Question

How is the labor market for artists structured and how is it different from and similar to the market for such labor services as drivers or accountants?

Answer 1

A labor market is a market where individuals, in return for wages, wages and other types of compensation, give their abilities to employers. Labor market participants include any individual seeking compensation job and any individual or organisation seeking employment performance by individuals.

Cultural employment markets are puzzling. Employment and unemployment are growing at the same time. Uncertainty not only functions as a substantive condition for innovation and self-realization, but also as an attraction. Learning through doing plays such a crucial role that original learning is an incomplete filtering tool in many artworlds. The attractiveness of creative occupations is high, but it must be balanced against the danger of failure and ineffective professionalization, which ideally transforms non-routine employment into normal or ephemeral enterprises. Distributions of earnings are highly skewed.

Risk must be managed, primarily by means of flexibility and cost reduction at the organisational level and various work holdings at the individual level. Job rationing and excess artists supply appear to be structural features associated with the emergence and expansion of the arts ' free market organization.

An external factor in a specific sector could affect the supply and demand for employment and the salaries provided. For instance, suppose some of the employment needed to manufacture cars were mechanized (i.e., performed by robots). As many workers would no longer be required by car producers, so salaries would drop. On the other side, companies would demand fresh employment (maybe in keeping the new technology), and because labor supply would be smaller for such employment, the salaries provided would have to be high.  If enough people, incentivized by these higher-paying jobs, received training in the skills needed to do them, then wages would begin to fall as the labor supply met and even exceeded the demand.