So, there was this food emporium called Pastas. The idea was to specialize in Pasta, since everybody loves Pasta, and to provide a range of options of pasta at a good price. You would go to a counter to order the pasta, but someone would bring the food to your table, along with a napkin-wrapped set of silverware. When you were done eating, they would bus your table for you. This placed Pastas clearly outside the normal range for fast food, yet in the same comfortable (and fast) ball park.

Over time, Pastas stock went up, as more and more stores were open. People buy the stock because it is going up. This investment fuels more franchises, advertising, other development. The value of the company goes up because its numbers look good, and that adds to the value of the stock itself, because people want to buy it.

Eventually, every strip mall and commercial zone in America that can have a Pastas, almost, has one.

When stores were being added, income streams were being added. Earnings went up because of this, plus, because an older franchise can have a higher profit margin than a brand new one. But once the market was saturated with stores, the income stream could not grow that way any longer. This caused the value of the stocks to stop going up as much as they were. Instead of always going up, a lot when the overall market went up, a little when the overall market went down, Pastas stock now went both up and down. And every time it went down, there was the stock market equivalent of a stern look. News report: “Pastas stocks have gone down for the first time since the company did yada yada” and that sort of thing.

Pastas needed to increase its own value somehow to keep stock holders happy, else they put Pastas stock in their “sell when you need the cash to buy into the Next Big Thing” category. But most of the previous increases were from opening new stores, and all the stores that could exist, pretty much already existed. There had to be other ways to increase value.

Note: At this stage, everybody loves Pastas. No stores are closing. There are no layoffs. The restaurant continues to do well, people buy lots of Pastas product (pasta), vendors and employees get paid, etc. Everything is just fine. The only thing that is off is the value of the stock, stabilizing or dropping slightly, not because of a change in inherent value of the company, but because the company had filled its space.

Everything is just fine but one thing: The stock market does not understand that the store has value, and needs to see earnings increase — not just stay the same but go up — or they don’t hold the stock.

So, what does Pastas do?

In order, roughly:

1) Stop bringing silverware and napkins to the table. One might think this would make very little difference, but it saves money because it saves a measurable bit of time. It is also one less thing for employees to get right, so one can spend less time training.

2) Stop clearing tables. This saves even more money for similar reasons.

3) Reduce quality of some of the ingredients if it saves money.

4) Reductions in pay to employees, or slowing down raises, or less training.

As these or similar steps are carried out, the earnings go up because costs go down. Not by a lot, but enough to stop the bleeding.

As this sort of thing happens, Pastas starts to decline in quality. No longer to people say,”Hey, this new place is great, try it out.” People keep going to eat there, sure, but only out of habit and because while quality has gone down, it is tolerable.

Over time, a measurable number of customers become annoyed when their local Pastas gives them a dose of extra bad service, and are less inclined to go there.

The number of customers stops increasing, which offsets the small gains from increased stinginess. The number of customers who walk away and come back less frequently or not at all goes up, which exacerbates the problem.

Earning drop. Stockholders, believing as they do in the perfection, wisdom, and sanctity of the Free Market, don’t understand that the real reason the value of the stock drops is because of their prissy irrational behavior. They blame it on — well, whatever excuse they can think of that does not incriminate themselves. More stocks sell. Value drops. Pastas starts to cut its losses any way they can. Eventually, Pastas, a good idea well done, disappears from the American landscape, cast aside by the invisible, and brainless hand of the Free Market. Pastas is gone, having died of its own success.

But the cause of death isn’t only success. What really killed Pastas is the fact that it was a publicly owned company.

Perhaps something like that is why Musk wants Tesla taken out of public ownership.

I wonder what the value is of a show like House of Cards vs, say, Jessica Jones, to a producer of content like Netflix. The former has major stars, a cult-like following that is large, and is great critical success. The latter also has some kick-ass stars but probably fewer, is a bit of a niche product (there are people who will glaze over at the idea of watching a “super hero” show, even though it really isn’t) and seems to have less hype, possibly watered down by the nearly simultaneous production of a handful of different parallel integrated complexly interrelated productions.

So, had you been a wise investor in Netflix productions, you would have been invested heavily in House of Cards, with all its high cost, high compensation, high production value, and less invested in Jessica Jones, because it also is probably fairly expensive to make, but it has a much less well known star (Krysten Ritter) as opposed to the great and famous Kevin Spacey.

But things do not always work out as planned.

It may well turn out that House of Cards will be of very little future value compered to Jessica Jones, assuming Krysten Ritter is not exposed as a sexual exploiter of some kind. Nobody will be re-watching the first few years of the House of Cards, or at least, no one other than the MRAs and people who just never heard. So one can look back and say that the wise investors were fooled, maybe even ripped off. Right?

Well, not really. Investors got what the were (not) asking for. The Patriarchy rarely examines itself, and had it done so, there might have been routine inspection of productions to check for … certain things … before piling in piles of production money. But it does not so there was not.

I heard many times a story from a friend that I always avoided repeating, but now that everyone (in the story) is dead, I have no compunction.

It was Michael Crichton, who as an alum was a long time friend of Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, visiting and staying at my adivsor and friend, Irv DeVore’s house. DeVore was one of the founders of modern primatology and hunter-gatherer studies. Michael was staying at DeVore’s place, as he sometimes did as a member of the department’s “Visiting Committee.” At the same time, he was working on a move.

By the way, one of his books was based in large part on the research project I was engaged in at the time, using the location and many of the stories brought back from the field to fuel the writing (though the plot of the book had very little to do with the course of the research!). It might have been the movie based on that book that was being developed at that time. But I digress.

As told to me by Irv, Michael Crichton spent considerable time on the phone, as a producer for the upcoming movie, with the casting director and others, trying to figure out which actors they could rely on, which actors were currently in rehab, or likely to cop out because of some drug or alcohol related binge, or who were in the middle of a messy divorce, or some other distracting activities.

This wasn’t just Crichton being a moralist or paranoid. It was standard procedure in producing a movie. It is a main job of casting directors and producers. You have to weigh the costs and benefits of hiring a given actor, where the costs often included the risks of an actor becoming unusable, or costing production a lot more than they should, because of bad behavior.

The point is, considering the behavior of actors has long been part of the process of producing film and I assume TV. Those conversations on the phone with Crichton were happening in the 1980s.

Yet, for some reason, this never seems to have included sexual misconduct, harassment, or similar. It never occurred to the producers and other movers and shakers that a) women (mostly) and men (sometimes) on the set or in some other context might be unduly burdened with felonious and obnoxious acts carried out against them, or that b) the value of a series or movie might drop precipitously if it tuned out a star was a sexual harasser, predator, or similar, and that became generally known.

Never. Occurred. To. Anyone.

Give that some thought.

The patriarchy is blind to its own misdeeds. The free market assumes the involvement of “ideal free actors.” “Free” in this case means free to make choices. “Ideal” in this case means all the actors have the same information, complete information, and are therefore “free” to act in the same way as each other if they chose. That is how you get rational choices being made, and that is how the decision makers, or the decisions themselves, are tested against each other, with the best ones winning and coming out ahead in the end. Plus or minus random effects.

Only then is a free market an actual free market, a maximizer of profit, and optimizer of process.

But in reality, the making of movies and TV shows, and many other endeavours in and out of Hollywood, involve “Ideal–free actors.” Notice the added dash. Notice the lack of ideals, of ethics and morals. Notice that for decades felonious acts on the set or elsewhere in the production process were expected, assumed to be normal. Boys will be boys, producers will be producers, stars will be stars. Decades after the deployment of anti sexual harassment HR policies across the rest of the professional world, film and TV investors remained (willfully?) blind, decades after the deployment of methods to avoid losing production money because some actors had turned into a crack head or some director stopped going to meetings, nobody cared about the issues of sexual harassment, assault, and similar.

So much for the free market.

By the way, I’m enjoying Jessica Jones. If you are a Dr. Who Fan, note that David Tennant plays a super villian for part of the show.

Some video treats: