Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

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The issue is that with supply and demand, the market will bear poor/abusive conditions for people that have no rational ability to make a difference but superrationally would be able to do so.

A prominent example is child labor laws. Before these were passed, the market would bear endangerment and injuries to children because something was better than nothing to families that had very little, and it was rationally in each family’s best interest to take the risk in exchange for some small amount of money. If they had all collaborated in an organized strike, they could have demanded better conditions, but in practice that wasn’t going to happen for people that were already extremely constrained on money and time (and all it takes is a minority of defectors to prevent this from working). It creates a feedback cycle of compounding inequality, and the only way to break it is via regulation.

So once you allow unpaid work in exchange for "exposure", that becomes the new normal, and no individual photographer can alter the system while still acting in their own best financial interest.

I disagree, I think the photography prices here are a good example of markets working as intended.

Prices reward people who do work that there is an unmet demand for in society. If society already has an oversaturation of professional photographers (so much so that clients feel they do not have to compete at all), the low price of $0 for professional photography work will hopefully encourage some of these glut of professional photographers (and others looking to enter the field) to pursue another profession where they can add more value.

If Netflix's contractor here has set the price too low, well then no one will apply, and they will have to set the price higher.

It might be fruitful to look at the inverted — Netflix is doing the selling here. They’re selling the intangible product of publicity (exchanged for labor) to a group of people who are struggling to evaluate the “real” value of the product. And the argument is of course that the product in fact has no real value — it’s a trick.

The problem then is the same as snake oil; the demand exists only because the consumers lack information. And then keeping in mind that market principles only produce efficient economies when information is available and known.

Child labor is similar in some ways, but I do want to point out some important differences. Children are not legally able to make contracts. We recognize children as being unable to rationally process on the same level as adults. To the extent adults have a problem with hyperbolic discounting, children often have that same problem but much worse. And children often have no choice but to obey a person in authority over them (typically parents).

If you put all that together you get a perfect storm of terribly misaligned incentives and vulnerability that make child labor a very different case than what we're discussing here. It's entirely possible or even likely for a rational service provider to throw in a freebie in exchange for intangibles like publicity. It happens all the time in the adult world. So I don't think child labor is a fair thing to compare this situation to.

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