Capitalism and Books

I, like a lot of readers of these essays, probably, believe that capitalism is the best economic system of all the ones available. Capitalism, when implemented correctly, provides more abundant goods at cheaper prices and higher standards of living for everyone across the economic spectrum. Capitalistic countries even have higher life expectancy than those that aren’t. Run the regression, you will see for yourself.

As I get older, I’ve become a bit more sensitive to some people’s objections to capitalism, and what I’ve found is that they usually center around what kinds of people are successful under a capitalistic system. We find them distasteful. Elon Musk being the most obvious example, but there are others. If you ever find yourself feeling this way, I encourage you to contrast this with what types of people would become successful in an unfree economy. It would be those with political pull, claiming to have the interest of the common man at heart. Elon Musk is quite clear: he is in it for himself. But because of that self-interest, millions of people own pretty cool electric cars and prices they find to be reasonable. It is the invisible hand argument from Adam Smith—each of us, acting in our own self-interest, produce outcomes that are beneficial to us all.

Enter Molly McGhee, who I hadn’t heard of until last week. Molly is a creative writing MFA (just like me) from Columbia University, and also teaches in the writing program there. She complained bitterly on Twitter about how her student loan payments were going to start up again, about $1200/month, and wondered how someone who was so highly educated could be so poor. She has a book coming out soon, a novel about class warfare. Her Twitter bio reads: “200% class rage.”

Anyway, poor Molly was roundhoused by just about every conservative commentator out there. It turned into a big pile-on, one of the biggest ratios of all time, and while I have ideas about student loans (and writing), I kept my opinions to myself, because Molly is a fellow writer and I do not participate in internet pigpiles. She went on tilt, tweeting incessantly about student loans and inequality. It was a bit of a meltdown. I’ve been at the bottom of a pigpile before—you just turn off the notifications and stay off Twitter for a few days. When you come back, everything will be back to normal. As unpleasant as it was for her, it was probably great publicity for her book, which, until the tweet, nobody had heard about and probably nobody was going to buy.

I also make a living as a writer—same as Molly—and I have made a lot more money than her. Now, it’s not an entirely fair comparison, because you can make a lot of money writing about money. But even when you put that aside, I have made about $300,000 from my books over the years, and if you include my days as a Bloomberg op-ed columnist, maybe another $70,000. I have made multiples of that off my newsletter, but that doesn’t count, because I am writing about money. But even just as an author and freelance writer, I have done pretty well.

I think the crucial difference is that I am writing things that people want to read. James Patterson also writes things that people want to read, and it’s a crime against humanity. I saw a statistic a few years ago that sales of literary fiction had dropped 40%. It has probably dropped more since then. A lot of that has to do with the literary world going woke, and nobody reads books to be lectured. I noticed this happening back around 2008 or so, which is about the time that I mostly stopped reading literary fiction. Molly’s book falls into that category, though I’m sure the writing is beautiful. I’m not making a political statement here—the anti-woke crowd is equally dumb as the woke crowd—just that it’s a free market for books, and you have to decide between highbrow (which not a lot of people appreciate, but the right people appreciate), and lowbrow, where Joe Shlabotnik will walk into a Barnes & Noble and see it on the New Releases table and buy it on the basis of a cool-looking cover. We have a free market for books. You have probably noticed that some of the books that have sold the most copies are also terrible books. You have also probably noticed that literary genius goes unnoticed most of the time. That’s the cruel reality of capitalism.

But what would you have the solution be? Force people to read books they don’t want to read? Also, let’s put this in perspective: only about 30 books a year sell a million copies or more. Only 30 people a year truly get rich off of writing. 500 books a year will sell 100,000 copies. That may not seem like a lot of books, but selling 100,000 copies is a big, big deal. That will give you enough money to last a year or two, but not many people can crank out a book that sells 100,000 copies every year or two. The upshot is that very few people can make a living writing books.

It wasn’t always this way. As recently as the mid-2000s, a typical advance for a typical book might be $250,000 to $500,000. Amazon destroyed the book industry—for authors. It was great for consumers. Since then, advances have come way down, and now the typical advance for the typical book is about $30,000. For Molly’s book, which is literary fiction, it is probably less than that. The good news is that Molly teaches at Columbia, which is what a lot of writers of literary fiction do. They go get their MFA, they teach at a university, and they crank out books, and live at the subsistence level while paying off their student loans. I’ll describe the economics of higher education in a half a sentence—we subsidized it, and now it is wildly overpriced—which isn’t fair to people like Molly. Maybe she thinks her education should have been free. If it were, that would be too bad, because people would be being forced to pay for books on class warfare that they philosophically disagree with. Complicating things is the fact that Molly lives in New York City, at least, that is my assumption. If she were living in Bloomington, Indiana, her cost of living would be lower and her standard of living would be higher and she probably would be less inclined to tweet about the injustice of her student loans.

So while Molly and I disagree on a lot, we are both writers and we want millions of people to read our books. I wish her the best of luck and I hope she would wish me the best of luck. The problem with writing books is that getting people to read them is like getting them to climb a wall of indifference. Reading books is enjoyable, but it’s also work, and it’s a huge investment of time, when so many other things are competing for it. And it’s one thing to get someone to buy the book, and yet another to get them to read it. And it’s still another thing to get them to finish it. The whole thing is incredibly hard. And the financial rewards are nonexistent. You do it because you love it, like a lot of things in life. In 15 years of DJing, I have been paid $1,000. I still do it, because it’s fun. And you never know, maybe one book catches fire and goes hockey stick and you’re getting speaking gigs at $30,000 a pop.

I think what we have here is an example of innumeracy, which is how a lot of people get into trouble with student loans. They just can’t do the math. Borrowing $150,000 to go to school sounds like a good idea until you get that first payment stub. Then sticker shock sets in. Yes, it’s unfair that a writing degree costs $150,000. Don’t blame capitalism, blame the government! Just think, in a just world, you could go bankrupt and discharge this debt and never have to deal with it again. Because the government is willing to lend a virtually unlimited amount of money to finance a college degree, then a college degree will therefore cost an unlimited amount of money. The true cost of the education is obscured, until later. Don’t get me started as to how unfair this is. It used to be a lot more fair, until the government got involved.

But the real issue is—and this is important—money is a choice. If Molly wanted to make money, there are lots of other things she could have done with her life. She could have gone into banking or tech or venture capital or private equity. She would probably find that to be abhorrent, but these are the professions that the market values the most. We all get to choose how much money we have. Turn it on its head—she chose to have not money, but what she does have is an incredible quality of life. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to teach and write shit all day. That was the life that I wanted for myself out of college. And eventually, I got it.