Bail Out the Writers!
A fascinating essay by Paul Greenberg in the Sunday New York Times notes that there Are 185,000 people in the United States “who support themselves primarily as writers of books, plays, poetry, speeches and other literary matter.” They earn an average $38,000 a year from their employment. The industry suffers from overcapacity and for a mere $37 billion, Greenberg suggests with tongue firmly in cheek, could be bailed out with government money that would pay writers to cease production and raise the incomes of those who remain.
The counter-precedent in 1930’s was FDR’s Federal Writers Project where 6,000 unemployed writers were put to work writing guidebooks and collating oral histories.
The challenge for any bail out program aimed at reducing overcapacity, notes Greenberg, would be ensuring writers actually cease writing. Most writers, unlike auto-industry workers or Wall Street bankers, are in love with their craft and would be unlikely to take money in exchange for allowing their pages to lie fallow.
A core aspect of the written word since the dawn of the alphabet has been people’s love of creating texts for their own sake. Leonard Shlain notes in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
that
The written word is essentially immortal. To a hyper-conscious primate who had become aware that death was inevitable, the discovery of a method to project oneself beyond a single life span seemed nothing less than miraculous.
For those of us who need to put bread on the table as well as celebrate the miraculous in our work, a nice compromise would be the Irish system where creative artists and writers do not pay tax on their earnings. More a Dáil Out than a Bail Out.
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Ian: is there any possibility that public speakers could get in on the bailout also? I do like to speak, but I’d be willing to let it go for 6 or 7 figures.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental Communicator Blog
“Learn How To Calm Your Fears, Wow Your Audience, And Get Your Point Across”
By Dr. Jim Anderson on 12.15.08 2:10 pm
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