Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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More On Negative-Sum Publishing

Vox Day has a good post today about how mainstream publishing has become a negative sum game.

He’s mostly writing about science fiction, which I don’t read nearly as much as I used to during childhood, but it’s also applicable to the broader publishing industry. Vox touches on the demographic issue, but I’d like to go into a bit more detail here.

Anglo culture, like German culture, is hyper-literate. To the extent that both of those cultures are failing to reproduce themselves effectively has clear impacts on the demand for the written word. Mexicans love Telemundo more than they like PBS. A website like Buzzfeed is the Telemundo version of the New York Times. A shrinking and aging demographic is less capable of supporting growth in discretionary industries.

Highly literate culture that produces newspapers, literary magazines, and novels is as North European as tacos and empenadas are for South Americans. When a people diminishes, we should also expect the diminishment of their cultural expressions, both domestically and internationally. Liberals will often lament the decline in, say, newspaper readership, without connecting that decline to the decline in the consumer base who actually wants to participate in that kind of culture.

These cultural expressions are a way that a given population talks to itself, understands itself, and coordinates. As that population becomes less coherent and willing to sustain itself, its cultural expressions must also shrink.

Yet addressing this directly is very hard for people with a more liberal mentality. This is one of the reasons why you’ll see so many prospective writers waste years of their lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing MFAs and going to novel-writing workshops, in the hopes that more certificates and training programs will cure a fundamental lack of demand for the products.

More-educated novelists don’t solve the problem of a demographic crunch in the types of people who are apt to buy those novels.

Only White people — and the occasional affirmative action hire — would even think of buying an MFA’s novel. It’s just not a major art form outside a rather limited cultural bubble. There’s a reason why Africans are so absent from the long list of great authors — novel-writing was useless for Africans for most of their historical existance, as issues of bare survival were more important to them, and they never really had the level of development to support that sort of cultural expression, and aren’t likely to anytime soon, either.

Further, with higher education teaching the native stock that their culture is evil and degenerate — instead encouraging people to consume other cultural forms from the third world — any demand that might have been generated for distinctly Anglo-American culture gets dissipated. It becomes more important to be politically correct than it does to be conversant in the Western tradition and some of its newer speculative offshoots.

Liberals often profess to care a great deal about culture — they will often spend more of their lives shaping the culture than expanding the raw human material that makes that culture relevant — while simultaneously undermining the carrying capacity of the societies that they enjoy political dominance over.

You can’t promote literacy and literate culture while also suppressing the fertility of the populations which have a track record of running that kind of culture.

We could also say that this sort of over-reach is perhaps a result of excessive literacy and abstraction. Having developed advanced forms of cultural expression and communication of accurate knowledge, those expressions came to be more important than the reality which they were supposed to express, which has lead to our current predicament.

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The End of the Student Loan Bubble

The student loan bubble isn’t likely to end by government decree. Much like other failed lending programs, it’s likely to stop working as soon as demand for the loans abates significantly, whereas the trend over the last several years has been an enormous expansion in the demand for those loans.

The end will come due to selection effects. The people who focus on developing real job skills — and even the creative skills that college is sometimes supposed to inculcate — will continue to trounce many of the people who have shelled out for enormously expensive educations, even from some of the most prestigious universities. Parents who themselves went to college and have sent their own children through the system will continue to see that the system has degraded both in terms of the experience that it provides to students and in terms of the results that it fails to provide.

It’s not likely that any one thing — like internet college-level courses — will provide a replacement for the vast, mosty useless American education complex. Instead, institutions which have relied on ever increasing numbers of eager borrowers will begin to fail. The maintenance costs on extravagant campuses will not be able to bear decreasing enrollments. The huge payrolls of administrative staffs will not be supportable given even a dip in the overall increase in the interest in higher education.

The reversal isn’t that likely to be dramatic and sudden throughout the entire system. What’s more likely are local failures throughout the system, which will eventually cascade into a larger and more obvious failure. What the government might do in response to that is anyone’s guess. The record of the last 40 years suggests that the state will just try to lower the standards even further, increase enrollment even more, and reward failure with more enormous sums of money.

The changes in popular opinion over the last 10 years, though, while difficult to quantify, suggests that there’s more likely to be a contraction, but the stupidity of the bureaucratic left has been known to surprise.

None of this is particularly a problem for us or likely any of you. The more relevant question is what can pick up the shift in demand. The pat answer might be that ‘more people will go into the trades,’ but those trades can only absorb so many of the enormous numbers of largely useless graduates.

Rather than try to come up with a solution that works for the country as a whole — which would be impossible — it’s better to think more in terms of what you would do to increase the chances of your children succeeding. Historically, in times of serious resource restriction, a couple ways to handle that were:

  1. Strict gender roles
  2. Sending your children off to work for already established people

Some combination of both works well for people of all potentials, levels of intelligence, and most levels of scrupulousness. There’s no need to get more complex or institutionally-minded than that. There’s no grand proposal that can end the widespread middle class norms of extended ‘adolescence’ — but we can promote norms of early adult responsibility to counteract the errors of the last century.

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Expropriation and Elite Insecurity

This post is partly cribbed from a talk given by Guido Hülsmann at the Property and Freedom society which I linked to a while back.

Pervasive and ongoing expropriation by the progressive state motivates a small elite to work much harder than they would otherwise. Because income, capital gains, and effective regulatory taxation creates so much waste on each marginally profitable dollar, it creates conditions of more rigorous competition than might otherwise exist.

Competition in markets in turn creates signalling waste, as companies then need to spend more in advertising, marketing, and financial expenses in order to gain the same level of earnings which they’d be able to in a less democratic, more private order.

This is readily observable in any highly competitive market in which there are few qualitative differentiators among firms. This can even extend down to floral shops, which sell a mostly perishable commodity below a certain price point. When products are urgently needed and there are few providers, those providers need to spend less in market signalling to earn a profit. Instead, they can invest more into long term improvements, product quality, staff retainment, and other areas.

Long term investment — in a society which expropriatory legal norms — is an invitation to expropriation. This is one of the reasons why many third world societies have trouble igniting lasting economic growth: pockets of wealth will tend to get looted rather than respected.

When the state effectively takes half of every dollar that a company brings in, the short term needs of the enterprise become more acutely felt, especially because it’s harder to accumulate funds. In turn, the state creates vast classes of exceptions for its favored friends — the ‘corporate class’ in modern America falls under this umbrella. For example, a pharmacy conglomerate like CVS is in part more able to crush its local competitors in most markets because it’s more capable of negotiating tax credits, regulatory compliance, and supplier deals.

This fear of expropriation tends to keep what mercantile elites there are in modern democracies in line — or at least busy corrupting legislators and bureaucrats to respect their interests. In states with secure and absolute property rights, the laws are relatively simple. In states with arbitrary and shifting property rights, the people who can pay the bribes can keep their property, and those who can’t cannot.

This creates a social divide between the small business classes, the higher end corporate classes, and the slightly larger welfare-bureaucratic classes. The former two pay for the latter third, but both are subordinate to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy plays the two groups of the productive against one another, with the corporates having an upper hand over the former thanks to their regulatory advantages.

What is gradually happening is that the higher end corporate entities are being slowly gobbled by the state bureaucracy, with the former’s interests being suborned to the latter’s. Starbucks enourages all its baristas to ‘have a chat about race,’ in return for some unspecified favors down the line. This sort of thing is a violation of the previously established line between state and private propaganda — you could get the same sort of ‘chat about race’ in any public school, but for the most part, ignoring the occasional HR initiative and casting calls in advertisements, the link was kept subtle.

Now, not so much.

Similarly, ‘Google Doodles’ were once subtle accents on the homepage. Now they are as didactic as any public school curriculum with a parade of featured (mostly invented) heroes of the United Soviet States of America.

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