« Measuring health care costs and benefits | Main | Emily Oster sentence of the day »
Harry Potter and the Mystery of Inequality
J.K. Rowling is the first author in the history of the world to earn a billion dollars. I do not disparage Rowling when I say that talent is not the explanation for her monetary success. Homer, Shakespeare and Tolkien all earned much less. Why? Consider Homer, he told great stories but he could earn no more in a night than say 50 people might pay for an evening's entertainment. Shakespeare did a little better. The Globe theater could hold 3000 and unlike Homer, Shakespeare didn't have to be at the theater to earn. Shakespeare's words were leveraged.
Tolkien's words were leveraged further. By selling books Tolkien could sell to hundreds of thousands, even millions of buyers in a year - more than have ever seen a Shakespeare play in 400 years. And books were cheaper to produce than actors which meant that Tolkien could earn a greater share of the revenues than did Shakespeare (Shakespeare incidentally also owned shares in the Globe.)
Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy. And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.
Rowling's success brings with it inequality. Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component. Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality. The average writer's income hasn't gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires. The top pulls away from the median.
The same forces that have generated greater inequality in writing - the leveraging of intellect, the declining importance of physical labor in the production of value, cultural and economic globalization - are at work throughout the economy. Thus, if you really want to understand inequality today you must first understand Harry Potter.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on April 23, 2007 at 07:38 AM in Books, Economics | Permalink
Comments
The same story, with a few changed words, could be written about Bill Gates or Larry Page. Both are very talented, and yet there have been many others who are equally so and have produced products that were as good or nearly as good or arguably better, but:
"Time is limited and people want to use the software others are using so software has a winner-take all component."
Talent is the buy-in-price of the lottery ticket. Rowling is clearly very talented, but that is not what separates her and her income from hundreds/thousands who are comparably talented but labor in poorly paid obscurity (which, of course, is where Rowling was and might easily have remained despite her talent). Talent is required but a monstrously great stroke of luck (or a series of them) was the truly essential ingredient in Rowling's Harry Potter empire.
Posted by: Slocum at Apr 23, 2007 8:16:35 AM
This rings true but it has some interesting implications with regard to policy. On one hand it suggests that to the extent income inequality has grown it is not because of changes in tax policy, on the other hand it implies that great fortunes tend to be, essentially, gambling winnings. Now the people who pursue these fortunes are obviously willing to work even if they make much less. Because for each person that makes a fortune there are many more similarly talented people who toil in obscurity for little reward.
This may suggest that people who are capable of making huge sums of money are less likely to be less productive if the fruits of that production are taxed.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Apr 23, 2007 8:32:49 AM
Sounds like the solution to inequality is to remove IP laws. Perhaps instead of Rowling we would have had Shakespeare or Homer.
Posted by: theCoach at Apr 23, 2007 8:41:00 AM
Why do you say mystery?
It's a mystery only if your thinking is trapped in the proportionality fallacy of price:value relationships. (That's use value, not exchange value.)
Differentiated markets don't reward suppliers in rough proportion to their contributions. The business goes to the players whose final increment in benefit-cost (net differential value) is positive. For many buyers of kids' books, that was J.K. Rowling.
Full value:full price has nothing to do with it.
Proportionality? Neanderthal economics.
Posted by: Dick Harmer at Apr 23, 2007 8:52:34 AM
Good post, but the imperative casting of the last line was a clunker: Thus, if you really want to understand inequality today you must first understand Harry Potter.
As you say, "the same forces ... are at work throughout the economy." Or, as commenter Slocum writes, "The same story, with a few changed words, could be written about Bill Gates or Larry Page."
There are many roads that lead to an understanding of inequality, only one of which runs through Harry Potter.
Posted by: mike at Apr 23, 2007 9:04:34 AM
How about Stephen King, he must have made if not a billion, then pretty darn close to one? Considering the massive amount of books/movie deals he has made?
Posted by: Peter at Apr 23, 2007 9:06:48 AM
Or you might consider looking at a book called the Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) which makes an elegant argument about why greater inequalities exist and why more random events seem to occur. I picked up the book last week and think Taleb may be on to something.
Posted by: drtaxsacto at Apr 23, 2007 9:26:11 AM
Could someone explain how Rowling got contracts that made her so much money?
I assume that first-time authors are forced, by their lack of market position and negotiating skill, to sign away all their work (including options on future work) at very bad terms, if they want a major publisher to take their book.
I find it hard to believe that Rowling, with no negotiating experience, could do any better as she tried to publish _The Philosopher's Stone_.
Posted by: Arthur DaRosso at Apr 23, 2007 9:46:12 AM
"I assume that first-time authors are forced, by their lack of market position and negotiating skill, to sign away all their work (including options on future work) at very bad terms, if they want a major publisher to take their book."
No, this just isn't the case. Publishing contracts for the vast majority of authors are pretty standard in terms of royalties (although the size of the advance obviously varies dramatically). Even first-time authors almost certainly have agents, and the "lack of market position" is balanced by the competition among publishers. And publishers only rarely want to sign a multi-book deal with a first-time author, since it contractually obliges them to pay for books that they haven't seen and that they have no idea whether the public will like.
Posted by: K. Williams at Apr 23, 2007 10:06:53 AM
> Sounds like the solution to inequality is to remove IP laws.
Hmmm...are J.K. Rowlings, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. all just beneficiaries of rent seeking?
Posted by: Christopher Monnier at Apr 23, 2007 10:25:09 AM
"Hmmm...are J.K. Rowlings, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. all just beneficiaries of rent seeking?"
Ex post, of course they are, as is every band trying to sell CD's. Ex ante, it's not quite so clear.
Posted by: Don at Apr 23, 2007 10:28:06 AM
Nice post.
Sherwin Rosen, The Economics of Superstars.
Rosen did a scholarly piece, but also a lay piece, in The Public Interest, if I remember rightly.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Apr 23, 2007 12:14:59 PM
This may suggest that people who are capable of making huge sums of money are less likely to be less productive if the fruits of that production are taxed.
Even if that were true, my suspicion is that this idea will get lost in the translation into policy - folks may remember Clinton's "millionaire tax" from 1992 - some people thought he meant to tax incomes over a million per year, but by the time legislations was written "millionaires" were people earning over roughly $200,000 per year - still a lot of money, but not exactly a Donald Trump lifestyle.
My prediction - if Dems (I presume) embrace the notion that JK Rowling would work for less, they will decide that, since she would be happy with a mere $200 million, they will raise taxes on everyone earning more than $200,000.
Or ask about the estate tax - since Ms. Rowling would be happy with $200 million, let's tax all estates over $5 million.
That is roughly half the reason these tax policy debates tend to degenerate.
Posted by: Tom Maguire at Apr 23, 2007 12:17:45 PM
Does anyone but me think the second paragraph written by Michael Foody
at 8:30 this morning is completely inconsistent with the first paragraph he
wrote?
Posted by: spencer at Apr 23, 2007 12:18:11 PM
Of course she did write a series of books which the whole family could read. It had good winning over evil a little bit of magic and a lot of courage and moral guidelines.
None of the others you mention fit in that catagory. I read Tolkien when I was at school but it was a hell of a read. I enjoyed them but I've never read them again. Sometimes I wonder if he had written more than he did if I would ever have read another one. Stephen King or one of his aliases. I've read a couple but prefer the films. Homer, Shakespeare, even if they wrote a new book today only a select few would spend money on them.
Rowlings wrote a good story and was rewarded. Maybe luck was involved but overall it was her imagination that created the world and made us enjoy it.
Posted by: Dave Petterson at Apr 23, 2007 12:29:17 PM
"The Economics of Superstars" (lay version) is available at
http://www.geocities.com/valencia_aaup/The_Economics_of_Superstars.html
And yes, spencer, Foody's paragraph one thinks Foody's paragraph two is nuts.
Posted by: kharris at Apr 23, 2007 12:45:24 PM
You should read the Harry Potter books to understand resonance. Rowling has taken standard tools and created a seven year epic that resonates. She has played my emotions from high note to low and back again.
Posted by: Huggy at Apr 23, 2007 1:01:23 PM
Dave Petterson: "Homer,
Shakespeare, even if they wrote a new book today only a select few
would spend money on them."
That's nuts! Shakespeare's plays still routinely turn into successful movies, across a gulf of centuries. Has any other human being ever created popular writings that endured equally well as entertainments? If Shakespeare could return from the grave to health and spend a few years acculturating to modern society (and learning idiomatic 21st century English), he would be the richest screenwriter in Hollywood in no time.
Posted by: James at Apr 23, 2007 1:54:19 PM
Taleb identifies J K Rowling/Harry Potter as a publishing Black Swan. Google, Microsoft, iPods, the computer in general are Black Swan phenomena in the technology space. They may be slow in gestation/development/scaling. But their impact is huge and ostensibly positive. Risk seekers want, whether authors, artists or entrepreneurs, to try to create them and benefit from this scaling. There is a population who have the skill and ideas, but for whom the moment of scaling passes them by. They don't get rich.
But this does not defend another source of potential inequality, of which I sense Taleb is severely critical, where managers take hidden risks to earn a disproportionate rent for themselves, act as if they are in fact behaving conservatively, but then lose investors'/savers' money because they have become ultimately exposed to negative Black Swans, which are sudden, but leave the executive victim relatively unscathed. I think he is saying these people are frauds and not uncommon in finance and business. One of their defining characteristics is a propensity to wear neckties.
Posted by: knackeredhack at Apr 23, 2007 2:06:28 PM
This is the best blog post title ever. If I were a professor who studied inequality I would not hesitate for a second to name my class this.
Man, that's be the best class ever.
Posted by: Alec at Apr 23, 2007 2:55:10 PM
Trying to apply this to the overall economy fails because the subset of people who make a living writing fiction is very, very tiny.
Also, Rowling's initial effort was laregely a solo project, with more people involved in the follow ons.
Bill Gates or Bill Ford could not develop or build a single project without legions involved from the beginning.
Poor analogy.
Posted by: save_the_rustbelt at Apr 23, 2007 3:09:34 PM
Charles Dickens was extravagantly wealthy. I wonder if his wealth, adjusted for inflation, was comparable to Rowlings' wealth.
Posted by: Chris at Apr 23, 2007 3:21:31 PM
Actually, Bill Gates himself coded the initial version of the product (4K Altair Basic on punchtape) which launched Microsoft. I have been told that he still reviews source code being written by the legions now involved.
As for Rowling's inequality with other authors, it should be noted that the Harry Potter phenomenon has been a rising tide across the fantasy market.
Posted by: triticale at Apr 23, 2007 3:23:16 PM
spencer, I had the same thought.
The mere possibility of becoming a Bill Gates or J.K. Rowling motivates the toilers. Think expected value.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Apr 23, 2007 3:40:59 PM
The Harry Potter series is so incredible.
I waited to read these stories until I had children and then, it... started. I read the first and second book. I, then, had to commit to read the remaining books. What joy this series brings.
Harry Potter is the "Star Wars" for a generation. The book provokes discussion and passion. As a young boy, I remember my buddies talking about whether Darth Vader really was Lukes father or did he lie. The young people (8-22 years) were having the same conversations but about Harry. The older people (from me to Grandma) were there for the ride because we still view the world with wonder (youthful outlook).
Rowling is so wealthly because the entry level is low ($6.99 a paperback. I bought my Book 6 hardback at Meyer's for $6.99 ($10 off coupon if I bought $50 worth of groceries), the story matures with the books, and the story is "traditional" (good vs bad). Mutliply the books sold by "X" and we get a big number.
Rowling said if she wrote another series, she would not write under "J.K. Rowling" due to the pressure to live up to the Harry Potter series. Can she be successful without Harry? With her success, does she have the desire to write again?
Posted by: Chip at Apr 23, 2007 4:03:10 PM
Whatever you think "leverage" means, it's not that.
Posted by: Antid Oto at Apr 23, 2007 4:04:48 PM
Actually, talent is the explanation for Rowling's monetary success.
Stick to economics, economists.
Posted by: alphie at Apr 23, 2007 4:34:34 PM
This may suggest that people who are capable of making huge sums of money are less likely to be less productive if the fruits of that production are taxed.
A) This somehow assumes that desire to get rich is highly elastic and sensitive to changes in final value - as if, people who have nothing will work vastly harder to make $1 million a year and will not do the same to make $500K. This is a patently absurd notion, and has been since it charged out of the abstractions of Econ 101.
B) If it wasn't an absurd notion, and effort/productivity rose in some sort of linear fashion with every extra earnings dollar (the corollary to it declining with every lost dollar) - then Rowling's productivity should be rising with every book written in proportion to the concordant increased revenue from every new book. I'd love to see someone attempt to make that case. It would be an instant humor classic.
C) Gee, how does anyone ever get low-paid people to work productively, if every dollar 'lost' in income corresponds to an equivalent decline in productivity via decreased incentives? Or does the productivity loss only come with taxation dollars?
Posted by: glasnost at Apr 23, 2007 4:55:32 PM
You've got it backwards. Equality for the consumer is the ability to choose whatever everyone else can choose. When nearly everyone happens to choose J.K Rowling, don't cry about the inequality among writers. Equality among consumers is responsible for that inequality, and that equality alone creates the potential for writer to make a billion. Without equality among consumers, Harry Potter's scale of success would never happen, and writers would all be equal in their misery, and all consumers would not have access to all books, making them unequal to each other.
It may be talent that sells books and movies, but it's the modern system of commerce that allows one to make a billion by selling a copy to every living being. So if you like the free market, what about the free market on steroids?
Posted by: Timothy at Apr 23, 2007 5:46:01 PM
Actually, J.K. Rowling's success does not explain in and of itself
increasing measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient or
the rising share of income going to the top 1%. In a world in which
population is rising and incomes are rising, one would expect the
very top to move to previously unrecorded highs, so a billionaire
author. This can and will happen under these circumstances without
the Gini coefficient or the share going to the top 1% budging a decimal.
This is the old "rising tide raises all ships" story.
The problem is that this is not what is going on now. Some of it
may be combined globalization plus Frankish "winner take all" story,
which has elements of semi-monopoly/rent seeking to it. Is this
something to praise in general? More generally, I would suggest that
the rising Gini coefficient has more to do with CEO compensation packages
having increased as multiple of that of the average worker on the line
(eeeeeek! hints of class warfare!), by an order of magnitude over the
past quarter of a century. Does the now long stalled-out increase in
the stock market justify this, or is it back-scratching by ingrown
Boards of Directors? This is no story of rewards for the virtuous and
hardworking J.K. Rowling.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 23, 2007 8:26:00 PM
Barkley,
I agree that "the rising Gini coefficient has...to do with CEO compensation packages having increased as multiple of that of the average worker." But I think exactly that process has happened with writing as well which is why I said:
"The average writer's income hasn't gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires. The top pulls away from the median."
I think exactly the same causes are responsible for both inequality among writers and workers - not a rising tide lifting all boats but the leveraging of intellect etc.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Apr 23, 2007 8:40:45 PM
"The same story, with a few changed words, could be written about Bill Gates or Larry Page."
Why? Are they particularly good Seekers, or were their parents killed by He Who Must Not ... er ... oh. Nevermind, I see what you mean now.
I started reading the series because a local preacher held a book burning. Anything worth burning should be worth reading. Except Dan Brown.
And this is why it is so difficult to make contracts on your expected future earnings. More than likely, Rowling would not have been able to get much for hers ex ante. Ex post, she would have regretted promising any percentage.
Posted by: Eric H at Apr 23, 2007 9:27:23 PM
Barkley likes to emphasize the role of those villainous CEOs because he wants to turn the issue into a morality play. (And I'm sure, since he is onto all those CEOs who steal investors money without producing comeasurate returns, that he has pulled his retirement money out of the stock market and put it in a savinings account, where it will earn higher returns by funding the ventures of more hard-working folk.)
But the rising Gini coefficient is not due to the exploding pay of those villainous CEOs. The CEO of every fortune 1000 company could get an extra $1M bonus ($1B total) and, if everyone else's income stayed the same, the Gini coefficient would not measurably budge! What is driving the rising Gini coefficient is the extent to which the wages of higher-educated workers are pulling away from the unskilled. (100M college-educated workers earning an extra $10K each is $1T total, a much bigger effect.) So go for it, Barkley, and attack those profligate college graduates for driving our society over the brink of iniquitous ruin!
If you believe that CEOs (or star authors) are making so much more than everyone else because their marginal products are so much higher than everyone else's, then CEO (or star author) pay is a useful illustration of the phenomonon driving up the Gini coefficient, because it reveals that pheonomenon in its most concentrated form. But if you believe, like Barkley, that CEOs are making so much more than everyone else just because they are successfully rent-seeking crooks, then the issue of CEO pay is just a red herring, so far as explaining the rising Gini coefficient goes. If you want to lower the Gini coefficient, you have to address the issue of the rising wage gap between the large mass of college-educated workers and the large mass of the unskilled.
Posted by: David Wright at Apr 23, 2007 11:07:24 PM
What I find interesting here is that inequality seems to have an assumed negative connotation. This makes little sense to me. Should she make 5 million dollars, or 500 million dollars how am I harmed in comparison to her making no money at all? Is her money not invested or used to fund work for others? I've never understood the focus on wealth inequalities except in terms of many of "the poor" being just as greedy and envious in heart as "the rich" are portrayed to be. If I sell a rock to a fellow for $5, and he turns around and sells it to someone for $10,000, have I been harmed? I wouldn't think so, it's my fault for not finding the sucker who'd buy it for $10,000, not the fault of the person who did so.
Only in cases where the guy who made the $10,000 uses that money to intentionally block me from finding and selling such rocks is there a problem. In Rowling's case, crowding out due simply to her being popular doesn't match such malice in my view, and personally I find any resulting inequity irrelevant to myself.
Posted by: none at Apr 24, 2007 1:31:24 AM
Alex,
I am a lot more willing to buy "leveraging of the intellect" with Rowling and star authors than I am with CEOs. Yes, I confess to thinking that a lot of them are essentially crooks.
David Wright,
Your point is well taken. But there is the part of this that you are leaving out. Why have the real incomes of the less well-educated been declining, which is part of the moving away? I am still perfectly willing to turn that into a morality play. Charles Dickens did.
none,
Well, as a matter of fact there is all kinds of evidence that higher degrees of income inequality do have direct and negative effects on society in many ways from the willingness of people to pay taxes, to health, to crime, and on and on, although I will grant that some of thes have been debated, especially the one on health. The one on taxes is rapidly becoming a truism, but I will confess to being the first person (with two coauthors) to establish empirically in a paper in 2000 in the Journal of Comparative Economics a relationship between income inequality and the share of GDP that is in the underground economy, which means not being openly reported to have taxes paid on it. This was originally shown for the case of the transition economies, but has since been shown to hold internationally (see my website for papers on this topic, easily gotten by googling my last name).
I note that this is quite the opposite of what conventional views were arguing previously, although the link to income distribution was never made directly. Thus, my old prof Ed Feige (a student of Milton Friedman's at Chicago) at Wisconsin long argued that Sweden was "shooting itself in the foot" with its high tax rates and large-scale welfare state because, obviously from garden variety neoclassical micro labor ecnomics, those programs would push people to go into the underground economy to avoid paying taxes, and we all know that those programs in those Nordic countries were associated with the their high levels of income equality.
There was only one problem with this theoretically appealing argument. It was wrong empirically. In fact those Nordic states have some of the lowest rates of underground economies around, as well as some of the least corrupt and most transparent economies around. One finds large underground economies in countries with large income inequalities, with their associated social alientation, lack of social capital, places like Russia and Brazil and Nigeria.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 24, 2007 9:45:19 AM
"Actually, talent is the explanation for Rowling's monetary success."
Complete and utter baloney (not the B word I had in mind). There are legions of authors trying to gets book published. Which books distributors decide to "push" (and that DOESE mak an ENORMOUS difference) is almost ntirely out of the author's hands.
"Critical mass" is achieved at a certain point, and after that, people go out and buy it too se what other people are talking about.
Does that mean she is UNskilled? No, of cours not! But it doesn't mean she is better than any other good author, of which there are legions. She just got very lucky. Actually, considering that this was her first attempt, she got stupendously, ridiculously lucky.
(The same could be said for Bill Gates, actually, only more so.)
Posted by: Deoxy at Apr 24, 2007 10:23:59 AM
So authors have a winner take all component just like many other things we, as consumers, purchase. So you really can relate Rowling to just about any other person who started cornering a market and taking advantage of it. It just proves that Rowling is not just a good author, but a also a smart business woman. She would have to be to be able to manage Harry Potter as, not only a book, but also a movie, video game, and toy.
Posted by: Tim at Apr 24, 2007 10:22:30 PM
I guess the interesting question to me is whether the increase in inequality associated with education involves:
a. Higher returns to education, IQ, whatever, as technology improves, jobs become more open to anyone qualified, and more choices are available. That is, people with more education getting a bigger productivity boost relative to what they used to get?
b. Higher returns to education due to policy or legal changes, that make the credential necessary. That is, do already educated/smart people rig the system to reward people with impressive credentials, to improve their own prospects and those of their kids?
It seems like I can see examples of both these things going on, but I don't have much intuition about what the balance is between them.
Posted by: albatross at Apr 25, 2007 10:12:43 AM
The comments on the 'Harry Potter' phenomenom I see are divided between those who see this degree of inequality as a problem, and those who don't.
I do see this growing inequality as a problem, but not by any means the only problem.
So, First, I'll adress the inequality problem. This problem can probably be overcome by tweaking, rather than doing away with copyright laws. Recall that copyright was expressly designed "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" not only as a means to enrich the creators. Let us remember, too, that copyright is a special case exception to the general rule of freedom of speech, and that therefore in any freedom based perspective, copyright must be seen as a necessary evil, a compromise, limiting freedom of speech but providing incentive. The facts of the Harry Potter example suggest that copyright law, as it presently exists, is doing too good a job of enriching creators, and should therefore be changed. There are many ways to change it, for example limits on copyright term time, or even limiting the amount of cpoyright income that could be obtained, or from taxing copyright income differently.
From my perspective, the other bad things about the 'Harry Potter' example that many commentators seem to ignore include the shallowness and poverty of the writing and the widespread distribution of such a poorly written work. These problems are connected clearly to the first problem. In fact, nearly all policy changes that would address the first problem will also address the second.
Posted by: enigma_foundry at Apr 25, 2007 4:41:43 PM
You're missing the obvious proximate cause of Rowling's success: her contracts with her publishers.
Rowling's original contract is now a legendary cautionary tale among children's book publishers. Back when she first negotiated the rights to publish her work, her publishers did not think it important to reserve all film and merchandising rights. They never expected the books to be the runaway success that they are.
Children's book editors have learned their lesson from this. Publishing contracts now usually transfer ownership of all derivative and auxiliary rights to the publishers from the authors. Reserving any rights to the author can be extremely difficult, since no editor wants to face the same fate as the person at Scholastic who didn't keep the movie rights to Harry Potter.
This is very similar to what George Lucas accomplished with his contract to make the original Star Wars. He gave in on demands from the production studio to reduce his up-front compensation in return for ownership of merchandising rights (which, back in 1977, were considered small potatoes). The studios have not made that same mistake since.
Essentially, the wealth of many of these superstar creators is dependent primarily on contract negotiation, and errors and assumptions by distributors during same, all compounded by selling in a mass market.
Posted by: Kenshi at Apr 27, 2007 12:04:01 PM
Income inequality should not be a issue. People tend to complain about those
who make more than they do. In reality though a person has to be willing
to work hard in order to gain the money that they wish to obtain. Today
people are so concerned with money but they are not willing to do the
work. I think that people who have money deserve it becuase somewhere
along that line someone had to work hard enough to get that money in
their back accounts. Also today people are not to good about saving
their money. Some people are just more smart with their money and how
they obtain. That is all there is to say about this subject.
Posted by: Jenna at Apr 27, 2007 5:31:26 PM
Harry Potter has, indeed, hurt the book industry more than it has helped:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,710189,00.html
The success of H.P. is a triumph of marketing hype, period.
Posted by: Ellie in T.O. at May 1, 2007 10:39:41 AM
http://3freesex.com x
Posted by: Zmajrpi at Jun 2, 2007 12:14:52 PM
http://3freesex.com x
Posted by: Zmajrpi at Jun 2, 2007 12:14:58 PM
Posted by: Nbkvqos at Jun 2, 2007 10:11:48 PM
http://sextasexxx.info x
Posted by: Zmajrfu at Jun 3, 2007 9:10:34 AM
I find this thread interesting... However, I do not think that Rowling's success is resulting in GREATER inequality than already exists (although I would agree that it is part of a trend). Economically, the amount of income she generated is a product (symptom?) of the capitalist system. It is the system that spawns inequality. Rowling is just a beneficiary of that system.
Re: Ellie's reference to article stating that Harry Potter has hurt the book industry children's literature sales (and thus the amount children read) is based on inaccurate correlations. the book industry selling less children's books because of Harry Potter, because parents can't afford to buy too many books, and as a consequence children are reading less is NOT an accurate correlations. (think of economic downturn, availability of school and public and school libraries, used books, AND the fact that probably more adults are reading the series than children). Also, it's ridiculous that a book series that has come out with seven books over 10 years with various price configurations ($35 for a new hardcopy, $7 for a paper back) is causing families not to buy other books. So over 10 years that means that middle and upper class families are breaking the bank buying the books new with an average spending of $24.00 a year? Especially since it is the higher income bracket families that are buying books new books for their children in the first place. Alternatively, while the children's and adult book sales have declined TEEN book sales (ages 12-18) have risen in the United States have risen 23 percent between 1999 and 2005 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19035151). (And of course all these articles about books sales brings up an important point from the Harry Potter books--you can't trust the media not to put their own spin on things).
In terms of inequality with regards to more people reading her books than others--good literature touches not only universal values and experiences (family, the need to belonging, death, vengeance, the evil of power) but also to current social and political issues (genocide, racisim, equal rights, untrustworthy governments, media as a form of propaganda, REVOLUTION). Her books are also unapologetically champion consumerism and the value in "cool products" like the firebolt and other consumer products created in Rowling's word. While consumerism/conspicuous consumption is not a value that I share, it is an element of the world she creates that allows people to identify with and understand the Harry Potter world. All these things make this book so enjoyable.
Also I disagree that there is something wrong with a book having a large share of the market or that there is a problem with people all reading the same book because their friends are reading it. A culture is based on shared experiences. While I agree it's important that there is a range of literature available to read, it is not an inherently bad thing that the harry potter series is taking up a large chunk of the current books sales. There is something to be said for using shared literary experience such as Harry Potter as an avenue for discussing important topics and issues in the world that touch us all. Indeed the Harry Potter books and their success are the basis for THIS THREAD. I do not think that the success of Harry Potter is based solely on it's marketing--if so there would be many other would be novels that would have also been as successful (I'm thinking here of Eragon and The Golden Compass).
I am wondering if the people critiquing the success of the book here have actually read the series?
I was reluctant to read this series because of it's popularity when it came out. However, after watching the first movie with a friend, I became intrigued in the series and quickly read the first four books. I was then hooked. I am a great reader and while I read many books every year, there are few books that really touched me and captured my imagination as the Harry Potter books have done. There are so many layers to this book--political, cultural, religious, mythological that it can be read and discussed from many different angles and levels. I am also thrilled that children exposed to the Harry Potter books are also reading very potent critiques of racism, genocide, and buying into the government rhetoric and propaganda.
There other sci-fi children's series compared to Harry Potter. I was told by some employees of a leftist bookstore (who were making fun of Harry Potter readers) that the Pullman series, The Golden Compass, was better and deeper than the Harry Potter series. After reading the Pullman series I wonder if they had actually read the Harry Potter series? The Pullman series was very good and interesting in that the evil to be conquered in the world is God (I wonder how they will discuss that in the mainstream movie?). However, the Pullman series in no way was as complex as the Harry Potter series and is not as accessible (meaning that not everyone will have a component or character in the book that they can identify with).
Posted by: izaguf at Jul 22, 2007 5:22:04 PM
