The Historic Reversal of Cultural Affordability

[Celerity]

America used to be a pioneer in democratizing culture.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/historic-reversal-of-cultural-affordability/



“Everyone is a V.I.P.” was the motto of the Disney theme parks for decades after the opening of Disneyland in 1955. A broad middle class could afford a trip to a Disney park, and visitors had equal access to the attractions once they were there. Unfortunately, America is a long way from that middle-class ideal today. Disney and other companies now make more money from people with high incomes, and they tailor their services accordingly. So much for the old Disney theme song: “When you wish upon a star / Makes no difference who you are.”

The original Disney vision reflected a long history of popular cultural affordability that once set America apart. At the time of the American Revolution and during the first half of the 19th century, European countries levied stamp taxes on newspapers, to raise their prices and block the growth of a cheap working-class press that might cause trouble. In contrast, as I showed in my book The Creation of the Media, Americans didn’t just revolt against the British stamp taxes; their new government subsidized newspapers and later magazines through below-cost postal rates. (Low-cost “media mail” rates for books and periodicals exist to this day, though they are much less significant than they once were.) In the 1830s and 1840s, a revolution of cheap print brought a popularly oriented “penny press.” That development initially had more to do with the popular politics of Jacksonian America than with technological advances in printing technology. Entrepreneurs developed faster presses to satisfy a market the partisan papers pioneered.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a series of low-cost innovations in popular culture. As working people had more discretionary income and free time, showmen found they could make money based on what historian David Nasaw calls a “new calculus of public entertainment”—lower prices and larger audiences. The new venues had to be cheap but respectable. Like the penny papers, some were named for their low price, from dime museums and penny arcades to nickelodeons, the first popular venues for movies.

Free public elementary and secondary education, public libraries, land grant colleges with low tuition, and the 20th century’s mass media—including free, over-the-air radio and television—all fit into this tradition. New Deal programs supported artists, musicians, writers, and actors and left cultural legacies across the country. Public broadcasting and the early vision of the internet as a cornucopia of free culture also aimed to fulfill the old ideals that originally motivated cheap postal rates for publications. The economist William Baumol raised a famous caution about cultural affordability. The costs of cultural production, according to “Baumol’s law,” necessarily rise relative to other goods because productivity in culture cannot keep pace. His illustration was a live musical performance, which will always take musicians the same time. That’s true but of limited relevance to what has been happening lately.

snip