> it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort
George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.
So if you were to assign value to the work to make a new Star Wars toy would you it’s (total value of Stat wars) * (number of people who have ever worked on Star Wars) / (number of people who worked on the toy)?
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
Hmm, what about JK Rowling and LeBron James where the vast majority of their value is explicitly going to their publisher and they keep only a small percentage. Their tiny portion is a billion after everyone else takes most of it!
Harry Potter became a billion dollar business after the movies and toys and so on were created - again, it takes waayyy more people than one to actually produce this amount of money. The initial idea that Rowling herself came up with is of course a significant part of that - but still only a small part of it, in the grand scheme of things.
It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.
JK Rowling, the proofreaders, the reviewers, the printers, the marketing, the librarians... Everyone in that list is in effect getting stolen from by the publishers, yes.
in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?
Right, and even if we assume Lebron accomplished his entire basketball career by himself and that his salary is 100% “earned”, his salary didn’t net him a billion dollars.
you’re only strengthening the argument that people deserve asymmetric compensation. LeBron and the NBA have a symbiotic relationship where both of them make more money because they exist. And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
Are we not discussing this in the context of this parent message?
> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
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> And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
And yes, in this case I believe the NBA is extracting asymmetrically, from Lebron and others.
Also the idea that playing on a basketball team is a good counter to the argument that everyone is on a team seems pretty odd for obvious reasons.
Are you sure the root of your concern isn’t that people differ in ability and value?
Can you quickly break down which players on the team are fairly compensated and which are oppressed by LeBron?
I'm the original poster in this sub-thread, and I didn't make any of the points you seem to have ascribed to me.
Once again, the publisher gave her something like 5-10% of sales and kept 90% to cover those costs and she is still a billionaire!!! So is your real beef with the publisher?
Indeed. And once the publishers have paid their fair share, JKR also will, and she won't be a billionaire anymore.
> George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
Inability to predict the universe does not mean the underlying mechanism is actually random. It means you don’t understand it well enough.
Well that conveniently makes your assertion unfalsifiable, doesn't it?
Your position is that any correct prediction or investment can be explained by luck. That sounds more unfalsifable to me - it sounds like you’re neglecting evidence, actually.
> What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but
Well yes. That is in fact exactly what I mean.
> George Lucas
Once again, lopsided allocation - George benefited from and is directly responsible for keeping the cost of labor low: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/100...
Would he have been a billionaire without that? Who knows? But it definitely helped him get there.
I addressed that. The movies themselves are not the source of the wealth and yes the original was created by a group so small that theoretically Star Wars wealth could have been divided evenly and they would be billionaires.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
I might be misunderstanding your point then.
Are you saying that he/the small group are solely responsible for Disney wanting to pay 4 billion for it?
Yes I’m arguing that the original crew created within the ball park of a billion in wealth per-head.
The Star Wars franchise earned a tremendous amount of money before the one-time Disney payout.
Jk Rowling and LeBron James are additional examples.
Would jk rowling have been as popular without the marketing from her publisher? What about the work of the editor from the publisher?
It's instructive that people like you pick people like LeBron James or J.K. Rowling to make your points.
The reason is that the conflict here is between labor and capital. And those two, at least in their primary roles, are labor, as a writer and an athlete. One of them is even a union member operating under a collective bargaining agreement.
They're just the absolute pinnacle top of anything that could possibly be put in that category.
But if I'm arguing that this is really about the division of of the spoils between labor and capital, and you have to resort to picking members of the labor class to make your argument then you have essentially conceded my point, which is that returns to labor are different than returns to capital, and returns to capital are much harder to defend. You didn't pick Bill Ackman for a reason.