America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
apricitas.io325 points by gnabgib 9 hours ago
325 points by gnabgib 9 hours ago
I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
In general I fully agree except with your conclusion. In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them. Because as you bring the price down on things you enable more efficient competition. Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
> when you start moving things away from LA to "save money"
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
Another huge nail was the strikes - business will continue with or without those on the picket line, but it just moved to where there weren't strikes.
>Regular people do not have more more money or time
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
Meanwhile household basics increased faster than wages. In other words people don’t have more money.
This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Looking at an article from the CATO institute, over the last 30 years wages have climbed 169 percent, while food prices 111 percent.
But an even better measure is PCE, or personal consumption index. Rather than CPI, or any other "household basics" measure, which subjectively categorize goods and then tracks those, PCE measures the total dollar amount spent by the entire U.S. consumer sector on goods and services. This is what is used by the FRED database referenced in the reply above.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-dire-pronouncements-abou...
I feel like people complain about “food” but it’s a stand-in and that the cumulative increase in rent, transportation and food probably rose faster than wages. So Cato reply “but food hasn’t grown as fast as wages” is a myopic retort (admittedly one they acknowledge) that tries to fight the narrow factual argument ignoring the broader one where the emotional narrative probably remains true.
Also we can probably simplify this bucket even more and just talk about the elephant in the room which is rent/mortgage.
It’s 30 to 50% of most peoples paycheck, it’s really the piece that matters and the one that is most complicated to solve.
It's not very complicated; it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular. Making housing affordable by definition means driving down prices. But existing homeowners don't like to see their home prices go down! And about 2/3 of the US public lives in a house owned by a resident.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
You're mistaken about the reasons why solutions are unpopular. Have you actually talked to the most active NIMBYs who oppose new housing development? Most of them are barely aware of affordability and home prices. They have lived in the same neighborhood for decades and intend so stay there until they die so prices don't impact them at all. Instead they are concerned about quality of life issues: traffic, parking, noise, petty crime.
“Making housing affordable by definition means driving down prices.”
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
> But existing homeowners don't like to see their home prices go down!
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
The government heavily interferes in the housing industry. Hence, the higher costs. It's the same for everything the government interferes with - such as education and health care.
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
> And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out".
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
> there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC
That's about 2.4% of the total number of rented apartments, and about 1.5% of the total housing stock.
How long do you think those apartments are unoccupied, on average?
What portion of the stock do you think would normally be healthy to have on the market?
google prompt: "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
Scroll down a bit and read the section: "Key Causes of Vacancies"
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I genuinely can not understand how anyone with basic knowledge of economics could believe that government intervention is not responsible for the majority of rent price increases
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+can+government+...
That's because you inserted the word "all" which was quite absent from what I wrote.
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
> all unoccupied apartments in a market
Which market are you thinking of?