MPAA lied to Congress about the jobs number
thebestpageintheuniverse.net
thebestpageintheuniverse.net
To have an honest discussion on this debate we need to stop talking about raw job numbers lost in one industry and instead talking about:
(1) net job losses and gains (2) discounted by the number of jobs that are likely to be eliminated due to changes in consumption patterns and increased productivity (read: automation) in those industries.
The whole debate about job losses is dishonest if you don't accept the fact that change happens.
This isn't HN quality material. Give us deep analyses instead of a poorly made and misleading info graphic.
[1] http://maddox.xmission.com/ [2] http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs038.htm
TBH, you may be right that I am wrong about it being intentionally misleading. It may just be confusing design due to proximity. But if that is the case, I wouldn't be surprised if agenda played some role in clouding out better judgement in how it was designed. I'm still trying to figure out if the 25% refers to: (a) 361,900 jobs, meaning there are 1,080,700 creative jobs in the industry for a total of 1,447,600 people employed; or (b) 25% of the 361,900, meaning that 90,475 people are doing jobs like janitor and concessions and that 271,425 are creative jobs.
FYI, I removed the word "intentionally" from my original comment. I agree that including it wasn't constructive.
Plus, the same argument can be applied to tech companies. It's disingenuous to talk about people like janitors and cooks and whatnot, when people in every industry need to eat and have the spaces they occupy cleaned up and cared for.
The author of the info graphic shouldn't have discounted those jobs from the MPAA's figures without also discounting them from the tech industry figures as well.
I'm as anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA as anyone here on HN, but truth and transparency are more important than agenda, and if you give those up, you become those you are critizing.
Some of those "motion picture" jobs include food prep workers, concession stand jobs and janitors. In fact, 25% of all "motion picture" jobs are comprised of fast food workers, ushers and other service occupations.
If you look behind the callout, you'll see that the background spreadsheet image represents a partial view into the total count and breakdown.
Again, I had to do a double-take, myself, to see this. So I'm not saying the infographic couldn't stand some tweaking.
Two comments I'll make.
1) I take the point of the infographic, but I don't mean in my own observation to discount nor demean those particular jobs.
2) It would be nice to have some links to information backing this up. However, I see a web site address clearly provided at the bottom. Looking there, while it's hardly the most structured web site design, if you look for the portion of the page that begins "Update (01-20-12)", you'll find at least some linkage.
I may be completely off base here, but with the exception of gas money in suburbs, I imagine that most of the income from jobs performed by people in high school is discretionary income spent on entertainment (because food and housing are still provided by someone's parents). Now I know this is not universally true, especially in low income communities, but I imagine that loss of discretionary income among this segment of society is adequately replaced by cheap or free internet content.
I would even suggest that society shouldn't even worry too much about the loss of discretionary income that is mostly being spent on goods whose price is falling together with the loss in purchasing power for those goods.
Another benefit is that said teenagers learn how to hold a job when failure may not be as expensive as it will be later.
These kids earn disposable income and dispose of it. It's safe to assume that a fair portion of this demographics disposable income is disposed of at their local theatre, whilst simultaneously providing most of the staff there too.
If these kids can no longer dispose of their income at the theatre, then it's safe to assume they'll quickly find somewhere else to dispose of their money. These other locals will receive a boost in business and require hiring more staff, possibly extending shifts into the times when young adults are more prevalent rather than closing at 8pm.
Without an entry level job, he would have no way to pay for community college and commuting- as the pell grants and available loans are simply insufficient. Even with free room and board.
Nearly 15 years ago I took a job at the local Wal-Mart as a high-school sophomore (15 1/2 was the minimum required age, with restrictions on hours worked), mostly so I could save up enough money to buy my own computer, or enough fairly recent parts to build something respectable. To my parents this was preferable to me hitching a ride with high school seniors in the computer club to go dumpster diving every weekend for 386s in the back of colleges, company headquarters, and landfills. Though to be honest, it yielded quite a respectable stack of working computers.
I used the computer I built from my Wal-Mart money (Pentium 200MHz with 64MB of RAM) to learn how to program, enough about relational databases, and create dynamic websites (we're talking mid-90s here), so in my latter half of high school I was building basic e-commerce sites for larger local companies to save up tuition money to go to a state college and not have to take out loans. And to play games, of course.
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Granted, I think most of the kids I worked with mostly spent their money on music, movies and fast food, and didn't show up when they didn't need spending money. Or to hook up with their coworkers (Kim from the shoe department, leave me alone!). I ended up taking care of 1/3rd of the store floor myself, which really ticked them off when I quit.
Is it the latest and greatest iOS or Android device? No. But it is a platform for exploring, learning and being entertained.
A question to you that I've asked myself, would you rather have less buying power today and access to the Internet in its current form or more buying power and access to the Internet 15 years ago?
I'm not saying that the movie industry has no reason to complain about piracy, but the whole 'America is losing jobs' argument isn't working for me.
Here's a study I'd personally like to see: spending on "legitimate" copies of entertainment products easily available through piracy versus availability of discretionary income. I can't help but think that MPAA, if they were _truly_ just a bunch of greedy bastards, would have an entirely different political agenda.
That is to say, if you can afford $30 Blu-ray movies and a player, or going out for a $50 trip to the theatre, you surely have a high speed internet connection.
furthermore, I think it's a bit silly to claim that in order to win the argument, the tech industry must prove that its many millions of jobs are more important than the entertainment industry's 376K. That 376K may be important, but is it THAT important?
It's hardly hypocritical to think that encryption and privacy should be in the control of the owner of a device, not the device's manufacturer or a third-party content producer.
> Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs
Doing that math, for every 1000 jobs lost, the MPAA looses 0.045% of it's workers. So "thousands" could mean as much as what… 5,000 – (2.25%) of their workforce?
How are we wasting Congress's time!?
The money leaving the industry isn't resulting in many lost jobs. It is resulting in lost revenue from rent-seeking activities. How much is highly debatable.
TBH, we need to be addressing the issue of rent-seeking activities in general. My favorite explanation of rent-seeking that highlights the problem with it is that rent-seeking is when someone seeks to take a bigger slice of an existing pie, instead helping make that pie bigger.
This is not a bad thing. It is the reason we have the standard of living that we have.
So waving a jobs number around as a justification for something is somewhat dubious. What matters is the benefit derived for the cost of doing it.
If something were invented that healed all illness instantaneously, health care would be over as an industry. But the resources freed up would be spent on other things, with jobs in those areas increasing.
The same thing happened when we automated farming, manufacturing, basket weaving. Its how an economy evolves.
Flagged for being really low quality, anyway.
Most middle to low income earners spend every dime they make. If they're not spending it on movies or music, it's going to something else like beer, diapers or travel.