cover).  That's out of 209 artists/writers/cover artists.

 

The sole female writer called on DC to hire more women, and one of her fellow creators was unhappy about that. His argument, albeit not in so many words, was 'which of the us do you want to get fired for this?'

 

And this seemed like entirely the wrong question.  DC and Marvel's superhero comics are read by, I dunno, maybe a couple million people.  Out of the seven billion people in the world, these giants in the field are reaching maybe a thousandth of a percent.  And it's not that people don't like superheroes: I'd guess that at least ten times as many people watched Captain America as read even one superhero comic in 2011.

 

So this guy is saying 'I don't want to lose my job to some woman just because she's a woman and there aren't enough jobs for everyone'. Which is totally understandable.  Except that it ignores the ability of people to MAKE MORE JOBS.  It ignores that maybe if the DC Universe wasn't a No Gurlz Allowed club, maybe it would appeal to more people. Not just women, but men too.   Maybe if you weren't so jealously intent on protecting your little bitty pie from anyone else getting a slice, you'd find out that you could make a much bigger pie.

 

But it's not just this one little thing.  It's so many things where I feel like we as humans are totally misguided, where we act as if resources were not just finite but narrowly bounded, as if there's a fixed amount of wealth in the world and there can never be any more so we have to grab as much of it as we can and keep anyone else from getting their hands on it. We can't let immigrants into our country and steal OUR JOBS.  We can't let people get rich because that should be OUR MONEY.  We can't be happy for a friend's successful blog because those should be OUR READERS. 

 

One blogger called it 'slottiness', when aspiring writers would get jealous of another being published, as if that author had taken their slot.  But we do it with so many things.  It seems like common sense to think that if one person gets X, the next person can't.

 

But it's still wrong.  There's so much that we can create. Life is not zero-sum. We don't have to make sure someone else loses in order for us to win.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I do like the idea of making the pie bigger!

As for the 'friend's successful blog' thing, I seem to remember someone, possibly Cliffski of Gratuituous Space Battles observed once that it is always a good thing when your "competitors" are doing well-- they are your market as well, people who play their games will probably also play your games. Likewise, people who read your friend's blog are also likely to read yours.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Well, why stop with DC comics? Let's make everyone in the county's pie bigger. After all, lots of people out of work today. Why not give them all jobs? Let's let the uber rich banks hire more people. And let's make the super rich insurance companies hire more people too. And heck, the oil companies can buy all of Europe -- they can hire some people I'm sure.

Oh, but first, they have to have something for these people to do, don't they? No company hires people unless they have jobs for them to do, correct? Maybe this, then, is what that "slottiness" comes down to; DC isn't going to hire women as writers if they don't need more writers. Or artists, etc. Sure, a company can invent work for people to do. But that would affect profit negatively. And all these public companies could care less about anything else but that profit.

While you are correct in theory, having companies actually step up and hire people for what they really need done has been an uphill battle. Getting them to hire folks for no real reason but "the pie should be bigger" won't cut it.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It comes down to the whole concept of competition. Competition doesn't improve things for anybody except the person who wins. We'd be better off co-operating to improve things for everybody, rather than focusing on competition, which by definition requires winners and losers.

[telnar.livejournal.com]

Whether it's right for an individual to perceive change as making the pie bigger or as zero sum often depends on the degree to which that person is already committed to the old technology. At one extreme, free trade and technological progress create many opportunities which are hard to foresee in advance (as well as destroying many usually less valuable opportunities), so they should be seen primarily as making the pie bigger by someone who isn't yet committed to a particular firm or industry -- say, a college student. At the opposite extreme, imagine a firm which prints comics and only has a comparative advantage in that format because their workers have trained for decades on machinery which isn't good at other kinds of printing and don't have more general skills. The shift to electronic comics will seem zero sum for them even if it's not for the economy as a whole.

I'm in favor of encouraging change which has the potential to grow the pie in spite of the disruption it creates, but we shouldn't kid ourselves about that disruption. If you're right that adding female artists will grow the pie, the reason is likely to be that it will encourage migration to new drawing styles which will make comics as a whole more popular. That change is not a positive one for those who are specialized in the old drawing styles.

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

... just one of the rare occasions when I gotta use the LJ LIKE button *grins*
Beautifully said ... nothing I could add to this