Here is a good question:
This reminds me of something I don’t really understand: why affluent people will pay unbelievable amounts of money to attend a lecture so they can bask in the (one would think) unedifying physical presence of somebody like Tom Friedman, whom they can see for free on television practically every week.
I take this to be a signaling problem. The quality of the speaker signals the quality of the event, and most of all the quality of the other attendees. Wealthy people and successful people don’t want to go to an event full of losers, why should they? So the organizers seek quality speakers, so as to attract quality participants. Such valuable signals have to be scarce by their nature, and that means that the best known speakers earn high rents from their physical presence, whether or not they are edifying.
On related matters, Greg Mankiw posts on live performance.
That still doesn’t explain why people would go see Tom Friedman, who is, if anything, even worse when he talks then his writing. Since the writing is devoid of logic or sense this is pretty bad. I say this from experience though I went to see him only as a favor to those putting on the show (I used to work for them) and for free.
When I was in college and law school, I went to hear guest speakers a lot because it required so little effort. (William F. Buckley was especially memorable, at a time when I viewed him as practically the devil.) Now that I’m older and busier, and the options for having almost the same experience virtually have increased so much, I find live events less and less rewarding.
So I’m stumped as to why people incur substantial costs to be in the same room when an expert or celebrity says things that you could hear for a lot less elsewhere. Classical music seems to be one of the few things where being present (at least for now) has serious advantages over getting a performance second-hand.
I’ve only read a few paragraphs of Thomas Friedman’s book, but perhaps it is indicative. One of the early pioneering examples of his flat world refers to Reuters’ offshoring of US company news reporting to India in 2004, I think. This had already been done extensively before 2000, by at least one other of their competitors. Investment banks were also producing US company analysis from India prior to Reuters’ departure there, so what was so novel for Friedman?
The reason to go to an event full of losers is that those stories are seldom told. What literature exists on failure tends to be of the catastrophic Enron style, rather than what might be described as productive failure. Business academics/writers who write the case studies prefer to cavort with the winners, because they are more likely to pick up the dinner bill, endow the faculty and are easier to find in the phone book. So your example is one of survivorship bias, as well as signalling, I’d say.
Jacqueline’s point is closely related to Tyler’s, and they’re both on the money.
I think that the only reason people are willing to pay for these lectures is so they can say that the heard the lectures themsleves. People want to say they heard the lecture live rather than just reading them for free on the internet. This is evident when people pay for Mankiw’s lectures at Harvard and get a diploma from Harvard and not read the same information for free online. I think that people feel more important going to the lecture rather than just hearing it.
At business and professional conferences the attendee is not paying the bill, their organization is. A high profile speaker is a signal to one’s boss that this is a reputable conference, and so… please sign my travel authorization!
Many speakers represent a “cause” or political movement. By paying big bucks to hear them speak, you are donating money to a cause you support.
I could speculate that other speakers have their fees pulled up by association with the political speakers.
1. Nobody looks good in Bermuda shorts. Nobody.
2. I’m 57, have a calm life. But my peers still admire the fact that I went to the Fillmore Auditorium to see Chuck Berry, back in the day.
The “story-telling” explanation merely pushes the problem back a step. Why would people be interested in hearing about your up-close, personal encounter with Friedman?
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thank you very much for this article
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