Austin Goolsbee tells us in his NYT column that the proliferation of reality TV shows is the price that we pay for the greater diversity of television offerings. The argument is that it is expensive to develop a scripted show, and with the audience now splintered among hundreds of cable and satellite channels, it is increasingly difficult to recover these costs. Therefore we get many more low-cost reality shows. Well, the argument about the expense of scripted shows is undoubtedly true, but it seems hard to mourn the loss of shows, that with few exceptions, were incredibly bad. I don't know if anyone has ever done a study of script writers and the other insiders in the television world, but as someone who grew up watching such acts of creative genius as "Mr. Ed," "I Dream of Jeanie," and "My Mother the Car," I have always assumed that the main qualification for producing a television show was being a friend or relative of someone in the business. Television production was an area of outrageous rents (the sort of thing that really bothers economsts when they go to autoworkers or textiles workers), with people routinely pulling down high six figure and even seven figure salaries for jobs that hardly fit most people's definition of work. As both a consumer of culture and an economist, It is hard for me not to see the proliferation of television options as entirely positive. I can't wait until the Internet fully merges with traditional television, so that we will effectively have infinite viewing choices at any point in time. If economists didn't devote so much time trying to eliminate the modest rents earned by autoworkers and textile workers, they could easily develop mechanisms to ensure that creative workers can get compensated for their work (e.g. my artistic freedom voucher proposal). This may not give the children of Hollywood moguls the incomes to which they think that they are entitled, but them's the breaks.
--Dean Baker
