These quotidian details matter. Our great writers cared about money because they needed it. They needed it to feed their families, and so that they could devote themselves to fulfilling their creative selves. Without pay, they would have been consigned to day jobs, unable to fully apply themselves to their prose. Apologists for Amazon like to sneer at the writerly caste, a hermetic club that dismisses outsiders who aren't part of the gang. [...]

The problem that Baumol and Bowen identified was subtler than that: They named a condition called "cost disease." While classical music hasn't grown any more productive, the cost of producing it keeps increasing.

There was a political corollary to this prelapsarian dream

vegetarians are presented with endless vegetarian agitprop