Karma, or What Goes Around Goes Around and Around

Hi there, folks! Still with me? Is anyone reading this aside from my parents, grandparents, and probably Ankur? Let me know if you are!

Anyway, today I received some interesting news. I learned that The Magdalene, that musical I was supposed to be the CM for but was laid off of before I even started, will be closing this week! 7 weeks early. I can't quite decide how I feel about this. On the one hand, there is some small level of vindication, but believe me, it's incredibly small. I know for sure that the show closing had absolutely nothing to do with me, and had I been on staff there's nothing that I could have done to have delayed it's closing early. On the other hand, I feel that this is a loss for the industry in general. I think far too often people forget that when a show closes, either because of mismanagement (which I'm not alleging), bad reviews, or just not being able to get the audience in (either through poor marketing or not really being very good to begin with), the entire industry takes a hit. People who were working in theater are now very soon to be unemployed. Investors who backed a show will not see their investment recouped, let alone return a profit. What if those investors never back another show again? It's already hard enough to convince people to sink their money into theater, given how risky a venture it is (though in good news, I just learned that Ghetto Klown, which is closing soon/maybe just closed, recouped its investment). At the end of the day, what might be a karmic victory for me, really isn't, because it makes my own future opportunities all the dimmer.

However! the economist in me says that that's all ok! If the market wanted that show to be open, then it would have stayed open. If the market wanted that show to run for years, it would have run for years. If the market wanted The Magdalene to be the next Wicked and span a billion-dollar + empire, then that's what would have happened. You take a shot, and sometimes thems the breaks. And at the end of the day, an Off-Broadway show closing prematurely isn't any different from a small sprocket plant closing down, or a restaurant going belly up. While it's definitely emotionally difficult to come to terms with failures such as these, in the bigger picture, the Invisible Hand has reallocated those resources to a more efficient use, that in theory (and I believe in practice) will yield a better result for society as a whole. And Adam Smith is smiling down on it.

I think that's the hard thing to grasp about economics, and capitalism. It's pretty darn uncaring of individuals. What a capitalist economy really cares about is the collective good. What?! How can you say that, Alex? Isn't that the opposite of capitalism? Well, frankly, in my opinion no. The way I see it, in capitalism, you have individuals working hard to achieve personal success in a system that rewards such success because of the positive impact it has on the collective good of the entire economy. In communism, or socialism, or other non-market-based or less-market-based economies, you have individuals working hard (I won't begrudge the fact that people tend to work hard the world over, relative to their cultural standards) to achieve the collective success of the economy, which will tend to reward certain individuals over others, even as it cares for the collective good.

Does that make any sense? I didn't really think about it before I wrote it, I just let it come out. Sometimes I think, for all of my study in the Dismal Science, I still have a very fuzzy understanding of it. I don't know if that means that I was a really terrible student, or if its just super hard to understand.

As you can see, I've kind of decided to go no holds barred on this blog, and just write whatever I want. Who knows, maybe without a slavish devotion to reporting my comings and goings, which are fairly few and far between in this period of unemployed doldrums, I might actually start blogging more.

Keep calm and carry on.