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

[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.

[rowyn]

Actually, I was thinking less that the current styles would be replaced than that some new ideas (in writing or art) being added to the line-up would make the genre more appealing by having more variety.

But yeah, sure, in general, the existing business of buggy-whip manufacturing is not going to be helped by the invention of cars.