That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
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.
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 ?
> 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.
Can you quickly break down which players on the team are fairly compensated and which are oppressed by LeBron?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you saying that he/the small group are solely responsible for Disney wanting to pay 4 billion for it?
The Star Wars franchise earned a tremendous amount of money before the one-time Disney payout.
Jk Rowling and LeBron James are additional examples.
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.
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.