I imagine this life test (i.e. “you can get with this or you can get with that”) fields different results depending on gender. It bothers me that a deep schism may exist in my marriage if a consensus is not had on whether we are going to have kids. Worst yet, it will probably be me looking like the a$$hole, because everybody loves babies!

Thanks for sharing this, Milena. This definitely helped me get some perspective on this.

You ask,

“Does Reidel explain in more detail why getting rid of anti-payola laws would help “everyone but the most lucrative performers” get chart action that they’re not currently receiving?”

The link to the article is in the post, so you can check. Here it is again:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/fellows_papers/pdf/Reidel_35.pdf

And I agree with the content. So called “terrestrial” radio is now almost an unbearable mix of constant commercials, and 40 or so heavily rotated “hits” that I have to believe are decided more by corporate boards than by the actual popularity of the piece among listening public.

And even if songs are popular among the people, there is little to no chance of anyone outside of Disney Bubblegum pop to emerge into any kind of stardom.

I work in a large classical music nonprofit org in a large city, in the finance department. And I have an MBA that included a very strong grounding in economic theory, from a school that demands rigorous empirical testing of theory (despite a reputation to the contrary). At my arts org, we have lots of unpaid interns, and the current situation is that it is nearly impossible to get a programming or artistic job, even entry level, without starting as an unpaid intern. We could probably afford to pay a couple interns, but not as many as we have (I’m the budget guy, I know this).

The person who might benefit from this legislation would be a person like I was when I graduated from college. Someone with pre-existing clerical skills, a degree in theater, therefore knowledge of the art, and heaping mounds of student loan debt. I was situationally poor then, and ended up going into temp office work that bored me to tears, which led to an accounting job and eventually an MBA and back into arts administration in the finance side rather than the creative side. So I’m not exactly fulfilled, and would have appreciated a minimum wage internship in the artistic or dramaturgy department of a theater, but I will survive. And I was forced to develop other skills that are potentially more lucrative than my current job.

The person who would not as likely be helped is the person who is systemically poor. Somebody who is poor because of urban blight, rural blight, or racism and had little chance to go to college (or at least a good one). No music education, therefore no internship at my organization (paid or unpaid). Going farther back, the person who is systemically poor had very few opportunities to study music intensely as a child, and it probably won’t be a surprise when I say that most of our administrators did. If you never studied music as a child, you certainly didn’t major in music if you got to college.

So, who is the legislation supposed to help? I hope it would be intended to help the systemically poor person. But the thing is, it can’t. If you want to increase access for the systemically poor, then you have to work on systemic issues. You have to help improve their arts education, their parents’ involvement, their access to top college programs… This minimum wage floor isn’t going to help. It’s too little, too late. Maybe a few extraordinary people from such a background would be helped, but you can’t set policy for the extraordinary. And if the legislature is actually designed to help people like me who left college with too much debt to pursue the unpaid internship… well, I guess I could have said thank you. But in the end, there is probably more utility to society in my learning other skills.

There is one possibility, hinted at in one of Mr. Moss’ comments, that organizations would see paid internships as an opportunity to fill their diversity hiring goals. That could be. And you only have to be a tiny bit cynical to perceive that if you use your lowest paid, least responsible positions as a relief valve for institutional diversity goals, you are actually doing a great disservice to yourself, your diversity goals, and the people you bring in as your token diverse individuals. Assuming race is one diversity vector here, this actually would reinforce institutional inferiority of people of color. There’s a negative externality for you.