Adam Davidson on Hollywood and the Future of Work

“But embedded in Coase is this idea: the average worker, a person with a salaried job, is not receiving a lot of information from the market. They get a job for a certain task, and they have that job maybe for decades. And in that time they are not given the opportunity–or the pain–of learning what their market price is. And for someone, for much of the middle part of the 20th century this was a pretty good deal for an awful lot of people. […] And so, the Hollywood Model, one of the salient facts in my mind was that all of these various workers–the Creative Department Heads, the actors, the writer and director, even the technical folks, the electricians, the carpenters–they live in a world where they receive a market signal all of the time. Their life is broken up into these projects. This one was 2 months. Some bigger movies, like the Hunger Game movies, that might be a year and a half. You know, the big franchises, like the Hobbit movies, you might get a job for 3 or 4 years.